Noun + à + Verb

Remember from previous posts that à often has a conversion function? Suppose you want to say in French "I want something to eat". Let us consider the incorrect example below:

Je veux quelque chose manger.

In this sentence there is no connection between "quelque chose" and "manger". It is a little like saying in English "I want something eat". In fact, it sounds worse than the very rough English translation I have given.

The problem we have is that there is a noun, that is not the subject of the sentence, being followed by a verb. This is rather odd in French. The solution is turn "manger" into a kind of adjective. To convert "manger" into a (type of) adjective, we use à. The correct sentence is therefore:

Je veux quelque chose à manger.

This is a little like saying "I want some eating thing". Of course, we do not speak like this in English. The point though is that the verb needs to be changed into something resembling an adjective since the noun preceding the verb is not the subject of the verb. In English we use the word "to", which corresponds to "a". It may not seem that the word "to" is exactly equivalent to the "a" in French in this instance but it is.

Further Examples

Marie a acheté un livre à lire.
[Marie bought a book to read.]

Quelqu'un à aimer, c'est très important.
[Someone to love, that's very important, i.e. It's very important to have someone to love.]