"The cities are not old."
Translation:Ta města nejsou stará.
6 Comments
That would mean all the cities in general, so it sounds a bit weird and does not correspond to the original English sentence.
You can imagine a different sentence, "počítače nejsou staré", which is saying that computers in general (like the invention) are not old, as opposed to the sentence "ty počítače nejsou staré", which would be referring to a certain set of machines, just like the English counterpart "the computers are not old".
Your example is a bad analogy for this sentence. In for example French, you might say "les ordinateurs" but in English you would just say "computers", not "the computers".
What about a different example, where, for example, you are comparing North America to Europe. You would say "The cities are not old" meaning the cities in general, not cities that you've previously discussed or are pointing at. Would you still say "ta města"?
We were told a few lessons ago that "ten/ta/to" are not a translation of "the", so I'm just trying to understand the difference.
Thank you! I think I'm starting to understand this better. I was confused because singular nouns don't mark "a" vs "the". I guess the English "the" with plural nouns maybe corresponds better to "those", and in Czech the plural refers to all of that sort of noun when its by itself and in order to refer to a specific subset I need to use a word like "ta". Is that accurate?
why is it that sometimes "the" (ta/to/ty) is inferred with a noun, and sometimes you need to put it.
