"The cat has my butter."
Translation:Моё масло у кошки.
25 Comments
As far as I remember from the Babbel course you don't use есть once you have specified the object in some way. So 'the man has a bike' would use есть but 'the man has this/that/my/your bike' does not use it.
Yeah, I was thinking the same.
Is "есть" omitted here because it isn't the emphasis of the sentence? Would it be too redundant if we did have it?
I'm sorry, I don't understand why it is redundant here but not in other contexts we've seen.
You don't say "есть" when someone has "the thing" rather than "a thing".
У кошки есть масло = The cat has butter (some butter, any butter)
Моё масло у кошки = The cat has my butter (the butter)
You put the "known" thing in the beginning and the new information in the end. In the first example the "known" thing is the cat, and the "new" is that it has butter. In the second example, the "known" thing is "my butter", and the "new" information is that the cat has it.
Sorry, still I don't get why "У кошки есть мое масло" is not acceptable. I think both are possible.
What does the cat have? or Whose butter does the cat have? - The cat has MY BUTTER. (New info is "my" or "my butter")
-> У кошки есть мое масло.
Where is my butter? or Who has my butter? - My butter is WITH THE CAT (The sentence sounds awkward to me though) or THE CAT has my butter. (New info is "be with the cat" or "the cat has")
-> Мое масло у кошки.
Thus, given the English sentence "The cat has my butter" without audio or additional context, it can be translated in both way. Am I missing something?
Hi Olga, I'm not a native speaker, but as far as I read over the internet I made up in my mind that the explanation of есть is mainly "the possession of the object" not "the butter or some butter". In this case I think we can skip it cause butter is actually mine and the cat is not the owner, but he keeps the butter temporary. Does it make sense? Thank you in advance
They have been teaching us that "a" ends accusative words that normally end in "o". Why isn't масла the correct form?
I'm not a native Russian speaker, but here is how I understand it: In this sentence, butter is not in the accusative case. It is in the nomnative case. Literally translated, Моё масло у кошки would be something like, "My butter is near the cat."
Yea, but also even if it was the accusative case it would still be масло. Масла is genitive case я ем масло у меня масла нет
No, the Russian idiom is to express possession the other way around. So "my butter (nominative) is possessed by the cat (genitive)".
From everything I've read, "У кошки моё масло" should be okay. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that there might be other ways to say this, but using the form: "У кошки есть" without the "есть", given that you are using "моё", should be fine
At first look of the answer it looks more like "My cat has the butter," rather than, "The cat has my butter."
