- Forum >
- Topic: Greek >
- "Το βοδινό είναι κρέας"
9 Comments
1393
Red-screened today: "Beef [in its generic sense] is a meat." Duolingo insisted on "the beef," even though, in the same exercise, it happily paired up "Το παγωτό είναι γλυκό" with "Ice cream is sweet" -- not The ice cream.... **Two months later, reviewing this exercise, I spontaneously translated it again as "Beef is a meat." As others have opined more diplomatically, this is a pretty dumb sentence -- but I still think my translation is the least dumb. Will a moderator please look this over and consider adding my version?
379
Is βοδινό, with consonantal root VDN, perhaps related to Russian "говядина" "goVyaDiNa", which also means "beef"?
Is βοδινό, with consonantal root VDN, perhaps related to Russian "говядина" "goVyaDiNa", which also means "beef"?
No. Greek and Russian are not Semitic languages and don't operate on triliteral roots.
However, the βο- and the го- part are related; they both come from a word that means "cow, cattle".
The -δ- in the Greek word is from a diminutive suffix and the -ν- from an adjective-forming suffix.