- Forum >
- Topic: Russian >
- "Они не женщины."
73 Comments
Nope.
-They are not women
-There are no women here/there
-No man does this (here you're saying that nobody does this)
-A (true) man does not do this (here you're questioning one's masculinity)
Of course there are examples where people say things like ˝You're no good˝ which does slightly differ to ˝You're not good˝,the former being more of figure of speech
I don't think that xania1977 meant "there are no women", I think he actually meant exactly what he said: "they are no women." I believe he meant this in the sense that someone might point to a dilapidated and uninhabitable house and say "this is no home!" This is synonymous with "this is not a home." Or someone might have an extremely hostile cat that just tears into everything and makes a ruin of their home, and they might say "this is no cat! It's a demon!" This is synonymous with "this is not a cat." Or someone might point to a group of loud, boorish, crude females and say "they are no women," inferring that while they may be female, they're not "women" (or at least not deserving of the title) because they don't act like them. In this sense, it is synonymous with "they are not women," and it's perfectly acceptable English. This use of the word "no" operates very much like the German word "kein", grammatically, except it conceptually draws a bit of a further distinction, typically, inferring that X not only is not Y, but is anything but Y.
Person A: "What about those women over there?"
Person B: "Them?! They are no women! They're she-beasts!"
It tends to be on the exclamatory side. Although it's not always strictly exclamatory. It could be simply contrastive.
Person A: "Those women over there are pretty hot..." (not knowing that "those women" are men in drag)
Person B: "Dude... those are no women."
Maybe there's a better place to point this out, but I would like to see the course use the Cyrillic alphabet more, as it would give us more practice seeing the words in actual Russian. As it stands, just seeing the words translated into the Roman alphabet just leaves me confused when I'm trying to type the words using Cyrillic characters. Case in point - I tried to type женщиний and was marked wrong for what I assume is a spelling error, but since the course only displays the Roman transliteration, I'm not sure what the correct spelling is.