"Pomóżmy tym ludziom."
Translation:Let's help these people.
17 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
46
I'm quite surprised Duolingo rejected my sentence simply because I wrote "Lets" and not "Let's". In most courses forgetting the apostrophe usually gets you the word marked red, but doesn't mark the complete sentence as wrong.
We don't get to decide what gets treated as a typo (and accepted with a simple warning) and what gets rejected. It's an algorithm that determines it and we can't change how it works. If you got your answer rejected because of a typo, take note of it and write it correctly the next time.
Why not "let's help these people out"? Is there another specific equivalent to "help out" vs "help"? Because in English, the two phrases are utterly identical and interchangeable...
It's not slang - it's used interchangeably with "help", both in speech and in writing, in American English and has been for generations. It may have started as a colloquialism in England in the 1600s, where it first shows up, but is pretty firmly part of everyday speech.
Maybe you meant to say it's an idiom?
- 84
Yes, you're right, not slang but a colloquialism. There's no grammatical need for the preposition, unless you're helping your grandmother "out" of the car.
Nominative: człowiek (one man/human being), ludzie (people).
Dative (what we need here): człowiekowi, ludziom.
So it's "Pomóżmy temu człowiekowi".
I definitely hear 'sz' in 'pomóżmy' instead of the 'ż', why is it so in this case?
- 84
The only difference between Ż and sz is voiced and unvoiced. I think it just flows more naturally to say it unvoiced before M. At least for me it takes more effort to pronounce Ż before M than szm.
The usual common pronunciation in Polish is to devoice a consonant before an unvoiced consonant and to voice an unvoiced consonant before a voiced consonant. Since M is a voiced consonant, this is an exception to that rule.
I am not a Polish speaker, so maybe a Polish speaker can confirm this or correct me if I'm wrong.
An average Polish speaker will have no clue what you're talking about ;) After all, voicing or devoicing isn't really a conscious choice.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_devoicing "m" doesn't affect devoicing. I really don't know much about it. But I can confirm that the pronunciation is indeed "szmy".
- 84
Thanks for that link, very interesting. Dach domu /daɣ 'do-mu/ is an interesting one, because I didn't know that Polish had the /ɣ/ sound that does exist in Czech/Slovak H and Ukrainian/Belarusian Г.
I guess it's unconscious, just like in Russian the same goes. We are unaware when we do it, but linguists would definitely acknowledge that it's done. A good example is przepraszam or any word with prz. The rz becomes sz because the P is unvoiced. A surname like Brzezinski, because the B is voiced, the rz keeps its sound.
- 1065
It doesn't correspond to the pronunciation rules and I have no clue why there's a devoicing in 'zróbmy' and 'pomóżmy', but not in 'weźmy'. I'm afraid we'll have to learn this by heart...
"zrupmy", "pomuszmy", "weśmy"... I don't think "weśmy" sounds wrong. Maybe it's easier to voice "ź" on purpose than it is to voice "b" or "ż", which create some slight stop?
Or maybe someone Polish without hypercorrectness of speech and better at phonetics could jump in? :D
It feels to me like an unusual choice, as if you wanted to make an obligation to help them over the course of years (Let's choose one poor family and support them financially at least until their children go to college!), but well, we can't rule out such an interpretation. Added.