When is “de les” okay?
In your journey to learning the French language, you’ve certainly come across lessons in partitive articles:
le, la, l’, les, du, de la, de l’, des
You also learned that des comes from combining de with les
Ex. Je veux des bananes et non Je veux de les bananes
So why is it that a sentence like this one is gramatically correct?
Les étapes sont définies afin de les catégoriser (The steps are defined to categorize them)
That’s because in this example, de is not a partitive article but rather a preposition. There are a few phrases that require de, such as the one mentioned above
afin de: to, in order to (synonym to pour)
Because de is not acting as an article, it cannot be combined with les, or even the le, la, l’ singular articles. On top of that, les, is not acting as an article either but rather a direct pronoun. In this instance, les is referring to the steps mentioned earlier in the sentence and is used in order to avoid repeating the word steps.
Another similar example:
Je vais essayer de le porter ce soir (I will try to wear it tonight)
So next time you’re reading a French text and you come across de le or de les, now you’ll know why the language seemingly broke its own rules (or, like many languages, has the same words serve many purposes and therefore needs to create multiple gramatical rules for them in order to distinguish their function - yay!)
