"Van egy asztal a fiú és a lány között."
Translation:There is a table between the boy and the girl.
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1499
Yeah, I'm starting to struggle too. There is a table, the boy and the girl, between. When it's written and I have time I could just about follow it but if I was hearing this in Hungary I'd be all over the place.
You guys better familiarize yourselves with postpositions. :) Hungarian has no prepositions, relations are marked right after the objects, not in front of them (most "cases" can be seen as postpositions that have turned into suffixes).
Having said that, I don't see how "the boy and the girl between" would be any more difficult than "between the boy and the girl".
If you want to suggest an alternate translation like this, it's better to use the Report a Problem button and make the suggestion there, as it's possible a contributor won't see your comment here. ^_^
- 1041
Can you explain me, please: There is a table in between the boy and the girl. Is this "in" correct in English? ( I am german native speaker).
I'm a native English speaker, so I'll see if I can help... The 'in' isn't absolutely necessary in the sense that the sentence is still grammatical and intelligible without it. However, I wouldn't call the 'in' unnecessary, either. I sat and thought about this awhile and how to explain it. It seems that we use 'extra' directional words in front of prepositions in some cases to specify, ie to give more information, about what we want to say with the prepositional phrase. Also there seems to be a sense that 'in' in this context demonstrates that we are talking about a concrete and not an abstract statement. For example, say that the girl and the boy have been having a disagreement and are no longer speaking to each other. We can say they have a (metaphorical) wall between them. 'There is a wall between the boy and the girl'. Using 'in' here does not sound natural. The wall isn't really there physically. Okay, if on the other hand, the girl and boy are sitting each on opposite sides of the wall between their yards, you could say - 'There is a wall IN between the boy and girl' - meaning that their is an actual wall located between them. You could also think 'in the between', although using 'the' in this case would not be correct. One more example - like I mentioned earlier, you can use an 'extra' word to help describe what the prepositonal phrase (ie the preposition plus its noun and modifiers) - for example: The boy and girl sit down at the table. This is perfectly correct as 'The boy and girl sit at the table', but you get less information. I hope that all this helps.
Just curious, since "Van" is at the beginning of the sentence, could this be interpreted as a question "Is there a table between the boy and the girl"?
Word order has nothing to do with a sentence being a question or not. It can be interpreted as a question, so could be any other valid word order.
- 288
But, getting back to "van" being at the start of the sentence, is that what gives us "There is a table between ..." rather than "A table is between ..."? That is, we are emphasising the existence of the table rather than its location.
This is more or less the only meaningful way anyway. You wouldn't just say the location of something you haven't even introduced to the conversation. The other option would be saying what is at the known location and using up the new piece of information for the focus. That could be Egy asztal van a fiú és a lány között or A fiú és a lány között egy asztal van.
So, van in front really makes it a "there is" sentence at the end of the day but not really "instead of empasising its location".
