Air has a song called “Ce Matin La”
Google Translate says that this translates to “This morning”
Bing Translate says “This morning the”
I’m curious about the “la”. Is this an idiom?
Air has a song called “Ce Matin La”
Google Translate says that this translates to “This morning”
Bing Translate says “This morning the”
I’m curious about the “la”. Is this an idiom?
là, with a grave accent (not the same word as “la”) (ETA, OK, they are related, but the accents in French actually do serve a purpose)
Right, the translation. “Ce matin-là” would mean, “that morning”.
Interesting I went back to Bing Translate and pasted Ce matin là and this time it said “That morning”
So, là and la must be pronounced differently
Take my word for this: everything in French is pronounced differently.
I am not sure this is the case. Were they, in the song?
Some claim homophones do exist in French…
It’s an instrumental. I committed the sin of calling a piece of music a “song” when it’s not.
No.
‘Là’ is a preposition - generally ‘there’ / ‘here’.
‘La’ is a feminine singular article.
‘Mets la là’ means ‘put it there’, for instance.
As mentioned by Ramira - they’re pronounced the same, though with plenty of regional variations.
Ce matin là - means ‘that morning’ or ‘on that particular morning’.
Don’t know the song…
Thanks everyone.
This is a track off a very famous album (in Electronica circles) by the group “Air”. This was their debut album release in 1999. Air is two guys from France playing bass, drums, and keyboard and of course a whole bunch of electronic wizardry.
I wonder if it be a reference to this song?
No. But they have different meanings.
The pronunciation difference is simply to do with emphasis. “La”, being a noun’s article and preceding it, has no need of emphasis, which if anything goes to the noun itself; it’s almost part of the noun.
“Là”, as an adverb, has emphasis because it’s used to point something out and distinguish it from something else.
“La” is not always an article, does not always precede a noun, and is not always unstressed. It can also be a pronoun, as in Themenin’s example.
Google translate is good at getting the gist, but sometimes is weirdly off. For instance, according to Google Translate:
Ce matin-là = This morning
Ce matin-là, ce matin-ci = That morning, this morning
Ce matin-ci = This morning
No.
Ce matin-là = definitely that morning.
It’s not just French- Google Translate produces this sort, and much worse sorts, of weirdness from other languages as well. Some deictic inaccuracy is practically fluent by the standards of Google Translate.
Nitpick: I don’t think it’s a preposition — it isn’t positioned prior to anything. Larousse calls it an adverbe, just as Webster calls ‘there’ an adverb. (The Adverb category seems to be rather a hodgepodge.)
Good point (though this thread is probably defunct).
And just to add to the general linguistic confusion, let me add :
où vs ou
à vs a
Sure; don’t forget çà vs ça, dès vs des, maïs vs mais, cote vs côté, mûr vs mur, dû vs du, né vs ne, and hundreds of other pairs of words whose spelling only differs by an accent or two, and in some examples are pronounced the same.
I wonder what proportion of words in a typical text require at least one accent-- maybe 1/3 ? - certainly enough that leaving them out would be annoying.