Dormimos nos sofás-camas quando visitamos a cidade.
We sleep on the sofa beds when we visit the city.
Breakdown of Dormimos nos sofás-camas quando visitamos a cidade.
em
in / on / at
quando
when
dormir
to sleep
visitar
to visit
a cidade
the city
o
him/it (m)
o sofá-cama
the sofa bed
Questions & Answers about Dormimos nos sofás-camas quando visitamos a cidade.
Why do both parts of sofás-camas get an "s" in the plural?
Sofá-cama is a compound noun made of two separate nouns: sofá and cama. The general rule in Portuguese is that when a hyphenated compound word is made up of two nouns (or a noun and an adjective), both words take the plural form. Therefore, sofá becomes sofás and cama becomes camas.
If sofá is masculine and cama is feminine, how do we know the gender of the combined word sofá-cama?
A compound noun generally takes the gender of its first word, which acts as the core idea. Since sofá is masculine (o sofá), the entire compound noun is treated as masculine. That is why we use the masculine contraction nos (em + os) right before it.
Why does the sentence use nos to mean "on the"?
The word nos is a contraction of the preposition em (in/on/at) and the masculine plural article os (the). While English strictly distinguishes between sleeping in a bed versus on a sofa, Portuguese uses em for resting on most types of furniture.
Could dormimos and visitamos be in the past tense here?
Yes, they absolutely could! For both -ir verbs like dormir and -ar verbs like visitar, the "we" form (nós) is spelled and pronounced exactly the same in both the present tense and the simple past tense. Without more context, this sentence could also be translated as "We slept on the sofa beds when we visited the city."
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