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- Topic: Hungarian >
- "A magyar sportolók jók."
28 Comments
I prefer the gender-neutral word, "athletes". As do apparently the DuoLingo team. Cheers :)
One of the answers had "Hungarian athletes are good" but I think the "A Magyar sportolók jók" would require the definite article "the", right? "The Hungarian athletes are good".
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I believe the Hungarian sentence can be translated into English either with or without the definite article. Hungarian uses the definoite article for general statements (like many European languages), but English does not or is not required to.
Thank you, CsordsAndr1.
But to be 100% correct - I think we need to use í - the letter "i" with the accent - "í" -- vízilabda :)
Cheers, Max
Yes - you have to give proper props to magyar vizilaba. A sportolók harcoltak (aha past tense!). They were the warriors before the 1956 Revolution in Budapest.
Yes - I got burned with this sentence - I saw it as a sentence fragment - Good Hungarian athletes. LOL Well, I cut to the chase.
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If there is a noun after nationality, there is no plural. Polish politicians-lengyel politikusok Polish politician-lengyel politikus Hungarian athletes-magyar sportolók Hungarian athlete-magyar sportoló
"Sportolok" has been translated with "athletes" all the time, never with sportspeople. If this Kind of mistakes continue, I'll have to look for a teacher who does not contradict himself.
Sportspeople? That is certainly not commonly used. Not to dig on the developers but I also thought "athlete" was a perfectly good word for "sportolo" in the lessons up to now. "Sportolok" is accepted as correct, though so no problem.
"Athletes" is accepted (that's what I wrote this time) so I don't see any contradiction. By the way, the correct spelling is "sportolók", "sportolok" means "I do sport".
i'm going to argue that: sportspeople is not a term in English. From California here, so perhaps in commonwealth countries it is?
Scrolling through this thread, I see that two years ago, I already wrote that “athletes” is the word we ought to be looking at. “Sportspeople” is a fabrication. A malapropism. I can imagine the developers of the course were searching for a gender-neutral term to replace “sportsmen”. Reaching for “sportspeople” however is a mistake as already the very fine word, “athlete” is available.
Hihetetlen, hogy még mindig ez itt egy téma.
Speaking of sports - I will now take a break, put on my running shoes, and go for a nice run around Lost Lagoon - in Vancouver.
Cheers. Sziasztok.
To be fair, we are trying to teach people Hungarian, not High English. If they write “sportspeople”, then the student has correctly understood Hungarian. I personally think “sportspeople” is a perfectly acceptable word but it isn’t important whether it is or not. As a translation, it demonstrates understanding of Hungarian.
Exactly! And in addition, "sportspeople" is definitely not something the developers made up. It's in the Cambridge Dictionary, it's on Wikipedia and so on. I just can't understand why people come to a course teaching a language other than English and then start off with rants about English...
Jó is an adjective and jól is the adverb. Just as good is the adjective and well is the adverb. So your sentence would be A magyar sportolók jól vannak.
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In English, it is not idiomatic to use the "the" before general or abstract nouns. In Hungarian (and many other European languages) it is idiomatic to use the "the".
So, in English, if you are talking about athletes in general, you say "American athletes did well at the Olympics". You would say "The American athletes did well at the Olympics" only if context had previously mentioned the athletes and you were referring to them.
In the exercise here, we are given the Hungarian first. and it uses the definite article. Since we have no context in a DL exercise, we could translate without the "the" (as in "American athletes") or we could translate the "the" (assuming previous mention). Either translation would be correct, in my opinion.
