Breakdown of Le prince courageux attaqua la bête.
courageux
brave
attaquer
to attack
la bête
the beast
le prince
the prince
Questions & Answers about Le prince courageux attaqua la bête.
Why does attaqua end in just an -a? Is it missing a letter?
No letters are missing! attaqua is in the passé simple (historic past) tense, which is the focus of this lesson. For regular -er verbs like attaquer, the third-person singular (he/she/it) ending in the passé simple is just -a. This tells you the prince "attacked".
Why use the passé simple (attaqua) here instead of the passé composé (a attaqué)?
The passé simple is a literary tense used almost exclusively in books, fairy tales, and formal historical writing to describe completed actions in the past. If you were telling this story out loud to a friend, you would use the everyday passé composé and say Le prince courageux a attaqué la bête. Because this sentence reads like a line from a fairy tale, it uses the formal attaqua.
Why does courageux come after prince?
In French, most adjectives come after the noun they describe. Only a specific group of common, short adjectives (often remembered by the acronym BAGS: Beauty, Age, Goodness, Size) go before the noun. Since courageux (brave) doesn't fit into those core BAGS categories, it follows the standard rule and goes right after prince.
Is there a reason bête has a circumflex accent (^)?
Yes! The circumflex in French often indicates that an s used to be in the word historically but was dropped over time. If you replace the ê with an "es", you get "beste", which looks incredibly close to its English translation, "beast". Spotting this little "hat" can be a great trick for guessing the English meaning of new French words!
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