16 Comments
I don't understand: Why is this in the reflexive lesson? What in this sentence is reflexive?
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В упражнении спрашиваетСЯ, :)) как перевести предложение "У меня нет велосипеда" In this exercise the question is how to translate the sentence "I don't have a bicycle"
' bike ' is the almost universal abbreviation in English. Is there a Russian equivalent ? ( like ' velo ' in French )
Yes, 'ве́лик', but it is common slang. 'Поеду покатаюсь на ве́лике'. Sometimes called simply 'вел', as slang too, but it is not used in all cases. We can say 'Заберу свой вел.' or 'Смотрю - нет моего вела!', and not 'Езжу на веле'. It may be 'bike' too, especially if bicycle is new and advanced, but more often 'bike' in Russian means motobike. The prefix 'velo' is used in compound words, as 'велодорожка' (track for bicycles), 'велопарковка'(parking for bicycles).
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И я нет... У меня нет велосипеда потому что сейчас у меня нет денег.
"I have no bicycle"
When you use "No" like that, articles like "A/An/The" aren't used.
but "I have no bicycle" is correct but was not accepted. I reported it.
"I have no bicycle" would sound odd in most situations. I would say it is on the margin of being correct, but would discourage its use. A car salesman might say "I have no bicycles". But for one bike he would say "I don't have a bicycle" and is more likely to say with respect to the plural "I don't have any bicycles"
"I have no bicycle" is standard for me. A first search on Google for the exact phrase yields about 26,500 results.
The first suggested "correct solution" (I have not got a bicycle), which sounds really weird to me, yields 2 results. (See, for example, https://prezi.com/4ar1c8irvv7l/mi/ for one example.) Consequently, "I have not got a bicycle" is unacceptable (in my opinion). In contrast, "I haven't got a bicycle" yields about 104,000 results. The point here is that formalizing a common colloquial usage can create an absurdity (the "not got" grates on the ear of a native speaker).
"I ain't got no bicycle" is also common spoken colloquial English, but because it is regarded as uneducated, people rarely write it. Google yields about 9 results (nevertheless, significantly more than "I have not got a bicycle").
"I don't have a bicycle" yields about 334,000 results, while the more formal "I do not have a bicycle" yields about 389,000 results.
Nothing borderline about it. I agree in ordinary speech Americans would probably choose "don't have," but in formal writing the more compact locution sounds better to my ears.
