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- Topic: Hungarian >
- "Péter régieket keres."
23 Comments
The Great Old Ones. Oh great Cthulhu, I did not know Duo is thou minion. ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
hahaha, of course someone else noticed this. every time this example sentence pops up i'm like "what is with these Duolingo people and the Cthuhlhu mythos"
Can someone explain to me why "fiataloket" can mean "young people", but "régieket" (only) means "old ones"?
Can "régieket" be translated into "old people" or is this only the case for "fiataloket"
No, régieket cannot be "old people", because "régi" is used for objects, and "idős" or "öreg" is used for old people.
For example: I am looking for books. -- What kind of books? ---Old ones.
Könyveket keresek. --- Milyen könyveket? --- Régieket.
Exactly Han-Miru. Do Hungarians refer to ones a lot? Because English natives would rarely say 'we are looking for old ones' without specifying what exactly we are looking for.
893
This sentence would be part of a dialogue, like the one suggested by jzuzsi below. (Or above, depending on the upvotes they get.) Why waste your breath on repeating the noun if you already know what you're talking about?
- 1784
Unless they were making a reference to Lovcraftian mythos - a literature genre- in which case it is entirely correct.
- 558
"old ones" is the English translation because we cannot say "olds" (actually we did as kids to annoy our "olds" ie our parents)
Régi means old but not in human age but the age of an item. We refer öreg to old people.
From the comments I've learned this sentence is only accidentally Lovecraftian.
Not more examples of Duo interacting with the Eldritch things from realms outside of sanity and comprehensions.
- 558
Present indicative indefinite conjugation:
keresek, keresel, keres, keresünk, kerestek, keresnek (edited)
- 893
*kerestek
-tok/-tek/-tök is the suffix for the ti conjugation, and the binding vowel is only added in some circumstances.
I think these kind of sentences are the true "kindergarten teacher" sentences in disguise. The idea of looking for something old or multiple old things is common but a complete-sounding sentence with "régieket" sounds just as bizarre as "looking for old ones" in English.
What do you guys think? I find a sentence like this much more tiring than a sentence that has a usual structure with odd meaning. In the latter case, the idea to express is rare but the way to express it is common. Here, a common idea is expressed in an odd way... the sentence looks like an innocent neutral complete sentence while it structurally can't sound like one.
- 558
I'm in a shop. My friend points to a pair of modern chairs and says "What about those?", "Nah" I say "I'm looking for old ones". True, it is an odd conversation but not impossible.
That's "Régieket keresek" though. It doesn't look like a complete sentence. "Péter régieket keres" looks like a neutral report about what a third person is doing/does regularly - and it fails to be natural with this. "Régieket keres" itself would sound more legit in my opinion - although we may argue whether it would be a good idea to start adding intentionally "contextual" sentences.
