An employee advised his co-worker that he was going on supper break by saying a French equivalent of “I’m going for supper.” Can you guess how he said it?
The employee used a first-person present tense conjugation of s’en aller (to go), followed by the verb souper (to eat supper, to have supper). In other words, to say to go for supper, he used the expression s’en aller souper.
One way s’en aller conjugates is as je m’en vais, giving us je m’en vais souper — but that’s not what he said. Another way it conjugates is as je m’en vas, where vas rhymes with pas. The conjugation je m’en vas is a colloquial form and contracts in spoken language to j’m’en vas, giving us j’m’en vas souper. This still isn’t quite what the employee said, though.
Here, finally, is what he said:
M’en vas souper.
I’m going for supper.
M’en vas is a reduction of the conjugation je m’en vas, where the pronoun je is no longer present.
