Pets and animals Lesson 15 of the french course of Mova's primary school: 13 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
1 Every animal word has a gender that belongs to the word, not to the animal: une tortue is always une, even if your tortoise is a boy. 2 Animal names can be funny pictures: a goldfish is un poisson rouge, "a red fish", and a guinea pig is un cochon d'Inde, "a pig from India". 3 Picture a gate in Provence with the sign Attention au chien !: attention here means watch out, not pay attention, so you stay outside. 4 Animals sound the same everywhere, but each language writes the noises differently: a French dog says ouaf ouaf and a French rooster says cocorico. 5 un chien ("uhn SHYAN") is a dog and un chat ("uhn SHA") is a cat; a female dog is une chienne. 6 You write le hamster, not l'hamster, because some words starting with h act as if they began with a consonant; others, like l'hôtel and l'homme, don't. 7 un poisson rouge means a goldfish, word for word "a red fish". 9 French animal noises: ouaf ouaf (woof woof), miaou (miaow), cocorico (cock-a-doodle-doo), meuh (moo), coin-coin (quack quack). 10 Most words ending in -al change to -aux in the plural: un cheval, des chevaux (horses); un animal, des animaux. 12 une tortue is a tortoise or turtle and is always feminine, whether the animal is a boy or a girl. 13 une souris ("un soo-REE") is a mouse; the s is silent; words ending in s, x or z don't change in the plural: des souris; souris is also a computer mouse. 15 un cochon d'Inde is a guinea pig, word for word "a pig from India"; funnily, guinea pigs are not pigs at all, and they come from South America, not from India or from Guinea. 16 Forest animals: le loup ("LOO") is the wolf, le renard ("ruh-NAR") the fox and l'ours ("LOORSS") the bear, where the s is said. ← previous My familynext → The body↑ back to French This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/french/15-pets-and-animals/