Can someone help me parse the lyric "que la mer nous mange le corps"?
From On Brûlera by Pomme:
Que la mer nous mange le corps
Que le sol nous lave le cœur
I know that definite articles tend to replace possessive adjectives when speaking about body parts, so I'm pretty sure this means
May the sea eat our bodies
May the earth wash our hearts
I guess my question is: if my translation is right, is this a common construction, or does it only apply to pronouns that include I, like je and nous? Like if I were to say "the dog bit his arm," would it be « le chien l'ai mordu le bras » ?
I hope that's clear!
Posted Nov 19, 2019, 6:32 AM UTC
15
I think it's to avoid redundancy of information (we know who is the person because of the pronoun, we don't need to specify it again with the object). Especially for the body parts, there can be no ambiguity.
Btw, it's “Le chien lui a mordu le bras”, the correct pronoun is “lui” in this sentence 🙂
[deleted]
No, you can only do that with parts of the body. Your examples require sa and son.
You can say the first:https://www.linguee.fr/francais-anglais/traduction/on+lui+a+vol%C3%A9.htmlbut not the second:https://www.linguee.fr/francais-anglais/search?source=auto&query=on+lui+a+tu%C3%A9His car belongs to him, so "on a volé sa voiture" can be expressed as "on lui a volé la voiture", but his brother does not - "son" shows kinship rather than possession or ownership, and so you need to say "on a tué son frère".EDIT: I misread Linguee.
[deleted]
Ah, my mistake. My understanding was that this only applied to body parts, but Linguee seemed to disagree at first glance. I didn't look closely enough. I'll edit my post.