"У тебя есть какая-нибудь ложка?"
Translation:Do you have some kind of spoon?
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Those are different meanings. It's not asking if you have any spoons at all, but rather any kind of spoon. Maybe not a very common question but still a possible
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that sounds to me like someone has been handed several forks, chopsticks, knives etc. and is getting irritated. "Do you have ANY kind of spoon?" "Some kind of spoon" seems more neutral. my two cents.
- 441
While I agree with you about the tone, can this realistically mean the latter translation? What exactly fits the definition of "some kind of spoon" that isn't actually a spoon? (okay, a spork, but who has that)
It's hard to imagine when "do you have some kind of spoon?" would be used in English. What I imagine every time I get this question is someone who has just been given a bowl of ice cream with a pair of chopsticks. They say, "I can't eat ice cream with chopsticks", and then they are given a fork. And then a knife. And then, finally, the star of our show, they ask the question, "do you have some kind of spoon?"
By the time you have an object as specific as "spoon", it's hard to see how the phrase "some kind of" is involved. Compare Google n-grams for "some kind of spoon" vs "any spoons" ("do you have any spoons?" might not be the best way to translate this sentence, but it's more likely to be used in English) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=some+kind+of+spoon%2C+any+spoons&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csome%20kind%20of%20spoon%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cany%20spoons%3B%2Cc0
- 1134
I've been taught that grammatically it would have to be ANY for questions (and negatives) and SOME for positive statements. But SOME is tolerated in questions when a positive answer is expected and very likely. Could SOME English native confirm this, please? :o)
- 1047
Because of the pronunciation /lašká/ I thought it could not be ложка, which is stressed on the first syllable, and believed it to be something else - but what? лашка was rejected, of course, it does not exist, it is ложка, indeed. Is there really no way to replace the automatic voice in cases like this by a human speaker who knows what to say and how to pronounce it??
- 468
so there is this other sentence in this lesson: купи нам какого-нибудь хлеба. Which was translated as "Buy us some bread."
Both of these нибудь were using как.
Why was the bread sentence not купи нам какой-нибудь хлеб, and vice versa, why was this spoon sentence not "У тебя есть какого-нибудь ложки?"
- 1119
That sentence you've referred to generated quite some discussion with no definitive conclusion.
My (non-expert) take on this is that partitive applies to uncountable nouns such as bread and water, and does not apply to countable nouns like spoon.
I think the most natural-sounding translation for this would be "Do you have a spoon of any kind?" No one would realistically say "Do you have some kind of spoon?" It's not grammatically incorrect, but it just would not be said.