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- Topic: Czech >
- "On někdy kupuje mléko tady."
24 Comments
338
Christine is absolutely right. Between "on" and "někdy" there is indeed an additional unnecessary sound, and it is clearly audible!
I think I got what you all may have in mind.
There is a glottal stop between on and někdo. It is necessary to separate the final N in the first word and the starting N in the next word. It is NOT phonemic. A Czech ear does not intepret it as ʔ, ə, or e or uh or however you may call it. It just how we separate sounds that do matter.
Without this sound you would get "oněkdy" instead of "on někdy".
338
Yes, that's it. And to a non-Czech ear it sounds like "onəněkdy". A foreigner would say "on někdy".
Hehe! I came here to complain that before 2nd coffee o'clock I have an irresistible tendency to think of ‘on’ as referring to either an indeterminate subject and/or to first person plural and/or any of the many other usages of French ‘on’.
The fact that both in Czech and French it is conjugated as a 3rd person singular pronoun and gives very similar sentence structures does not exactly help with avoiding interference (I am a fluent French speaker).
Hledejte na webu a najdete dobrá vysvětlení https://www.helpforenglish.cz/article/2012082801-sometimes-vs-sometime
475
so saying it like that is similar to saying that he always buys it here ... and no where else?
2148
Google Translate says that:
never = nikdy
sometimes = někdy
Is this correct? How can I distinguish each one? They sound very similar...