"Is he not human?"
Translation:Он не человек?
34 Comments
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What's the difference between "On ne chelovek?" and "On net chelovek?" ? Спасибо!
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The second variant is grammatically impossible. Нет is used as a negation (no!) or when there is a lack of something: no bread - нет хлеба. When you translate do not, does not, is not etc. use не.
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What is the difference between the English no/not distinction and the Russian не/нет distinction?
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Surprisingly enough, the rules of не/нет distinction in Russian are not that hard for the English speakers since не almost always copies not's behaviour and нет does the same with no. You can remember it as a rule of Reversed T's (yep, just made that up) since word-final т/t appears when its countepart lacks it.
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The only problem is that the English "no" sometimes mean "not a" or "not any" -- in this case it works like "not".
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I responded "Не он человек" which was marked wrong. Should I assume that не behaves very similarly in grammar to english not
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that would be stating "he is not a human", not asking "is he not a human". Slavic word order is usually pretty flexible, but this isn't one of those times.
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Not exactly :) "Не он человек" means "Someone else (not him) is human."
"He is not a human" - "Он не человек."
I answered "Он не челобека" because I thought that the object should be acussative but genitiv when living objects.
How do you get the 1st symbol in human? I cant find it on my keyboard at all.
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It's under the "X" key. If you're using a phonetic keyboard then I don't know, but if you know what your keyboard is called you can google it with "keyboard layout".
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A couple comments - nationalities aren't capitalised in Russian. Also "русская" Is the feminine form. "Он русский" or "она русская". But I have to say, most Russians I've talked to have been human - at least apparently so...
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In this sentence "human" is being used as a adjective. Shouldn't it be "Is he not a human?" ? Human as an adjective would be человеческий I think.
Он establishes that it is a man being discussed, so why is Он не мужчина? wrong?
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Because that's a completely different meaning ."Он не человек?" is questioning his humanity, while "Он не мужчина?" is questioning his masculinity.
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The most literal translation of "человек" is "human". However this word is also very common in everyday speech in Russian, while in English "human" has more of a scientific feel to it, so it's better to use "person" to avoid sounding like an alien. Also "человек" is not gender specific, so it doesn't really mean "man", but it can be translated as "man" in certain contexts when "man" in English is used as a synonym to "person", i.e. when it doesn't focus on the gender specifically and is used as a more generic term (like in "to go where no man has gone before"). So basically you just need to use whatever is more natural to use in English.
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Because it is not used this way. But the instrumental case is used in "Он является человеком" (which is more formal).
