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- "Mom and dad have horses."
"Mom and dad have horses."
Translation:У мамы и папы есть лошади.
37 Comments
Because you're talking about possession just like «У меня ест яблоко.»
«У мамы есть лошади» - "In Mom's possession there are horses"
«У мамы и папы есть лошади» - "In mom's and dad's possession there are horses"
It doesn't change just because you're talking about two people, you still need the preposition «У».
I'm confused about this, too, however I think it may be because you're speaking about them as a collective owner rather than two people who both own horses.
By saying «И у мамы и у папы есть лошади» you'd be saying "Both in Mom's possession and in Dad's possession there are horses", implying that they each happen to own horses.
By saying «У мамы и папы есть лошади» you'd be saying "In the collective possession if mom and dad there are horses."
Again I'm not certain but that's what seems to be the case to me. Maybe someone else can confirm?
У ((genative) и (genative)) есть (nominative)
У мама (-a+ы) и папа (-a+ы) есть лошадь (-ь+и)
У мамы и папы есть лошади.
https://www.duolingo.com/skill/ru/Genitive-Case---1/tips-and-notes
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%88%D0%B0%D0%B4%D1%8C#Russian
There is no logical relationship between grammatical gender and "real life" gender. Thus a word can be masculine in grammar, but feminine in real life (and vice versa).
Focusing on the endings of words instead can help you determine grammatical case:
In the nominative singular, the stem ending is,
-
for masculine nouns:
-
all hard consonants and й;
-
usually ь
-
f.:
-
all а and (и)я, (but not мя);
-
occasionally ь
-
n.: almost all end о, (и)е, ё, мя
(Source: PONS cheatsheet https://de.pons.com/grammatik-wortschatz/pons-grammatik-auf-einen-blick-russisch-978-3-12-561908-1/russisch)
Since Russians usually drop есть in this construction, is there a good reason not to accept this throughtout? I mean, in the construction "У кого-то есть что-то," the word есть can be dropped, right?
One last thing. I've heard the usage "Есть у тебя что-то," but last I checked, this inversion was not accepted by DL. It is correct ((colloquial) usage, isn't it?
"есть" is usually dropped in the present tense when you define the relationship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula
(папа - лошадь / dad is a horse)
In possessive constructions (like this) it's usually kept https://www.duolingo.com/comment/11885358
(у папы есть лошадь / dad has a horse)
This question keeps cropping up. From what I have read on other Duolingo discussions, I gathered that есть is only kept when the existence of the object is in question.
But concerning possession, it seems clear to me that the object always exists and the real question is who owns it. To confirm, I've seen several DL exercises by now (level 4), where есть was left out in some examples of possession.
So I am going to upvote this question, in the hopes that a native speaker will explain...
In this particular exercise there is no "Y" in Russian version to copy and paste. I used Capital Y and it took it but pointed "the typo". Also in those translations from English into Russian the Russian words are "escaping" before I can copy them and paste. Sometimes it takes me 20 times before they stay long enough that I have time to copy them and paste. It is pretty frustrating. Can you give us Russian letters to type it with? Thanks!