Hello,
I’m just clarifying this sentence from the course: “Eles foram - nos buscar a eles.” This is translated in the course as “They picked them up”.
Certainly, this is a typo. The translation has to be “They picked US up.” Am I right?
Good morning Igor. It means both “They picked Us/THEM up”
’Foram-nos buscar’ Could be the easy obvious one : Pick us up.
Or the other one : Because foraM ends on M the os (THEM) gets and N in front which leads to foram-nos buscar.
But then again, Im a student as well, so we have to wait for a PP-team member to answer your question with a grammatical sound answer…
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Hi Rijk,
I don’t agree with your suggestion. It is not about the ending of the verb but rather about the particle “nos” which clearly means US. If THEM was meant, there would be something like “os” instead of “nos”. There can be no duality here.
The point of my post was to alert the staff to the typo so that they fix it and it doesn’t confuse anyone. In any case, let’s wait for staff to reply.
Update: Suddenly I don’t understand what this “a eles” means and what it is for. If they wanted to say “They came to pick us up”, “Eles foram - nos buscar” seems to suffice. As it is, the sentence sounds to me like “They picked us up from them”. Would a team member clarify this?
@igormashnin1, like @Rijk has mentioned, foram-nos per se is ambiguous and can translate either as us or as them. This is because foram ends in a nasal sound, and this forces the third-person pronoun -os to change to -nos when paired with it, looking identical to the first-person plural pronoun. This Learning Note also explains this: Clitic Pronouns: Nos & Vos | Practice Portuguese
To work around this ambiguity (if not made clear in context already), we have two options:
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Add a tonic pronoun for extra clarity. When we read foram-nos buscar on its own, we tend to assume it refers to us. To make it clear we’re referring to them, we can state Foram-nos buscar a eles - this is what the exercise demonstrates.
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Place the clitic pronoun differently. In this verb phrase, by linking the clitic pronoun to the last verb instead of the first one, we get unambiguous structures: Foram buscar-nos (us) and Foram buscá-los (them). This is the most practical option.
I am still only at the A1 level and some examples are too advanced for me to understand. I’ll try to make sense of this.
I think you mean that foram-nos sounds ambiguous only in spoken speech because of the nasal sound (I didn’t think about that). In writing it seems pretty clear to me.
The second option you suggest rings familiar from Spanish: “Foram buscá-los” definitely means “they went to pick them up”.
However, the first option still raises my doubt. Is this “a eles” similar to the Spanish phrase “les parece” when you can add “les parece a ellos” to make it clear that you meant “it seems to them” (and not to usted)? Even here I don’t understand, if were mean THEM, why do we use the clitic pronoun NOS? Can nos mean THEM in Portuguese?
@igormashnin1, this phrase pair appears in a mid-A2 unit, so yes, it’s a bit more advanced. With verbs that end in a nasal sound (–am/-em/-êm/-ão), the 3rd-person clitic pronouns -o(s)/-a(s) must be modified to -no(s)/-na(s) and become indistinguishable from the 1st-person plural pronouns. This is why foram-nos may have an ambiguous meaning, whether in written or spoken form: it could be the 1st-person -nos or the modified 3rd-person -nos. You can check this Learning Note for reference: Clitic Pronouns: 3rd Person | Practice Portuguese
The Spanish ‘a ellos’ in that example is indeed similar to how ‘a eles’ is being used in the Portuguese sentence.
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I see. Thanks! I have just checked. Clitic pronouns are featured in the very end of A2 - beginning of B1. I haven’t got to that stage yet. That’s why I didn’t understand the example.
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Sorry, Rijk, if I confused you. You were right when you said the example is ambiguous. Relying on Spanish too much can let you down in Portuguese.