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- "A dog is lying on the ground…
"A dog is lying on the ground."
Translation:На земле лежит собака.
41 Comments
That means "The dog is lying on the ground". A lot of what English conveys through articles is conveyed through word order in Russian.
So the difference between "Собака лежит на земле" and "На земле лежит собака" is that the first sentence would imply the use of "the dog" in English while the second would imply the use of "a dog"?
Yeah. It's not as simple as subject first = "the", subject late = "a', but both of those things developed to solve the same problem: to tell people what in your sentence is new information, and what is just connecting things already mentioned.
If you say собака first, that sounds like the dog is already established as a topic of conversation, so you're telling someone where some dog is which you were already talking about. If you put it at the end, it sounds like the dog is new information, so it can't be "the dog", which is a dog that's already part of the conversation.
На земле лежит собака. A DOG is lying on the ground.
Собака лежит на земле. THE DOG is lying on the ground.
if we were to say 'на земле собака'', would it mean 'there is a dog on the ground', does sentence sound alright, or is it normal for native speakers to speak in that manner?
793
"лежат" is for "они", "лежит" for "он"
Just like "говорит" vs "говорят", but "а" appears here instead of "я" because of the spelling rule: never я after ж.
- 345
When we want to specify position in which the object is ( лежит, сидит, стоит). If it doesn't matter, you can just say "на земле (находится) собака". But it would sound better with these verbs.
Firstly, "to lie" does not have to be an action - it can be a state: you lie in your bed while asleep, no action involved. (Don't mix it with "laying something down" which is always an action, but is inapplicable here).
But in any case, action or not, собака here is a subject, not an object and hence should be nominative.
So it figuratively translates into "The grass is under the dog"?
Now I kinda understand the reverse Russian jokes. "In Soviet Russia television watches you."
is 'lezhit" needed? It meains 'there is" so it would be translated as on the ground there is a dog. Can na zemle sobaka be accepted?
- 10
Because you've wrote "эемле" instead of "земле". Pay attention to "з" and "э" - they are different letters.
"З" is a consonant. It sounds close to "z" in "zoo"
"Э" is a vowel. Sound (sort of) like "а" in "cat".
- 593
-е ending usually means the prepositional case, usually it refers to a fixed location and comes after на or в.
