"Jadłam obiad, gdy zadzwonił telefon."
Translation:I was eating lunch when the phone rang.
8 Comments
In Polish if you change the place of gdy the meaning changes slightly. ( I would assume the same happens in English.
Isn't gdy sometimes used as while? So the sentence "I was eating lunch while the telephone rang"
Would this not change the meaning? Can while be used with shorter action? I am not very good with English but that is what I was taught.
56
You wouldn't use 'while' with an instantaneous event, like the phone falling off the table, but you might use it here if you just left the phone ringing without picking it up until you'd had more of your lunch. But this polish sentence couldn't do that, could it? Because of the perfectivity of 'zadzwonił'.
At first I wrote that it could work, but after a second thought... yeah, you are right. "zadzwonił" refers to the moment it started ringing, so it's pretty perfective.
