- Forum >
- Topic: Hungarian >
- "Hova érkeztek?"
22 Comments
One travels to a restaurant, but arrives at a restaurant. Prepositions that can follow arrive include at, in, and on. Use "in" to express arrival when the destination is a large one like a country or a city: We arrived in France in November. http://www.dailywritingtips.com/arrive-to-vs-arrive-at/
26
It is the same, "Hova érkeztek?" If you want to clarify which one you mean, you can always use the pronouns.
- Ti hova érkeztek? - Where do you arrive?
- Ők hova érkeztek? - Where did they arrive?
Yes. Erkeztetek - without the apostrophe on the 3rd "e". Since we haven't learned past tense I'm sure they didn't want us to use past tense.
- 1468
Apostrophe would make a difference between indefinite and definite verbs. It is too much for me in this moment to know which one to use. My question was related to prior discussion about past tense, which I hope to learn more about it later.
I think the problem is that in English, "arrive" denotes that you are coming to a place where the speaker is (or already knows) so the "where" is never necessary. For instance, I would ask, "Where are you landing?" if someone was flying into an unknown location, or "Where are you flying into?" The use of the term "arrive" includes an already understood place so this phrase is not used in English.
This seems to be one of those spacial relationships that exist in Hungarian without any comparative frame of reference in English. Knowing that, I will probably use this phrase incorrectly in lieu of the previous phrases I mentioned. Would that be understandable to a Hungarian if I used this phrase when asking where someone was landing or to what city they were driving?
- 813
Interesting. So far hova was an identical twin to German Wohin. But here i would not use Wohin/Whither/Hova but Wo/Where/Hol with the given verb.
Érkezik = ankommen and, i think, you can't ask wohin when there is already an- in the verb and the question...
It makes sense in Hungarian i guess, i can't see why you wouldn't ask that way in Hungarian, but it nevertheless irritates me.
Personally I think "Where are you arriving at?" sounds like the best translation.
This is not a sentence a natural English speaker would say. The question would be "where are you going?" - Very unnatural English sentence. Grammatically OK but never spoken
Even in Hungarian this sentence is kinda weird but in English it's right out crazy, never used, so again we are wasting time learning expressions that might come up once in a lifetime.
I would consider that wrong.
You don't "arrive to somewhere" in English, in my experience.
What's the difference between this and "hova jöttek?", if I ever can say so?
I tried the grammatically correct "from where do you arrive?" because without a prepositional phrase this cannot be correctly translated. "Arrive" signifies a "coming towards" motion. "At" is not a good word for this.
But it's not about arriving from. "Hova" = "to where". "From where do you arrive" would be *Honnan érkeztek?" And that sentence would make a whole lot more sense to me!
I think this is another example of the tricky problem of translating motion/directional words from Hungarian to English. It's more subtle than "I stand to the mirror," but I think it's the same idea. There's no straightforward way to translate this, because it literally means "Where are you arriving to?" It includes two things: the act of arrival, and the direction in which you're traveling. This isn't expressed the same way in English. The closest would be "where are you arriving," or maybe "where are you arriving at," which is more colloquial but not strictly wrong. But those lose the directional meaning. English simply isn't as fussy about stating the direction explicitly.
No doubt.
"Where do you arrive at" is not used in any English I have ever encountered. We might say "where are you arriving" but I can't think of any form of usage for "arrive at" except for a plane "arriving at gate X." As in "Flight 1234 will be arriving at Gate 9 in 15 minutes." Maybe "he arrived at the theatre 10 minutes late." But never "where do you arriving at." It just sounds horrible and incorrect. Without the "at" is ok. Not great but ok. I'd probably more realistically ask "Which airport are you using?" LOL.
