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- "Walking is good."
"Walking is good."
Translation:Το να περπατώ είναι ωραίο.
15 Comments
Ωραίο and καλό are interchangeable in some cases, in greek. It seems like it's been added, thank you ^.^
1373
I also supposed that either would work here. But today (3 years later), "το να περπατώ είναι καλό" somehow earned the red screen. [Reported; the preceding Greek in the previous sentence was pasted from the exercise page.]
How would you translate these? Το περπάτημα κάνει καλό. ____ or: Μου κάνει καλό να περπατάω.
I'd say "Walking is good" could translate to Το περπάτημα κάνει καλό (as in walking being good in general), but "Μου κάνει καλό να περπατάω" would have to be "Walking is good for me", or "It's good for me to walk". Just to make clear that I'm talking about myself. ^.^
Σου χαρίζω και ένα γλώμισμα (lingot) επειδή μου αρέσουν αυτά που γράφεις.
Why is the gerund part περπατώ? Doesn't this make the sentence something like "my walking is good/me walking is good/it is good that I walk"?
Something like that, yes. Greek has no impersonal gerund form, so you have to say something like "the (fact) that I walk is good" (or "you walk" or "someone walks", etc.).
"That I walk is good" and "My walking is good" and "It is good that I walk" are perhaps all ways to approximate the literal meaning of the Greek sentence.
Why is "το να περπατείς είναι ωραίο" not accepted? Couldn't the english sentence be used in the sense of: "walking is good, I encourage YOU to do it"?
- 1373
JMP - I feel pretty sure that if you'd written περπατάς, it'd probably have been accepted. You're not the first to slip on these verbs with the stress on the -ώ ending, which are conjugated [most often/always?] with an -α-. Maybe one of the moderators could back this up and expand on it, if I'm right and (s)he has the time? Best, Paul
verbs with the stress on the -ώ ending, which are conjugated [most often/always?] with an -α-.
Often but not always.
Ancient Greek had three kinds of contracted verbs: in -άω -έω -όω, which all turned into -ώ in the first person singular but acted differently in other forms.
The first two survive into Modern Greek, so you have αγαπώ αγαπάς (love) but θεωρώ θεωρείς (consider).
The third kind got regularised into -ώνω (perhaps on the basis of the aorist -ωσα), so you have δηλώνω δηλώνεις (state, declare) in Modern Greek rather than δηλώ δηλοίς as in Ancient.
Verbs in (underlying) -άω are a fair bit more common than in -έω, though, so if you see -ώ, it's a pretty good guess that the εσύ form will be -άς and not -έις.
