Breakdown of L'enfant dort sur mon épaule.
sur
on
l'enfant
the child
mon
my (mon, ma, mes)
dormir
to sleep
l'épaule
the shoulder (f)
Questions & Answers about L'enfant dort sur mon épaule.
Why does the sentence use mon instead of ma when épaule is a feminine noun?
Even though épaule is feminine, it starts with a vowel. In French, you must use the masculine possessive adjectives (mon, ton, son) before any feminine singular noun that starts with a vowel or a mute H. This is just to make pronunciation smoother, so you don't have two vowels clashing like you would in ma épaule.
The translation says 'is sleeping', but shouldn't there be a French equivalent for the '-ing' verb?
French doesn't have a specific present continuous tense like English does. The simple present tense word dort covers both 'sleeps' in general and 'is sleeping' right now. If you really need to stress that it's happening at this exact moment, you could use the expression est en train de dormir (is in the middle of sleeping), but usually, the simple present is perfectly fine.
Is enfant masculine or feminine in French?
It can actually be both! You use un enfant for a boy and une enfant for a girl. However, because the word starts with a vowel, the definite article 'the' always shrinks to l' regardless of gender. So in the phrase l'enfant, the gender is hidden, and you would only know it from context.
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