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- "Αυτή είναι η γυναίκα την οπο…
31 Comments
172
Emphasis of lesson Understood. However what about the reverse of Vistonrev's answer? What would be the Greek translation for "She is the woman I found"? i.e. Do you need you need to use the relative pronoun in Greek?
1384
Yup, I believe you do -- either που or την οποία. Greek is a little less telegraphic and a little more analytic than English usage here.
923
her you have to take the feminine accusative form from "η οποία" and that is "την οποία"
In formal writing in English "that" does not function grammatically with people as a relative pronoun, although in colloquial English "that" with people in such constructions is common. It is so common, in fact, that when teaching formal writing one can only point out the matter. Sometimes when a phenomenon moves from formal to informal at some point it ceases to be formal and becomes archaic. It's a contextualized judgment call whether "that" in such cases is dialect, colloquial, or error. Since DL focuses on colloquial language acquisition, we have an English colloquialism here. In formal writing, it would be "...whom I found." When someone uses the direct object declined "whom" it tells a lot about the person's social location.
1384
I took AniOhevYahin's excellent comment to refer not to the conjunction "that," but the relative pronoun, as in "the woman that/whom I found." In other words, the case at hand in this thread....
I was wondering, in the colloquial Greek I learned as a child, που was used, like, everywhere. So my question is, what is the difference (maybe in level of speech) between:
-
Είναι η γυναίκα που βρήκα
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Είναι η γυναίκα την οποία βρήκα
The second one sounds more formal, but maybe the first one is just plain wrong?
As always, ευχαριστώ για τις απαντήσεις.