"Jesteśmy małżeństwem."
Translation:We are married.
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So would the literal translation of this be "we are marriage"? Since małżeństwo was "marriage" a couple sentences ago
It really makes no sense...
Jesteśmy małżeństwem - We are a married couple (literal translation)/We are married (commonly used interpretation)
'We are marriage' doesn't really make sense in English.
małżeństwo can mean either marriage or a married couple
Nope! Since "małżeństwem" is Instrumental and not Accusative, it's more like "in a marriage" or "under a state of marriage".
After "jesteśmy" you would normally use instrumental. No need to invent some even weirder translations: the literal one is "we are marriage" and the normal one is "we are married".
The word "małżeństwo" has two meanings:
małżeństwo - marriage/the institution/the legal act of marriage/the state of the union małżeństwo/para małżeńska/mąż i żona - married couple/husband and wife/spouses
to get married - pobrać się / zawrzeć związek małżeński / związać węzeł małżeński
Jesteśmy pobrani/Jesteśmy związani związkiem małżeńskim - We are married Jesteśmy małżeństwem/Jesteśmy małżonkami - We are a married couple/spouses
In the recording of the female voice, there is clearly a rising intonation towards the end of the sentence, indicative of a question. Nevertheless, "Are we married?" is not accepted.
Both the fast and the slow audio have rising intonation which makes the sentence sound like a question, even if there is no "?" in the exercise. Any explanation?
The text-to-speech technology is imperfect and has serious problems with intonation. But the new voices are better in this matter, the old female voice will probably soon be gone.
What if you and your friend have husbands at home and you're out at a bar and someone starts flirting with you both and one of you says "sorry, we are married". I'm guessing you can't say "jesteśmy małżeństwem" because that's saying you are married to each other? What would you say instead?
Yes, that would definitely mean that they are married to each other ;)
Very interesting question. A married man (or if you prefer: a person married to a woman) uses the adjective "żonaty". So they would say "Jesteśmy żonaci".
A married woman (or 'a person married to a man') uses the adjective "zamężny", so in this scenario "Jesteśmy zamężne". I feel that using the noun "mężatka" (a married woman) would be more common though - "Jesteśmy mężatkami".
Possibly also simple "We have wives/We have husbands": "Mamy żony/Mamy mężów".
Ok since the first time that i saw the instrumental case the first thing that came to my mind was that the instrumental case might be a way to turn "nouns" into adjectives, and somehow this exercise made me think it through even more. Am i right?
This is not what the instrumental case does, and "małżeństwo" (or "małżeństwem" in instrumental) is not an adjective.
Two main functions of this case is to tell what object/tool was used to perform an action (an equivalent of "with X" in English) and it's the case that nouns turn into in "NOUN(Nominative) jest NOUN(instrumental)" sentences.
This specific sentence translates into "We are married", because that's what you would say in English. If we tried to translate it literally, it would be "We are a marriage".