8 Comments
Or the program is wrong. In fairness, the use of There BE __ in English is tricky but indefinite Noun Phrases are generally introduced into a conversation with it.
Briefly: an indefinite Noun Phrase is normally introduced into an English conversation or "text" with the There Be __ construction. So....
- There are nine women at the table. versus
- ? / * Nine women are at the table.
The ? indicates a sentence that is at best odd; the star (*) indicates a sentence that is ungrammatical. As a second pair of examples,
- There's a fly in my soup. 4 ?? / * A fly is in my soup.
French with "Il y a...", Spanish with "Hay...", German with "Es gibt...." and Russian with "Yest....." have somewhat similar constructions for introducing indefinite Noun Phrases. I don't think Rumanian has a similar such device, but how about it, native speakers? Is the following grammatical as a declarative sentence?
1R-?. Sint noua femei la masa. (can't get the diacritics in)
Thanks. It is exactly as you say for French and the other languages you mention, 3 of which I consider as my mother'tongues ) French'- Spanish and German.. Italian is : C'e and Ci sono.....
1191
In English we could also say "nine women are at table," without the "the". I imagine this should also be accepted
