"A turisták egy régi szép kertbe mennek."
Translation:The tourists are going to a beautiful old garden.
17 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
This was mentioned at the discussion of another sentence, but still:
In English, there is a given order of adjectives : General opinion, Specific opinion, Size , Shape, Age, Colour, Nationality, Material
So, the correct English solution would be "beautiful old garden". In Hungarian I don't know about such word-order rule, even if there is a rule, it is still freeer than the English one. For example: Ez egy szép régi ház. Azok a régi szép napok. Both are fine.
It is a tricky question, then, what should a good Dou-translation be? I would like if both "old beautiful garden" and "beautiful old garden" would be accepted. If the first one is not accepted, those who translate word-by-word get anxious, and if the second one is not accepted, then those who know English grammar.
:)
That's the sort of "rule" they use to teach ESL/EFL students I suppose. Natives (who of course aren't conscious of it in the least unless they happen to have read about it somewhere) honor it in the breach: I think it's pretty analogous to Hungarian neutral word order; you can deviate from it all day long, which adds useful emphasis.
This brings me to my question: "old, beautiful garden" (as AtalinaDove points out, the comma is mandatory) being perfectly correct English, it nonetheless carries quite a strong emphasis on "beautiful." Is the order of the adjectives in Hungarian based on a similar consideration: whatever is closest to the noun is being emphasized?
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I agree with accepting both. This also applies to big ugly spiders, versus ugly big spiders. I try to translate word for word, but often the meaning enters my mind and my translation is, then, based on that meaning rather than the original Hungarian. If there is no real preference in the Hungarian and given that the course is not teaching English, it'd be good to accept such variants.
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I never knew this as a native English speaker, but now I am testing examples in my head and they seem to work. Big red wooden house? Works. Red wooden big house? Sounds weird (though I don't know about "wrong"). Interesting!
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The typo is Duolingo's, because they have put
régi szép so I have to put "a old beautiful.."