17 Comments
I put "elder brother" and got this marked wrong. "Elder brother" is perfectly good English especially in a family context
Thanks! Tread lightly, because "Adjectives&Spelling" is the skill where we have had this issue for almost a year, namely—correct answers being ignored. Report if this ever happens again.
Report it using the Report a Problem button. The course is still in beta so many correct translations haven't been added yet.
In English, "elder" is purely comparative, and of people. It does not imply that the person is, subjectively, "old". So, "I have 2 sons; the elder is 3 now." But "I have 2 uncles; the elder is 90 now." OR "I have 2 uncles; the older is 90 now".br Does Russian make this distinction?
Старший only means that the person is older than some other person (it may also mean that a person is in charge of other people of the same speciality in some company).
Старый, on the other hand, means "old", which, depending on the context, means either "not young" or "not new".
Thank you. Does this mean that "senior" would be a suitable translation for старший, since it has connotations of either greater rank or greater age?
Старший is about age or year. When it is a rank, it is a part of a job name, so you would translate it in a way that makes sense in English for such a position.
Yes. Extending "older" or "high" to a more general "more important, more knowledgeable" is quite logical. I would expect many languages to use this metaphor one way or another.
So it would be the appropriate word to use when referring, for example, to the senior partner in a law firm?
1071
Could this also mean "My older brother is already going home?"
I recall one discussion section where дома was described as an adverb meaning "at home" or "homeward", so that я хочу дома meant "I want to go home" = "I want [to be] homeward (bound)"
It seems unlikely to me to mean that, but I thought I'd ask.
Big Brother
Is translated like that in Orwell‘s book ‘1984’? Старший брат...or perhaps Большой брат?
Большой брат. Technically старший брат would be a more correct translation, but it’s too late to fix that because большой брат is too firmly established as an expression.
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Ста́р-ший ‧ Stár-shiy ‧ [ˈstarʂɨj ] ‧ 6 pronunciations ‧ forvo.com/search/ста́рший/ ‧ en.wiktionary.org/wiki/старший ‧
