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- "We live somewhere else now."
"We live somewhere else now."
Translation:My teď bydlíme jinde.
13 Comments
"My teď jinde bydlíme". sounds really unnatural. It stresses the verb. And that is strange. You are LIVING there instead of doing there what?
This word order is good for an agreeing answer, "We do live somewhere else now." but otherwise it is pretty unnatural.
Vy teď jinde pracujete, a my teď jinde bydlíme :-) Maybe weird compound sentences like that could be useful for showing something about topic/comment impacts on w.o.
381
Agreed. The word order seems arbitrarily specific. Is there an explanation why this order is correct and not others?
You will keep running into this over and over. Some Czech sentences can order in "n" factorial ways, others may be almost as constrained as English.
In this case, your simplest sentences will use just three words, BYDLÍME TEĎ JINDE. That actually is one of the most natural ways of ordering the three words if the message is "We live somewhere else now." as a basic explanation to your old neighborhood baker for why you no longer shop at her corner bakery every Saturday morning. The same basic, neutral message would also come out of (MY) TEĎ BYDLÍME JINDE, which to my ear are all natural enough to be interchangeable.
If you start shuffling the words around and/or including the optional MY in various other spots, some of your explanations will make your old neighborhood corner baker tilt her head dog-like and look at you in amazement, perhaps thinking that the reason for your absence was a brain injury that also produced a language processing problem. Let's look a few of those.
(MY) TEĎ (MY) JINDE (MY) BYDLÍME and (MY) JINDE (MY) TEĎ (MY) BYDLÍME: No matter if you put the MY in any of the spots shown here or skip it entirely, the message seems to be that no, what you are now in fact doing somewhere else is LIVING there, not some other activity/state that the baker (mistakenly) suggested you being involved in somewhere else. The problem hinting at cognitive impairment is that the baker suggested no such thing. She just asked you why you don't come 'round anymore. She did not claim that you work somewhere else, or grow turnips somewhere else, or any number of things that could possibly make your answer make some sense. And this uncalled for overblown significance of the LIVING rather than something else you might be doing somewhere else comes from the unexpected placement of "bydlíme" in the final position. Note that I did not show the (MY) in the final spot--the reason is that the explanation I gave here would now need adjustment. The baker's head tilt with the final MY would be induced by your apparent claim that she somehow suggested that it was someone else who now lives somewhere else, not you. Of course, she just asked why you had been so scarce lately.
Let's try (MY) JINDE (MY) BYDLÍME (MY) TEĎ and (MY) BYDLÍME (MY) JINDE (MY) TEĎ. The unexpected final placement of "teď" accuses the baker of wrongly implying that you were living somewhere else not now, but rather apparently had been living somewhere else before or were expected to begin living somewhere else later on. No, none of it would make any sense to the baker. Same reason I did not include the final "my" as above--a slightly different flavor of utter confusion is produced.
With just the three basic words, the only versions that make sense in the corner bakery context are those with JINDE as the final piece. That word (in general it could also be a phrase, like "v Praze") is the key to what the baker wanted/needed to know.
For the vast majority of exercises here on Duolingo, we cannot exclude most of the answers like we did here. What is unusual in this case is that the situations that would call for those other word orders are so goofy as to be meaningless and would likely result in an English sentence different from that shown above.
- 381
Very thoughtful reply, děkuji!
So ending with bydlíme might work if the baker were asking what we were doing around that particular house so often, but that is a rare case.
Is it true that in Czech the last word of a sentence takes the emphasis?
Czech is an SVO language (like English). Use the SVO order unless you have a specific reason to use a different one. Although "někde jinde" is not a real object, I think it sort of assumes its place in the sentence. And teď wants to be in the second position.
I put this same exact word order except I used jinam, and it was wrong. So are the words ending in -am generally for direction instead of location? And then what about tam? Based on the sentences I am seeing that include it, tam seems to mean "there" as in a location.
