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- "O cavalo dela come pão."
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Yes, it's wheat after all. They do best on grass, alfalfa, oats, corn and barley though. I had a friend who used to share her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with her horse. =D
Dele, dela, deles, delas are always used after the noun. Her horse = o seu cavalo / o cavalo dela. Her bread = seu pão / o pão dela
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Is the seu / sua form used more or is the dele/dela form used more, or are they just for different emphasis?
in "o cavalo" and "o pão" - does the "o" represent posession such a "the bread" instead of an article?
No. O/a are definite articles... You can use them with possessive, but they do not work as possessive alone.
Dela because it refers to the horses' owner, a woman. Breads has no horses :D
Dont understand why we need to use "dela"?? The horse eats bread "o cavalo come pão" :/
I don't understand the difference between "o seu cavalo" and "o cavalo dela"?
Maria sela o seu cavalo = it can means "Maria saddle your horse" or "Maria saddle her horse"
Maria sela o cavalo dela = "Maria saddle her horse"
Do you have to use dela in a sentence like this or is it just another suggested way of saying it?
You could to use "O seu cavalo come pão" but in this case you lose the gender of the horse owner, also the person ('seu cavalo' can means her horse, his horse, your horse... because the possessive correspond to the noun in Portuguese). "O cavalo dela come pão" has always the same meaning, independent of context.
Yeah, we don't say it that way in English. To give it a little irony someone might say, "that horse of hers eats bread!" But "Her horse eats bread" is much more common.
I am surprised that in "dela", the "d" is pronounced as in English, whereas in the word "de" it sounds like "dyee". Is there some way in which I could have predicted it is pronounced differently now?
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In fact, both "should" be the same, so nobody would complain if you choose to say it every time like in "dela". As the sound of "e" and "i" are not too different in Portuguese, people tend to say the "e" sound closer to the "i" when it is not in a tonic syllable. The same happens with words like "demais" ('too much') because "mais" is the tonic syllable, not "de".
