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- Topic: Hebrew >
- "הוא נמצא בתוך העוגה."
30 Comments
I love these sentences. You know all the words and you know them well but you still check the word because you can't believe this is the correct translation. :D
1969
Is "He is inside the cake" really more likely than "It is inside the cake here"? Israeli cakes may be much larger than what I am familiar with.
I don't know about big cakes, but "It is inside the cake" is a correct translation. :-) Like, Where is the raisin? Or, what happened to all the flour that we had? הוא נמצא בתוך העוגה. Passes for me.
- 1969
Good, I did flag it, but I wanted to make sure there wasn't something in the sentence that might suggest הוא had to be animate.
It's an old gag as well, to have someone jump out of a big (probably fake) cake. Used to happen now and again in older American sitcoms, the long lost lover or a stripper or something would pop out of the cake. So I suppose it could be an actual person though more likely an object. ;)
It reminded me of that "Hark, a Vagrant" strip where the guy jumps out of the cake, and when the other guy expresses surprise he's like "twenty years we've known each other, and now you don't want to see me jump out of the cake. You insult me"
- 728
So why if "was found" is a suggested translation is it not correct to say "He was found in the cake"
- 470
Nimtsá (נמצא) does mean "is found", but is used in these lessons as a directional form of "is" to show location. For any Spanish speakers, the phrase "se encuentra" is used in the exact same way.
- 721
It's not necessary. Both versions are correct. I guess they are just trying to teach us how to use נמצא and that's why they are giving us different sentences with it.
I think nimtsa נמצה is an indicator, the same way ha'im האם and et את are. 23 February 2019
Sorry, not sure how old your post is - I'm in the app. I answered by assuming you're asking why a translation of nimtsa is ignored/ not included in the translation. (I forgot to state that I'm not a native speaker and am learning Hebrew as well....)
TeribleT, even if you answer someone’s post years later, your insights benefit later readers like me.
Maybe Duolingo is teaching ultra correct English. For example, I learned in school that “The book fell off of the table” is incorrect because you don’t need “of”. Similarly, you don’t need of in the phrase inside of, so maybe that’s why Duolingo won’t accept it.
regarding בתוך, i tried "in the middle of" and i could have tried "center of". Are they both not reasonable translations?
- 721
I don't think so. "in the middle of" is best translated as באמצע and "in the center of" as במרכז.
