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- "Fue un momento de gran confu…
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It was a moment of great confusion. Are they talking about the day when the imperfect subjunctive was created?
Hearing her say the sentence in Spanish made me laugh. And I thought cool, I'm starting to think in Spanish. Then my mind went immediately to several moments working through the DL Tree. Yes, imperfect subjunctive was one of them!
Nothing funny about subjunctive. It drives me crazy. Forgot the it and lost a heart.
Gran - great, grande - big. The meaning of the adjective changes before and after the noun.
Not exactly - it's not the meaning that changes here. It is still the same adjective whether it is "gran" or "grande". It's the same adjective and it's only the form that changes. That is, in Spanish, when an adjective precedes the noun it modifies, it gets shortened.
No, TalGelman- is correct. The placement of the adjective alters its meaning. Before the noun, gran means more of an abstract bigness, which in English we translate as greatness.
Here are some other words which make a similar distinction:
hombre pobre = physically poor man (pauper)
pobre hombre = poor (unfortunate) man
amigo viejo = physically old (elderly) friend
viejo amigo = old (longtime) friend
Mira ! for example: Tu tienes un gran corazon = Tu tienes un corazon grande. Here has the same meaning. I understand what you are seeing, but it is not the case here.
I think that here the right translation is "It was a moment of big confusion" , because "great" is a positive thing AND "a confusion" can be like a small mistake. So, i think that is not correct to say "great mistake" or "great confusion" , the correct would be "big mistake" or "big confusion"
Ah, creo que veo la turbación. In English, great doesn't just mean very good; it also means large in scale or scope. Nobody thinks that a "great disaster" is a positive thing.
We do say "big mistake", but not "big confusion". I believe it's because confusion is not a countable noun: you can't have two confusions; it doesn't make sense.
And just like in Spanish, a big heart (un corazón grande) is a metaphor. It doesn't mean that the heart itself is literally bigger — that would be an enlarged heart (hipertrofia del corazón). Metaphors by their very nature break the rules, and therefore aren't the best examples of how grammar should behave.
No, "great" is not necessarily a positive thing. Consider for example, "a great big pile of crap"
physically poor man does not equate to pauper, pennyless man would be better
I agree, but in Canada and probably other colonies, if you said "it was a moment of great confusion" you might sound like you are trying too hard to be posh or impress someone. We would probably say "it was a moment of big confusion" to stay humble
I feel like this would be said as, "It was a very confusing moment." in English. Is that translation too free though?
I think that would be "Fue un momento muy confuso". Considering confusion is a state, I think "confusing" is too loose here.
De nada. :) I imagine this sentence as this: A person was standing on a corner in NYC as yet another alien invasion takes place, and he said, "Fue un momento de gran confusión." ;)
Confusion is a non-count noun. There needs to be an adjective between 'gran' & confusion for it to be correct grammatically. Fue un momento de gran cuantidad de confusion. A positive adj. before a negative noun do not work well in everyday English except in jokes, sarcasm etc.
If a translation seems easy, like for confusión, I always hover above the word (sometimes before I type my answer) to see if there are any 'unexpected' translations. In this case, I saw "embarrassment", which actually seemed quite fitting, so I typed: It was a moment of great embarrassment. Not accepted. So... is it incorrect?
I think they put this sentence in if you spend too long looking at a discussion
'Lo' is an object rather than a subject pronoun. The subject pronoun 'it' is contained within the verb and generally doesn't have to written separately
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It was a moment of great confusion is exactly what I wrote and it wasn't accepted!! A bug in the machine it appears! !!!
- 1957
Three times I typed, It was a moment of great confusion, and three times, it said I was wrong.
I literally wrote "It was a moment of great confusion" Is it wrong because suddenly punctuation counts?
Im utterly confused. I even tried their answer copied and pasted with the same result: wrong. This is what dl too says is the answer: "It was a moment of great confusion." So why count it as wrong? Bugger this, ima gonna click can't listen.
