"I am eating chicken."
Translation:אני אוכל עוף.
12 Comments
the word עוף (or עופות) means chicken in the broad sense, or the meat of the chicken (=poultry). However it is not "birds" - these would be ציפורים
Ok, thanks for clarifying.. so עוף is the chicken meat and תרנגולת the animal?
In the zoological sense, עוף is a broader term than ציפור. The latter refers to the species of birds that can fly, where as עוף refers to everything with feathers, including ducks, chickens, ostriches etc.. In a different thread we had this discussion and came to the conclusion that the best translation would be "fowl".
An owl is ינשוף, more generally דורס לילה, more generally ציפור, more generally עוף. :-)
Kind of.. תרנגולת is the animal, but you can say בשר תרנגולת which would mean the meat (this is not very common). עוף has a broad sense and can be used both for the meat (אני רוצה עוף, לא בקר) or for the animals (אני מגדל עופות: שתי תרנגולות ואווז אחד).
In the biblical sense, עוף refers to any bird (עופות השמיים = birds of the sky) and similarly in modern hebrew it can be used to refer to any type of bird (מלך העופות- king of the birds (a nickname for נשר)). But, in the spoken language, you will rarely hear someone referring to his, say, parrot, as a עוף rather than as a ציפור. Although, both are technically valid.
I have a question, I think there were these two options אני אוכל עוף and אני אוכלת עוף and the question was something like "I eat chicken" but isn't one male and the other female? English does not specify, oh never mind, once I am in the discussion board, it has a recording of the sound, which it does not in the question, so what I am saying is that in english only we could not tell which one of hte two are correct, no?
wait a second, I went back and I got the same question again, and it says the correct answer is feminine. if this because chiken is a feminine or what? I am confused
No, it's not because the chicken is feminine, it's because you are masculine or feminine. The (grammatical) sex of the subject of the sentence, in this case "I", determines whether the verb is conjugated in the masculine or feminine form.
