"Половина учеников в классе худые."
Translation:Half the students in the class are thin.
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Is the word художник historically derived from actually being skinny/thin, e.g. Я худой? This would make sense to me since artists stereotypically struggle for money and therefore can not afford a lot of food?!
Nice theory, but it doesn't seem to hold up. At least according to Wiktionary. Худой comes from a proto-Slavic root, художник/художество from Gothic with the original root meaning "hand".
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I see the correlation to Czech word "chudý" meaning poor. So it made me chuckle and now I remember artists better.
Weird that it makes "Half of the students in class are thin" as wrong. "In class" is definitely acceptable English. Reported.
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If I don't get it wrong, Russian seems to make no difference between class (group of students) and classroom (place where they learn), both being класс. If this is so, both should be accepted, but "classroom" is currently rejected. So, please, say if you agree or not and in case you do, report. Thanks.
If I would imply "класс" as "classroom" I would say 'в кабинете' or 'в классной комнате'. So, I think mostly in Russian we mean class as a group of students if it's ambiguous.
I actually got this one right! But I was wondering, to agree with половина shouldn't it be худая? ("Половина учеников в классе худая.")
The subject being described is plural, so the adjective describing it must be plural as well. The subject here is "the students" and "half" is just a value quantifying the students, it's not the subject itself.
Grammatically, the subject being described is not учеников but половина учеников, i.e. singular.
For example, in this sentence: половина учеников изучает математику, the verb is singular.
We see the same thing in this news item: Половина учеников школы во Всеволожске отказалась подписывать «добровольные согласия» на сдачу анализов на наркотики.
The verb отказалась agrees with половина.
Худые is an adjective, not a verb, so it doesn't work like that. I guess you can think of it in the sense that the adjective describes each separate individual and the verb describes the action taken by group acting as a single entity. So the adjective is plural because there are multiple individuals.
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If the sentence were in the future tense, would it be, 'Половина учеников в классе будет худые'? (Singular verb, agreeing with 'Половина'; plural adjective, agreeing with 'учеников' [though not in the same case].)
Yes it does. You can say the thin half, just as you can say the clever half ("The clever half of the class had already finished.")
As a Russian native I would say that in the particular case you can't use "половина учеников худая", only 'половина учеников худые'. Don't know why but it is. The first option sounds weird for me. Maybe it's because we imply that половина учеников = ученики that is plural, not sure. Maybe this is because the sentence is not full. We don't have a verb here.
I'm not a native English speaker, but isn't "half" a singular word? Why do you have to use "are" and not "is"?
I think it has to do with "students" being the plural subject here, and "half" being a descriptor.(if you wrote "Half of the students is thin")
Say, if you wrote "Half of the class is thin", "class" would become the singular subject, therefor an "is".
if you'd want to make the subject singular while still including "students", you'd have to write something complicated like "the students are divided into two groups, one is thin, and the other is not", which changes the subject to the two groups, allowing you to single them out. But, it has unnecessary clutter, and does not reflect the original text well.
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Since this is predicative sentence like "is/are [adjective]", would it be correct to say "Половина учеников в классе худы" ? Or am I wrong to believe that a short adjective fits and could be used here?
The "pattern" I found based on the duo examples that I remember, is that short adjectives work in many "predicative" sentences that affirm that something/someone "is [adjective]" (like other examples in the course, as сломан, согласен, рад).
While when the sentence is not directly an "is [adjective]" but instead the adjective is just "part" of the noun in the sentence, I do not remember having seen a short adjective. For example in something like "Я вижу сломанный стол" (I see a broken table), I think that it cannot be replaced by "Я вижу сломан стол", unless it would mean something like "I see, the table is broken / I see, broken is the table".
Is my impression correct?
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Your impression is correct. You can say "половина учеников в классе худы", this is a correct option. But this is not common used. Remember that the short adjective "худы"looks like an adverb "худо" (badly, poorly) and has a different old fashioned meaning "to be sick". I suppose historically, it led to the full form of the adjective. So, to avoid the ambiguity, in this exact case, I would prefer to use a full form "худые". However I see nothing wrong in your option.