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- "These are the names of our g…
"These are the names of our grandmothers and grandfathers."
Translation:Jsou to jména našich babiček a dědečků.
19 Comments
My answer -- Tyhle jsou jména nasich babiček a dědečků -- was wrong. The correct answer offered was "Tohle jsou jména našich babiček a dědečků," and "tohle" was underlined. I understand (and clearly forgot) the "to je/to jsou" construction, but if "tyhle" was wrong, why is "tohle" okay? Thanks!
To = tohle; the difference in this case is that "tohle" is colloquial (all the pronouns where there is "-hle-" in the word are colloquial), however, it does not necessarily mean they are used more often in spoken language.
I wrote "Tahle jsou jména našich babiček a dědečků" because I thought jména being plural, these/tahle should be plural to. Is that "tohle" in singular the same as "czech to", meaning that it doesn't matter if the verb is plural (for example, jsou to)? I am trying to make sense of this
"Tohle jsou jména našich babiček a dědečků." is definitely among the accepted answers. It's much better to show us the complete sentence that you entered, you probably had a mistake/typo in there somewhere.
can't I use "ta jsou" instead of "to jsou", which sounds odd to me because of the singular?
No, you can't say "ta jsou jména našich..." You can say "Ta jména jsou našich...", but that would refere to "These names are..." in English. Unfortunately for foreigners, Czech pronoun "to" is really tricky and can be used in a lot of different ways.
You are quite right. Because I never really understood 'to', it has really hindered me progress. Jamie's explanation is the clearest I've seen.
Same here. Jamie's explanation cleared away a lot of clouds of confusion from my eyes.
There is a phrase in Czech "to je (for singular nouns)/to jsou (for plural nouns)", which is used to identify things/people/etc. It was used in the sentence above. The "to" does not change according to the gender of a noun, only the verb is changed to match (singular/plural) with the noun. If you changed the word order "To jsou jména..." it would not sound that odd, because then the "to" would not be sitting next to "jména". (You have definitely seen sentences such as To je žena., To je muž. převiously in the course and they work with the same logic.)
why not "tato jsou jmena..." the upper translation would fit also to "those are the names..."
That is grammatically incorrect.
Similarly to the very common "to je/je to/to jsou/jsou" to we have the analogical "toto je/toto jsou" pattern. It is always "to", respectively "toto" not matter what gender is the subject it relates to.
If you were to say "These names are (long)" then yes, it would be "Tato jména jsou (dlouhá)", but that is syntactically very different.
See also the answers to fehrerdef.
479
Can I assume that the presence of nasich here instead of svoje is because there is no subject to show whose grandparents is meant?
The subject is "to", but since it doesn't really count for the purposes of the reflexive possessive (svůj), using "...jména svých babiček a dědečků" would sound as if they were their own grandmothers and grandfathers somehow. It would sound quite amusing.
