I was ready to try out my new language skills and decided to post a line on Twitter in French. I was fairly certain I knew what I was talking about, so I opened a tweet and typed:
Nous allons en Angleterre à visiter nos fille !
Then, I hit send. Smiling, ever so proud of myself, I clicked the "Translate Tweet" link and saw:
We're going to England to visit our daughters!
So what's wrong with that? We are, in fact, going to England, but we have just one daughter in that country. I wasn't certain which French form of "our" to use, so I went with nos, which I've practiced on several occasions on Duolingo, instead of notre.
As it turns out (I think I say that a lot in relation to my studies) nos is used when the following noun is plural. So by saying nos fille, I turned fille (fee-ah)--meaning one girl or daughter--to filles, which means girls or daughters. Since the last letter is usually silent in French, fille and filles is pronounced exactly the same. Thus the correct form of "our" is crucial to differentiate the two.
In English, the word "our" is the same whether the possessive is singular or plural. I never appreciated that until now. I don't know why the plurals and possessives have to be so complicated in other languages, but that's the way it is. I'm quickly learning that.
In the meantime, nous allons en Angleterre à visiter notre fille !