"Ta kategoria zawiera pięć przedmiotów."
Translation:This category contains five objects.
19 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Can I use items? Kinds of thing? I have the impression that przedmiot has the sense of being an object that be seen and felt, and at least in English I don't think we'd say a category can contain an object in this sense. I know in specialised areas like computer programming you can have objects that aren't seen or felt. But I don't think in layman's terms we think of it like that. I don't mean to be nit-picky. Just trying to get a sense of how przedmiot is used in Polish.
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This sentence amuses me greatly, for the following reason. I am a native English speaker and a professional mathematician. For the life of me, I cannot think of a non-mathematical context in which one would be likely to say "This category has five objects". But as a sentence spoken among mathematicians, interpreting the words "category" and "object" as mathematical terms, it is a completely reasonable thing to say.
I'm glad to see "item" named as a possible alternative for "przedmiot", because "This category has five items" sounds to me like a much more likely sentence in ordinary life.
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I too find that the female voice doing the Polish sounds "different" to me than what the spelling would indicate.
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"This category has five items" Similar meaning in English, too far from the Polish? thx
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Why in the multiple choice is it wrong to translate it as "This category contains THE five objects"?
I think it's a questions of 'Which five objects?' I feel one would have to try quite hard to find a context in which the subject of the sentence would be 'This category' and the object would be 'the five objects we have previously discussed.' In that case, 'the five objects are in this category' would be far more likely, don't you think? And that's not what the Polish sentence says...
When entering the following (yellow) line into the iweb corpus:
CONTAIN _mc the objects
[form of contain] + [number] + the + objects
we get the following 3 results:
...while the child datafile contains the two objects ABITMAP and AFONT.
The department contains the 1,544 objects in the Arthur Rubloff Paperweight Collection...
All requests to our various web service endpoints are required to contain the two objects " credentials " and " siteDetails ".
All three examples directly answer the question 'which objects' afterwards.
If we enter:
CONTAIN _mc the objects
[form of contain] + [number] + objects
we get 124 results, the majority of which don't specify the objects in the same sentence.
Glen, are you asking for some information/explanation of the iweb corpus data Alik has shared?
- 1854
I have no idea what he was saying. All I wanted was a simple answer, as to why "This category contains THE five objects" is incorrect in English. Yes, I know the inclusion of "the" is not mandatory, but neither can I see how it is incorrect. Neither of you directly answered the question
Okay. Is the 'the' totally grammatically incorrect in this sentence? No. But it assumes a very specific context that the Polish sentence doesn't.
We do, of course, often accept answers that need some imagined context behind them, because Duolingo's standalone phrases and sentences often require us to use a bit of imagination to make them fit the real world but that would really be pushing it here, and would move the focus of the sentence:
The Polish sentence and the main English translation are answers to the imaginary question 'How many objects does this category contain?' Adding 'the' makes the sentence an answer to 'In which category are the five objects?'
Alik's iweb search of a corpus of millions of real world texts demonstrates how very rare 'the' would be with the object in a sentence constructed like this one. We often refer to bodies of collected texts to see whether our instincts about words and sentences match real world usage, as well as normal English grammar.
Also, our native Polish-speaking contributors advise that 'the five objects' meaning five specific objects would be more like 'te pięć przedmiotów.'
Could one say 5 topics, as this might sound better in colliquial English?