"The Italian tourists are where the Polish ones are."

Translation: Az olasz turisták ott vannak, ahol a lengyelek.

[Pivo302]

Why not "Az olasz turisták ahol a lengyelek vannak."? Is "ott" necessary?

[chuckdsk]

Moreover, why does it receive focus?

[MrtonPolgr]

When you have a "be somewhere" sentence, the most "neutral" focus is the location. You can suspect it's new information.

Now I ask: what else would receive focus and why?

[kobihershk]

I alsó made this mistake - that's Hungarian for you, the grammer dictates it

[MrtonPolgr]

Well, no offence, this sentence just doesn't look any similar to a grammatically valid Hungarian sentence, that's why it's hard to even touch... Where are the clauses? You either have "az olasz turisták" as a clause (it lacks a predicate) or you have "az olasz turisták vannak", an odd statement, with a strange interjected subordinate clause with an implied unknown verb... Neither is understandable really.

I think the misconception is that once you could somehow get rid of "ott", there would be no need for "van" either. Neither the premise, nor the implication is the right. Technically, you can get rid of "ott" but then the sentence will still be about the location of something, you will still need "van" and in fact, "ott" will still be implied, just at the end of the clause, so your focus will be messy.

You may ask what's with "ahol a lengyelek" then. Well, that's an incomplete clause and this has nothing to do with "van". "Az olasz turisták ott főznek, ahol a lengyelek." would be just as valid. It's just there is no need to repeat certain parts of the sentence, the predicate in particular, when they can be deduced from preceding clauses.

[carolgoslen]

So why is Italian not plural here, since the noun it modifies is plural?

[Shamarth]

Attributive adjectives (ones standing directly in front of a noun) always stay in their singular form.

[dun867176]

In my opinion it should be "... ahol a lengyel". The english "Polish ones" means "the Polish tourists". In Hungarian the ”ones” is omitted. But the adjective should be in the singular form. The plural form as in the translation suggested by Duo, means ”... where the Polish people are”.

[MrtonPolgr]

This is wrong. When you make an adjective a noun, you can't still treat it as if it referred to a noun. You have to add all inflections to it. In this case, lengyel must mark the plural of "ones" so it's gonna be lengyelek.

[Nenad265373]

why does it not accept "az olasz turistak ott vannak ahol a lengyel turistak" ?

also its bizarre for "polish people" to turn up as a correct solution in a sentence where previously only tourists (not nationals) where mentioned.

[MrtonPolgr]

Lengyelek doesn't explicitly say they must be tourists. Actually it's up to common sense what they might be, it can very well be simply about Poles.