- Forum >
- Topic: Czech >
- "Are you looking at it?"
"Are you looking at it?"
Translation:Díváš se na to?
18 Comments
It is often strange to begin a sentence with an object.
Edit: And often not. But here the "na to" does not really want to go there for stress reasons as well ("na to" is an iconstant clitic), it just does not sound right. "Na tohle se díváš?" sounds quite natural.
Somewhere else it was only right so start with – I think – "o to". Something like "O to se františek stará". What's the difference???
"Na to se František dívá." is fine as well. But it is a different kind of sentence, isn't it??? For start one is a question and one is not.
Please also observe how overusing questionmarks may look quite rude.
i'm kind of sorry for using multiply question marks to show confusion. I should've used an emoji or something. I always felt like questions have basically the same word order but now that you point it out, it makes – at least – a bit more sense basically, "to" is old information by nature so it usually goes to the front. but in a question, this might be different. so maybe this is a bit like "what are you looking at? At this or at that?"
I have found a few (less than 10) similar sentences in the corpus. I will add it. To work it needs a lot of stress on díváte.
Thanks. Can you explain me the difference to "Na to nečekáme." ? sorry but I'm still confused.
It is really hard to meaningfully compare questions and non-questions.
at "na to nečekáme", the "na to" part is at the beginning in the default translation and here ("Díváš se na to?") you say you need a lot of stress on "díváš" to put "na to" to the front
Yes. When you skip the personal noun, 'se' needs to go behind the verb. When the personal noun is there, it goes behind it.
It sounds bad, "na to" wants to go in the second position, but after "se".
