Donavan's Brain

Il est back! Cajun French Language Tutorials par Jim Léger est back online. Je pense que il a un peu de tracas avec son service provider. J’étais un tas peur que il a disparu complètement.

Hier, j’ai écrit quelque chose sur les pronoms personnels en français cadien. Sur son site, Jim Léger donne un bon résumé des pronoms personnel dans son post “Une titte goûte pour rafraîchir la mémoire.”

And now for another Cajun 101 lesson:

On va se revoir plus tard.
ahn vah s’reh-vwar plu tar

We’ll see each other again later.

At the end of a conversation, you might have to go some where, so you’ll say au revoir (good-bye). But good-byes shouldn’t be so abrupt, so you’ll add on va se revoir plus tard or on va se revoir demain.

There are a couple of things to note about this sentence. The word va here is used as an auxiliary verb, to indicate future tense. I’ve translated the sentence as “we will see each other again”; I could have translated it this way: “We are going to see each other again.” The “are going” part indicates that the seeing each other will take place in the future. One thing to remember: when using forms of aller as an auxiliary for the futur proche tense, you’ll typically (always?) use the infinitive form of the base verb.

The verb se revoir is a pronominal or reflexive verb. That means there’s always a pronoun attached to the verb. The pronominal form of a verb usually differs slightly in meaning from the base verb. The base verb revoir means “to see again.” The pronominal form se revoir means “to see each other again.” Pronominal verbs are used when the subject and object of the sentence are the same. In general when forming pronominal verbs, the pronoun must match in gender and number the subject of the sentence.

N.B. You could say, On va se revoir, by itself to mean “see you later” or “good-bye for now.”

On va se revoir!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 9:44 am and is filed under cajun french. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.