"de" comer
I understand what "¿Qué hay para comer?" means, but it is not easy for me to understand "¿Qué hay de comer?"
Also, I found phrases like "hacer de comer", "ganar de comer", and "dar de comer." What on earth does de mean in each of them?
6 Answers
If you try to make sense of it by directly translating you are going to confuse yourself. This is sentence structure and that´s all.
¿Qué hay para/de comer? ......... What is there to eat?
Ganas de comer ...... (as Gringo said) desire to eat.
Dar de comer ...... to give (someone) something to eat.
Hacer de comer ..... to prepare/make something to eat.
Que hay de comer is what is there to eat. ANd que hay para comer means the same thing. Just as in english you can say the same thing different ways.
Hi Joy,
You received a lot of good answers there. A think the most important thing to learn is that prepositions don´t always translate directly, nor consistently. Really, in all these cases, ¨de¨, instead of being ¨of¨ or ¨from¨ as is more common, are more like ¨to¨.
Different verbs sometimes uses prepositions in ways different from other verbs. (believe me, it´s worse between English and German, simply because they use so many more than Spanish does).
Just remember all these ¨de comer¨ phrases are essentially ¨to eat¨ and don´t try to break them down into their smallest elements. You´ll drive yourself crazy.
Buena suerte.
de usually only means to in this case
"De" does not mean "to" in this case. The idea being conveyed by our Spanish sentences can be translated into relatively equivalent English expressions; however, I would caution against being overly literal when attempting such translations. That is to say that word for word translations are not always possible.
If we carefully examine our English equivalents, we might realize that the "to" in our expressions (i.e. to eat) does not play the syntactic role of a preposition, but instead, simply acts as an infinitive marker for our verb "eat." On the other hand, in Spanish, the word "de" is in fact acting as a preposition.
Interestingly, the nature of this preposition has not changed much over time from its original Latin roots. While many varied expressions have sprung forth over time that make use of this word, most (at least initially) reflect back on that earlier tradition. Essentially, the word is used to convey the idea of relation or concern. In the expressions above, the ideas being conveyed are in relation to or concerning the act of eating. That is, in "Darle de comer" we are trying to convey the idea of "giving somebody something." The something that we are giving concerns eating or is related to eating. Obviously, when we speak of things concerning eating we typically only conjure up (possibly vague) ideas or images related to eating such as food items.
Similarly, our other expressions also use the prepositional phrase "de comer," in order to place in the mind ideas related to food and the act of eating such food:
¿Qué hay de comer? ......... What is there concerning the act of eating (i.e. what kind of food is there)?
Tengo ganas de comer ...... I have a desire concerning the act of eating it (i.e. a desire for food).
Hacer de comer ..... to prepare/make something related to the act of eating (i.e. prepare something edible, e.g. food).
I imagine that I may have lost much of my audience with such an esoteric discussion and have probably crossed into the territory of over-analysis with my commentary; nevertheless, I do hope that I have at least made it a bit clearer that the Spanish preposition "de" (which does indeed play a semantic role in our Spanish sentences) should not be considered a direct translation of the word "to" in English expressions such as "to eat" (expressions in which the word is used as a particle rather than a preposition).
¿Qué hay para comer? = What is there (in order) to eat? ¿Qué hay de comer? = What is there good to eat? Ganas de comer = Want (desire) to eat. Most often heard as: Tengo ganas de comer.
¿Qué hay de comer? means what about eating? ¿Qué hay de comer? means what about eating ganar de come means win's eat dar de comer. means to feed
