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- Topic: Hebrew >
- "יש לכם בקר."
51 Comments
anything like אתן , אתם, להם, etc, anything for you plural is technically you all or y'all. im sad it doesnt accept if i put you all to clarify the pluralized form :(
It should accept y'all for the plural form. Because "you all" is said differently in Hebrew, it isn't used to translate these words - only כלכם and כלכן. Report it if it doesn't accept y'all.
Hi, i know i'm about 3 years too late, but i would like to clarify that i did not mean "y'all" as a literal translation for the hebrew. "yall" does not exist in hebrew, but a single word (in both the male and female form) for "you all" does. Some english speakers, though, do not say you all because of dialects and regional culture and instead they say y'all. That is all I meant. I was more so translating my already translated english into slang english lol. I did not type y'all into Duolingo thinking it should accept it.
They should accept cattle. Without context, it is actually the default for בקר. Beef is formally בשר בקר that is to say "cattle meat" with בקר being a short version, but you need to know that the context is food.
The word פרות is cows, and פרים is bulls. The word בקר is the general collective word for cattle.
If "You have fruit" would render פרי as פריות, why doesn't "You have beef" render בקר as בקרים?
Because בָּקָר is both singular and plural in Hebrew. Practically speaking, English speakers use beef as both singular and plural as well. I've never heard anyone use the plural of beef (which is beeves!).
Same as fruit, right? Nobody says "how many fruits are there?", we say "how much fruit is there?". We treat it the same as beef in English.
So in Hebrew, fruit is like any other plural, but beef is the same as the way we use it in English? I'm confused.
Here's an example: Apples and Pears are my two favorite fruits. Now try it with Filet Mignon and Prime Rib. Still confused?
Fruits are countable whereas beef is a mass noun. I agree it's rare in English to use it that way because you usually reference a specific fruit in the plural, but it's not wrong to say fruits.
As far as I understand, it's the whims of each language, and not some strict logic, that determines the existence of collective nouns. It's just luck that both English and Hebrew have a collective noun for cows (cattle, בקר). No such luck with "fruit" (possibly a collective noun), where Hebrew has only the countable noun פרי with the plural פירות. (Actually there is also a collective usage of פרי, I think mainly in contexts of commerce and agriculture (הרבה פרי)).
The suggested translation include "a beef". "You have a beef" has an idiomatic meaning at least in Canadian English of having a problem/grudge.
You can't say "a beef" in English (except in some special sense, mentioned in another comment here).
In English, I would say "You have a controller" (and probably supervisor or inspector instead).
I was told that in written form without niqud and no audio, "beef" should be written as בשר בקר to distinguish it from morning. Can someone confirm this? Otherwise this is going to get confusing!
The real reason to write בשר בקר is to differentiate from cattle. In Hebrew written without vowels, we write בוקר for morning.
As was said, "morning" is written differently, but do expect to have many pairs of unrelated words written the same and sound either the same or differently! (Triplets, too.) It happens in English, too, BTW ("read" in present vs. past tense; "can" the verb vs. the noun), but a lot more common in Hebrew.
An online dictionary I use shows בקר as beef but בקרים as controllers. Does anyone know the linguistic connection between these two?
None. They just happen to have the same root letters. In fact, in singular form they are voweled slightly differently.
It occasionally happens that there are two different root words with the same letter combination.
No question mark in the Hebrew... Otherwise I think it should have been accepted.
Why did the answer I chose include “בשר” and “בקר”? Shouldn’t it just be בקר for beef?
I forgot what the answer was exactly but it included both “בקר”- beef and “בשר”- meat. That’s what I read somewhere when I looked it up. The answer had both of those words side by side
