"These are the names of our grandmothers and grandfathers."
Translation:Jsou to jména našich babiček a dědečků.
8 Comments
1005
can't I use "ta jsou" instead of "to jsou", which sounds add to me because of the singular?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
