"Veuillez nous laisser votre numéro de téléphone."
Translation:Please leave us your phone number.
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Anyone have any insight as to how veuillez?
When I looked it up, all i could find is that vouloir has two imperatives forms. Veuille/veuillez does just have a politeness to it (maybe almost like "You'll want to sign here" but a bit more polite than that, more like "Please do x"). It says the tu form is weird because it's a formal way of saying things. Veux/voulons/voulez are more used for like "Want a fight?" or "don't blame him" "Ne lui en veux pas."
But I don't know. I'm the first comment so i want to give some guidance if possible.
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new to me too, but this isn't a bad discussion https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/8052/usage-of-veuillez-and-sil-vous-pla%C3%AEt
Thank you, that was helpful! And thanks to both for using the comments for their intended purpose, furthering our learning!
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I recall from school that it's considered very polite and grammatically something like the jussive subjunctive of 'vouloir' which would roughly equate to the old-fashioned formal phrase 'may it please you'. The modern equivalent would probably be 'would you be so kind as to...' or just 'kindly'.
really, marking telephone wrong and requiring "phone" is inexcusably random
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reported again 26 september 2020. I'm sure they will hear us sometime...perhaps they should give us a TELEPHONE number to contact......
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"Please leave us your telephone number." is not accepted!!!! Dec 2020. "téléphone" is telephone!
My intuition here is that it should be veuillez laisser-nous votre numéro de téléphone. This is because if you weren't using veuillez it would be laissez-nous votre numéro: "leave us your number".
Putting the veuillez there for politeness means you then have to change laissez to the infinitive, but how come you have to move the nous? Surely the verb-direct object relationship between laisser and nous isn't altered by putting the extra veuillez up front.
Could someone please tell me where I'm wrong?
EDIT: I said direct object above when referring to nous. This is wrong, nous is the indirect object here and in French the indirect object comes before the verb: https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/indirect-objects/
The "laissez-nous" has the hyphen to reflect the inversion from the usual order.
my question isn't about the hyphen it's about the placement of the nous in the answer with respect to what I think it should be.
Yes. The hyphen shows you that it is "backwards". The object should come before the verb normally. "You us show..." Sounds ridiculous in English. The hyphen is used when it is inverted from the correct order.
ok, I was confusing the direct and indirect object. In fact nous is the indirect object, and that generally comes before the verb. So I now think the inversion laissez-nous here is actually incorrect.
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IT SAYS TÉLÉPHONE in the french version- why oh why is it wrong when I say telephone number in the english!
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Just to confuse matters, I was looking up veuillez - or rather "please" at the start of a sentence so I could wrap my brain around it (I have copied the link above, thank you!) when I got, as a direct translation of "please leave us your phone number"; Merci de nous laisser votre numéro de téléphone ! Any contestants ready to take this one on?
(I only hope I get this exercise again if someone does answer it. If not, I'm sure that it will be of interest to most fellow students.)
In real life, yes. In Duolingo, probably not. If you leave out a meaningful word from the French, then it wouldn't reverse translate back. Some optional words can be omitted, but that's one that wouldn't be implied in French unless it's also in the English. Safer to choose a wordy and less elegant English sentence that will translate back to the original French sentence.
The need for reverse translation gives us so many poor English translations. Perhaps it's time for Duolingo to separate the translations, depending on which language is being learned.