So a sentence like "My friends came and they were all happy," can be translated in two different ways?
Mes amis sont venus et tous étaient contents.
Mes amis sont venus et ils étaient tous contents.
Is this then just a stylistic difference, or do these differ semantically as well?
Bonjour Andrea,
There is a slight difference between both sentences: ‘tous’ is a pronoun in both but its role in the sentence is either subject or complement
Mes amis sont venus et tous étaient contents → tous = subject of the verb
Mes amis sont venus et ils étaient tous contents → tous = complement of the subject ‘they’
I hope this is helpful.
Bonne journée !
Andreas,
We can do the same in English:
My friends came and all were happy/Mes amis sont venus et tous étaient contents.
My friends came and they were all happy/Mes amis sont venus et ils étaient tous contents.
Just 2 different turns of phrase with not a hair’s breadth between them as far as I can tell.
So a sentence like "My friends came and they were all happy," can be translated in two different ways?
Mes amis sont venus et tous étaient contents.
Mes amis sont venus et ils étaient tous contents.
Is this then just a stylistic difference, or do these differ semantically as well?
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