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- "Among the girls who are stan…
"Among the girls who are standing there, not even one is beautiful."
Translation:Azok közül a lányok közül, akik ott állnak, egy sem szép.
11 Comments
30
Another one of those made-up sentences that make no sense and would never be said in Hungary.
Besides that, I would drop "even" from "not even one".
"Even" implies that the speaker expected there to be beautiful girls, and is disappointed that there isn't even one. Or are you saying that "sem" only means "not one?"
- 30
Well, it could be disappointing if it ever happened. The word "even" can stay, I just personally feel it a bit too much. "Not one" sounds much better to me. And "egy sem" covers it pretty well. But it can be escalated in Hungarian, too:
"egyetlenegy sem". That would be closer to "not even one" or "not a single one". In my opinion.
Why isn't azok ... a translated as those in this case? In another exercise I came across a ... a (or az ... a) and "that" was incorrect.
- 731
If you have a dependent clause, especially one that is decoupled from the noun it refers to, you need to write "az..., aki" or similar in Hungarian. The az is simply a marker here with no special meaning, so it could mean both "the girls who stand there" and "those girls who stand there". It doesn't even make much of a difference in English.
- 731
They are mostly interchangeable, but have a small difference in meaning:
- az a lány, amelyik zöld sapkában van - that girl that is wearing a green hat - There's just one girl with a green hat in the group and we're defining her by her headpiece.
- az a lány, aki zöld sapkában van - that girl, who is wearing a green hat - We're pointing at that one girl, and she's wearing a green hat, by the way, but it's not a defining trait. There might be other girls with green hats around.
- 731
The movement here comes with the "selecting" meaning: we're picking a girl "from among" the girls who're standing there.
