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Questions & Answers about O cão atacou o carteiro.
Why doesn't o carteiro need a preposition before it, given that it refers to a person?
Unlike Spanish, European Portuguese does not use a "personal a" before direct objects that are people. The verb atacar is directly transitive, so its object (o carteiro) simply follows it without any preposition.
What happens to the spelling of the verb if I wanted to say "I attacked" instead of "The dog attacked"?
Because atacar ends in -car, the first-person singular in the simple past (Pretérito Perfeito) changes its spelling to ataquei to preserve the hard "c" sound. In our example sentence, the third-person atacou is perfectly regular.
How would you rewrite this sentence in the passive voice to say "The postman was attacked by the dog"?
You would use the auxiliary verb ser in the past tense followed by the past participle: O carteiro foi atacado pelo cão. In the passive voice, the participle atacado must agree in gender and number with the new subject (o carteiro).
The word carteiro comes from carta (letter). Is the suffix -eiro a reliable way to guess profession names?