#so: j'ai acheté les bananes (no agreement)

[coquelicoq]

i am SO glad your dad said that last one was a mistranslation because i was about ready to do something dramatic, like idk climb on top of a roof and scream "WHY??!?!?!?" at the sky, and i just don't have the upper arm strength to scale the side of a building. so please tell him that il m'a empêchée de me casser la jambe, or whatever that would be in grammatically correct french!

thank you for sending me all these websites. i have read them and i am both more confused than ever and also doubling down on my original instinct. firstly, the frenchtoday.com page lists 4 shortcuts, but i'm pretty sure you could just go with #3 (which incidentally is the same as my shortcut lol) and it would account for the others as well. occam's razor, madame la prof, s'il vous plaît !

(firstly part two, her second shortcut is nonsensical. tous-with-a-silent-s comes after a verb all the time. am i supposed to think the s is pronounced in Elle mange tous les sandwichs?)

secondly, i'm still taking issue with what these sites and my textbook are classifying as pronouns vs. adjectives/determiners. consider the following examples:

Tous pour un et un pour tous.

here tous is a pronoun; it's replacing the whole-ass noun phrase, an implied "tous les gens" or something like that.

the websites all agree that this is a pronoun; my textbook doesn't give an example corresponding to this type of usage.

the s is pronounced.

Il boit du café tous les jours.

which days? all of them. modifies the noun, so adjective.

all the sources seem to be in agreement that it functions as an adjective here.

the s is not pronounced.

Elle les achète tous.

les is the pronoun; tous is modifying the pronoun les. my reasoning: if you remove les, i believe (again i could be wrong) that what you end up with is ungrammatical: *Elle achète tous. (you could say Elle achète tout, but that has a different meaning.) if you remove tous, the sentence remains grammatical and is simply less descriptive without changing the meaning dramatically.

both the non-wikipedia sites are calling tous a pronoun in this kind of usage, and my textbook used the phrase "referring to," which i interpreted to mean "pronoun," but i don't see how this is a pronoun rather than an adjective modifying a pronoun. i don't think either the wikipedia page on pronoms indéfinis nor the one on adjectifs indéfinis has an example of this type. (perhaps Les hommes sont tousdelles sont toutes parties. is meant to be one, but i think there's something wrong there...that is not a sentence as far as i know lol.)

the s is pronounced.

Les élèves sont tous là.

i modified your example slightly in order to see if the difference between the previous two examples could be because tous is an adjective modifying a noun in one and an adjective modifying a pronoun in the other. here it's an adjective modifying a noun.

because i made this up, i don't know for sure if it is pronounced or not, but i think it is. if that's true, then the difference in pronunciation between tous les jours and Elle les achète tous is not because of noun/pronoun but something else. perhaps placement in the sentence (before vs. after the noun phrase it's modifying)?

À tous égards.

this is an example given on the wikipedia page for indefinite adjectives. i agree that it is an adjective. it precedes the noun it modifies, but it doesn't conform to the "tous les [plural noun]" construction because there's no article.

the website doesn't say whether it's pronounced or not. if we follow the "pronounce the s except when tous is followed by les" shortcut, it would be pronounced here. if we follow the "pronounce the s except when tous precedes the noun phrase it's modifying" theory, it would be silent (unless it's pronounced as a z because of liaison?). hmm.

(i think the distinction you're making between "every"/"all the" and "all" works for either of these two theories. and "chaque" corresponds pretty nicely to "every", so that all checks out.)

so i agree with all these sources that the pronunciation of tous depends on whether tous is a pronoun or adjective, and i agree that the s is pronounced when tous is a pronoun. but i disagree with several of them about which usages qualify as pronouns, and i also think that the s is pronounced in some cases when tous is an adjective rather than a pronoun. my assessment is that tous is acting as an adjective in four of the five examples i gave above, excepting only Tous pour un, un pour tous.

incidentally, tous is standing in for people there. that one website does say that tous as a pronoun only refers to people. thoughts on tous as pronoun:

it may very well be that, when used as a pronoun, tous can only be referring to people (i can't think of any counterexamples off the top of my head).

however, the s is also pronounced in environments where tous is not functioning as a pronoun, and in those cases it can be modifying people or things or whatever (e.g., Elle les achète tous).

this would account for the discrepancy between "the s is only pronounced when tous is a pronoun" (which i think is false) and "tous as a pronoun only refers to people, not things" (which actually might be true).

so regarding the pronoun tous, i would venture "when tous is a pronoun, it always refers to people, and the s is always pronounced." (there's a different rule for when tous is an adjective, which i'm guessing is based on word order.)

IN SHORT, i think we probably could have stopped with "don't pronounce the s in tous in the construction tous les [plural noun]," which may or may not cover à tous égards and its ilk but does account for the rest (i think). if you get the chance to ask him, let me know whether your dad 1) pronounces the s in à tous égards (or a similar type of phrase with a noun that starts with a consonant where liaison is not a possibility), 2) pronounces the s in Les élèves sont tous là, 3) thinks Elle achète tous is grammatical or ungrammatical (and, if it's grammatical, would it have to mean "she buys everyone"? see next question), and 4) ever uses "tous" alone by itself (e.g., Tous sont là) to mean "all [the things]" rather than "everyone". i feel like we're really getting somewhere!!!

good news! i am currently at my parents' house and one of the ways my father and i bond is me asking him questions about french. re: si, this was taught to me, but i did also double-check it with him, the actual native french speaker, and he confirmed it as well. you're not crazy, it is indeed a thing. re: tous, the s is pronounced when it's standing in for a noun phrase. e.g. tous (silent s) les élèves sont assemblés? oui, ils sont touS (s pronounced) là.

this is very good news indeed!! thank you for asking your dad my french questions and reporting back!

i’m feeling very relieved about si. phew. weight off my shoulders there. maybe they just don’t teach americans about it because spanish is more common here and they’re worried it might confuse us? ���si means yes, but only if you are answering no to a negative question? so does it mean yes or no?? preposterous!” that’s my working theory. (i’m mostly joking.)

the tous shortcut i have come up with is: when tous occurs in the construction tous les [plural noun], the s is silent, and otherwise, it’s pronounced. which i think is more or less what you’re saying? what do we think about that? yes? no? yes and no?