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- "Ни у девочки, ни у её мамы н…
"Ни у девочки, ни у её мамы нет молока."
Translation:Neither the girl nor her mom has milk.
55 Comments
It would? That sounds pretty unnatural to me. It's speaking of plural people (the girl and her mom), so I would think that "have" would be used. It would also be a plural item - technically - as they each have their own (glass of) milk; but saying "neither the girl nor her mom have milks" isn't right, because "milks" isn't really a word form.
Thanks for the clarification, you are correct. Here is an added reference http://grammarguide.copydesk.org/2012/01/10/a-tricky-agreement-problem-neither-nor/
Please "unfix" it (and allow both). "Neither the girl nor her mum have milk" is disallowed. In extremely technical english, yes this is not technically correct, but even to degree level you would literally never be pulled up on that, and I almost never hear someone go for the "has" over the "have".
"Neither of them have" has 5x as many google hits as "Neither of them has"
Even the oxford dictionary agrees with both: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/neither_1
the point is, if it is "neither book" then it is clearly "is", but when it's "neither of them" or "neither x nor y" then it becomes blurry, because plurals tend to go with plural verbs, so people tend to use the plural verb even though the "neither" pronoun is technically singular.
Yeah, who cares about the precise grammatical structure? do we have to state the obvious? This is a RUSSIAN course!! If anything, show us the correct English form but dont waste our time by marking it wrong and having us retype a long nonsensical sentence because of a minor detail. In the language that we ARE NOT supposed to be learning!
398
Neither the girl nor her mom have milk. As a native English speaker, i think this should be accepted. Im not sure if "has" or "have" is grammatically correct but "have" sounds more natural to me.
612
There is an oddity in the English grammatical rule that leads to the need of avoiding certain sentences like "neither he nor I am..." (which is simply nonsense). That's why people tend to use a much logical practical contra-rule of using the plural form of the verb in such phrases.
both have and has should be accepted.. language changes by use and as a native english speaker has sounds wayyyyy weirder than have. Maybe there is some obscure rule about it but language is about communication and understanding, not adhering to a rule that only people who search for obscure rules will use or care about..
570
'Have' is far more common than 'has' when using neither/nor but 'has' its not horribly wrong. I always use 'have' with neither/nor.
390
You wouldn't say 'the girls don't has milk'. The girl and her mother together are PLURAL. In my book 'have' should be allowed, it's the way most normal people speak.