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- "Few cars fly above the stree…
"Few cars fly above the street."
Translation:Kevés autó repül az utca fölött.
16 Comments
787
Are they carried by kindergarten teachers? =D
In all seriousness what's wrong with the word order in 'Keves auto az utca folott repul'? Does it have to be 'Kevés autó repül az utca fölött.' I'm pretty sure that I should report it, just want to make sure that I'm not missing anything
My native Hungarian wife tells me it is because the emphasis in this sentence must be on the 'few cars', and emphasis precedes the verb. If it were just 'az auto(k)' then the order wouldn't matter but in this case we are highlighting that it is a few.
In theory your sentence could make sense in response to a question of "where are few cars flying?" but it just wouldn't come up in most scenarios.
Well if it is unlikely but still possible in some cases (as for example in a response to a specific questions), I believe it should be therefore accepted.
I made the same mistake as you did, and I do not know either why 'repul' must be at the end in this sentence. (In other sentences the verb can be at the end.) Maybe it is because 'keves' is an indeterminate quantifier (few, but not a concrete number)???
Does the Hungarian sentence simply state that there are between 2 and 9 cars flying above the street (what would be "a few" in English) or does it have the exact meaning of the English version, focusing on that there are not many cars flying?
I got it wrong because the system wanted two answers: one with fölött and one with felett. Where does felett come from? never saw it here.
Oh, there are tons of comments on the subject (wish I could find what I wrote before). You may want to search the discussions. Basically they are the same, just two versions for you to choose your preference.
I did find what I was looking for. There is a list of examples in this discussion: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/16759359
The general Hungarian rule is that you don't need lots of plural hints.
If "kevés" says that it's more than one, you don't need a plural ending on autók AS WELL -- saying that there's more than one once is enough!
Similarly with numbers (5 autó), "sok" (many) etc.
I imagine that to a Hungarian, kevés autók would sound like "that the man" in English -- which is fine for a Hungarian or a Greek, but an English speaker would say, "you don't need to specify the definiteness twice -- that is already definite enough, you don't need to put a the there, that's simply redundant and unneeded!"
- 2565
Very unnatural. Try this:
"Kevés autó repül az utca fölött." Or this:
"Az utca fölött kevés autó repül."
