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The prepositions à (' to, at ') and de (' of, from ') form contracted forms with the masculine and plural articles le and les: au, du, aux, and des, respectively. Like the, the French definite article is used with a noun referring to a specific item when both the speaker and the audience know what the item is. It is necessary in the following ...
The Spanish copulas are ser and estar.The latter developed as follows: stare → *estare → estar. The copula ser developed from two Latin verbs. Thus its inflectional paradigm is a combination: most of it derives from svm (to be) but the present subjunctive appears to come from sedeo (to sit) via the Old Spanish verb seer.
French has three articles: definite, indefinite, and partitive. The difference between the definite and indefinite articles is similar to that in English (definite: the; indefinite: a, an), except that the indefinite article has a plural form (similar to some, though English normally does not use an article before indefinite plural nouns). The ...
The nominative theory suggests that -i as the plural of nouns in -o and -e as the plural of nouns in -a are derived straightforwardly from nominative -Ī and -AE, respectively (it is known that AE > e in all Romance languages), and that the plural -i for nouns in -e is derived by analogy with the plural of nouns in -o. (The corresponding ...
Singular forms simply remove the final 's' or, in the case of -ese endings, are the same as the plural forms. The ending -men has feminine equivalent -women (e.g. an Irishman and a Scotswoman ). The French terminations -ois / ais serve as both the singular and plural masculine ; adding 'e' ( -oise / aise ) makes them singular feminine; 'es ...
Compound nouns joined with hyphens (or fused) make their plural using normal rules, that is adding a final s or x, unless the modifier is an adjective (in which case both elements must agree), or the head is a determined noun, or a proper noun: des pèse-lettre → des pèse-lettres (letter scales) Loanwords also have a regular plural:
The basic form is lequel (le + quel; see French articles and determiners for information about each component). Both parts of lequel are inflected to agree with its referent in gender and number: hence, laquelle, lesquels, lesquelles. The prepositions à and de contract with le and les to form au, aux, du, and des, respectively; this is still ...
Similarly, the participle agrees with the subject when it is used with ser to form the "true" passive voice (e.g. La carta fue escrita ayer 'The letter was written [got written] yesterday.'), and also when it is used with estar to form a "passive of result", or stative passive (as in La carta ya está escrita 'The letter is already written.').