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What is the capital of Tunisia?

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What is the capital of Tunisia?

Usage of ‘y compris’

There are several points here.

Is your first sentence incorrect?

You said y compris cannot be used for an enumeration:

Cette année, mes élèves étudient plusieurs planètes, y compris Mars, Vénus et la Terre.

I see no grammatical error here and this seems perfectly fine to me. If you are unsure, you can use another translation of including. The first to come to my mind is dont:

Cette année, mes élèves étudient plusieurs planètes, dont Mars, Vénus et la Terre.


Side note: about your adaptation

In your example from the Wiktionary, you have à after y compris, but it is because it is necessary after the verb the proposition is related to. This is a form of emphasis

Il a servi à boire à tout le monde, y compris à ses ennemis.
Il a servi à boire à tout le monde. Il a même servi à boire à ses ennemis.

This works for other examples on the page:

Il fume comme un pompier, y compris lorsqu’il a une bronchite.
Il fume comme un pompier. Il fume comme un pompier même lorsqu’il a une bronchite.

In your adaptation, you used à after y compris. This is not correct here. The full and repetitive sentence would be:

Cette année, mes élèves étudient plusieurs planètes. Ils étudient en particulier les planètes du système solaire.

Therefore:

Cette année, mes élèves étudient plusieurs planètes, y compris les planètes du système solaire.

Il a servi à boire à tout le monde, y compris à ses ennemis

In this example, “y compris” underlines the fact that you would not normally expect the agent to offer a drink to his enemies (but only to his friends). In English this use of “y compris” could be rendered by the word “even”.

By contrast, “dont” does not have this connotation, as in

Cette année, mes élèves étudient plusieurs planètes, dont Mars, Vénus et la Terre.

Mars, Venus and the Earth are not unexpected in a list of planets, there are even prototypical planets, which is why “dont” is a better fit. Using “y compris” in this case would be grammatically correct but semantically inappropriate.

That’s what the article you found is getting at.

[…] contrairement à l’anglais including, la tournure française y compris « comporte généralement une petite connotation de “contrairement à ce qu’on pourrait croire” ».

Or, in English,

[…] unlike the English [word] including, the French phrase y compris “generally includes a slight hint of ‘in spite of what you might think’”

The same article offers a couple of other possible translations for “including”: “notamment” (literally especially) and “parmi lesquels/lesquelles”.

 

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What is the capital of Tunisia?