"Nauczyciel uczy dwadzieścioro dzieci."
Translation:The teacher teaches twenty children.
20 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Confounded numerals. Why is it 'dwadzieścioro'? Agreeing with 'dzieci' as Acc. Msc-personal plural?
3229
It's collective numeral. We used that when you are talking about the group of people (or children or little animals) of different sex
Please, explain why dwadzieścioro dzieci?. Going from russian language I am quite confused, in Russian twenty is двадцать and twenty children is just двадцать детей. From where came this oro?
I guess the difference is simply in the fact that ребёнок is grammatically masculine, and dziecko is neuter. So that affects how their plurals, дети and dzieci, behave.
I know that you generally have collective numerals (for example семеро = siedmioro), but I don't really know if they are used the same way. For sure there are things about numerals that work differently in our languages... Maybe you 'finish using it' earlier? Would you say семеро детей or семь детей? Or maybe I was just right with pointing at the singular noun...
In Polish, collective numerals are used for groups of people of mixed gender (pięciu policjantów = five policemen = five guys; pięcioro policjantów = there is at least one woman among those policemen), the noun "dzieci", and some words for baby animals, that are grammatically neuter (szczenię = a puppy). Also the words that don't have a singular form.
Russian is more lenient with the use of collective numerals, you can say семеро детей, but семь детей is just as correct. Also, десятеро (10) is the highest collective numeral that is widely used and accepted.
So I'd have to say 'dwoje drzwi'?
Also, I've read somewhere that the plural of 'jeden' is used for these 'plurale tantum', so 'one door' would be 'jedne drzwi'. Is this correct and is there a collective numeral 1 for such words that don't have a singular form?
Yes, "dwoje drzwi" would be correct... we rarely say that, I guess we rarely have the need to count doors. But then I can't imagine someone saying "dwa drzwi" or "dwie drzwi" or anything else.
Yes, "jedne" is a plural form of "1", however strange it sounds :D So indeed "jedne drzwi". No collective.
Another difficult thing about the Polish numerals: the collective numerals.
In Polish, collective numerals are used for groups of people of mixed gender (pięciu policjantów = five policemen = five guys; pięcioro policjantów = there is at least one woman among those policemen), the noun "dzieci", and some words for baby animals, that are grammatically neuter (szczenię = a puppy). Also the words that don't have a singular form.
In everyday Polish "dwadzieścia dzieci" is completely acceptable IMHO. "dwadzieścioro" is a bit old fashion.
We do accept 'dwadzieścia dzieci' as an alternative translation, but the version with the collective numeral should remain as the main translation.
Granted, with higher numbers, the predominance of collective numerals decreases, but a corpus search suggests that 'dwadzieścioro dzieci' is still several times more common than 'dwadzieścia dzieci', at least in written Polish.
I am native speaker of Polish - I do agree that in written Polish "dwadzieścioro" could be more prevalent. But spoken language usually evolves motivated by laziness to some degree so often things get simplified. And many people will readily use "dwadzieścia dzieci" form.
In fact I remember in Poland there were endless crusades by language educator to weed out certain "lazy" forms of speech - and some people consider it "low class" not too speak 100% correctly. But there are much bigger "crimes" in that respect than "dwadzieścia dzieci" vs "dwadzieścioro dzieci".
- 1053
"kids" should be accepted, please report it whenever you'll have another chance. This applies to all sentences about kids.
I always report missing "kids" translations since I'm too lazy to write "children".
Well, it was just a choice to use "dzieci" (children) instead of "uczniów" (pupils).
