8 Comments
I translated this, "Some are just as smart as we," which is proper English, but my answer was rejected as wrong, with the correct translation being given as "Some are just as smart as us." However, "us," which commonly used, is bad grammar. I see here above the translation is correctly shown as "Some are just as smart as we are." In English, the last "are" can be dropped, but despite the common error, the "we" should never be replaced with "us." That's more slang than it is English.
First of all, what you're describing is not slang at all. To spare a long rant about what grammar is and how language is defined by usage, I'll just say that using accusative pronouns is more common than nominative ones.
That being said, your answer should be accepted. Report it.
Maybe not slang as such, but still bad English (most slang is bad English, but not all bad English is slang, which is what I meant by "more slang than it is English"). But then most people these days only know English badly. . . . "To be" in English is a verb that always calls for nominative case pronouns in this example. This is shown by completing the sentence -- ". . . just as smart as we" means "just as smart as we are." It is never acceptable to say ". . . just as smart as us are" (and no one ever says that), which is why we are wrong to say ". . . just as smart as us." . . . But this has been a very common error among English speakers for a really long time, and I don't see any chance of it ever being resolved. But now I've begun my own "long rant" and had better stop.
Be all that as it may, how does one report this specific issue regarding "Unii sunt la fel de deștepți ca noi."? I've not tried to comment on or report any issue before last light.
I don't think you can report a sentence after you've moved on from it. My comment is mostly there for future readers :P
Anyway, you have a "Report sentence" button, which pops a list of checkboxes, one of which is "My answer should be accepted".
I'd like to add that people don't use accusative pronouns under the impression that it's short for stuff like "... just as smart as us are", but rather as a different grammatical construction.
In Romanian, for example, the accusative form is exclusively used:
He is smarter than [...]
*. - El e mai deștept decât mine (not eu).
even though the nominative pronoun is used when using "to be":
He is smarter than I am. - El e mai deștept decât sunt eu.
I know it's generally pretty meaningless to make such inter-language comparisons, but here we have an almost exact word correspondence and it shows that there isn't anything inherently illogical about object pronouns in comparisons. Unless you wanna diss Romanian altogether...
* (I left out the pronoun in the English sentence because that's what we're debating :) )
Yes, I quite agree it's not inherently illogical about object pronouns in comparisons -- but English and Romanian have (or had?) different rules for such things, a rule quite often ignored in English.
And I would certainly never dare diss Romanian. That would be like showing disrespect to my grandparents -- for Romanian was their mother tongue (one they chose not to pass to their children in America).
Thank you for explaining the "Report sentence" button. I'll save this information for the next time I might need to use it.
Multumesc!
When English "rules" -- especially zombie rules, are "ignored" by enough of us -- they cease to be English rules, if they ever were. You need a good course or to read a good book in Linguistics.
