mbirming

Hi all,

I am currently reading Pierre Loti's "Pecheur d'Islande" and have a question about the grammar in one of the sentences...

"Ayant essuyé leurs larmes, arrangé leurs cheveux, épousseté le salpêtre et la poussière des dalles sur leur jupon à l'endroit des genoux, elles s'en allèrent sans plus rien se dire, par des chemins différents."

Why is it that "leurs larmes" and "leurs cheveux" are plural, but "leur jupon" is singular?

Thanks for any insight!

Francil

Aaah, finally I can be of any help on that forum !!! I'm happy !

Actually, that's rather simple. It's written "leur jupon" because each character the writer is talking about has only one skirt. However, each of them have to wipe many tears and have "many hair" (in French, "the hair" is "les cheveux", always a plural, so...).

"Leur" often means that many people (for instance) have the same thing. When they have more than one of this thing, you just have to write "leurs".

Let me know if it's still not clear, I'll try to find a better way to explain it.

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mbirming

O wow...that is much more simple than I was imagining! Thank you!

christiane.tomasi

On a plusieurs larmes, plusieurs cheveux, mais on ne porte qu'un jupon en général.

Lina

The French rule is the contrary of the English one in this case.

In English, you would have had "their skirts", because English grammar considers the group : since there are two women, there are two skirts.

But French grammar only considers these women individually. So, as Francil told you, since a woman usually wears only one skirt, the author wrote "leur jupe".


Very good book, by the way !

JimP

This sounds like a plausible explanation. The way the sentence starts, it seems weird to suddenly shift from a group to observations focused on each individual (it also feels weird for me since I'm more used to reading books in english), but it does fit with a certain literal style.

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Lina

Yes, it is the explanation. I was given it once translating from Greek ( which has the same rule as in English ) into French. My teacher seemed to think I was incredibly ignorant...

But apparently there is more or less tolerance towards these two forms. See here : Accord de l'adjectif possessif