"These were his last words."
Translation:To byla jeho poslední slova.
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Can't I use 'tato' here? I thought that was supposed to mean these, instead of 'to', which usually is translated as those/the.
OH, I just reported this sentence, I see now why it was marked incorrect!
But I am wondering why "to jsou/to byla" construction here is "officially" translated as "these were" instead of "those were," as we've been doing for the rest of the course? (I don't mean to be pedantic, I just want to make sure there's not something I'm missing!)
No, you can never use "tato" in this sentence. The correct form would be "Toto byla jeho poslední slova." in Czech, but I have no explanation why so I will leave that to some (smarter) others.
That's the same problem that occured in one sentence in the Russian for English speaker course.
Let me explain this on an example: there is a difference between the following sentences:
"Is that a word?" "Is it that word?"
In the first one, 'that' refers to some imaginary subject (could be replaced with 'it', but not with 'the'), in the second one it functions as a sort of article (could be replaced with 'the', but not with 'it').
The same occurs here: 'These', like Mariba66 noticed, doesn't regard nor modify "words" (it doesn't necessarily have to be right next to this word in order to modify it), it is the subject of this sentence, we could replace it with "they". That's why, not being a part of the noun phrase, it doesn't take the noun's gender but rather the neutral form.
So, basically, this is "to jsou" in the past tense, so the form of "být" must agree with the noun... in this case, neuter plural?
1139
V DL AJ nás učí, že: Those = ta, tamta... These = tato... Nemělo by tudíž být použito buď "these", anebo v českém překladu pouze varianta "tato"? Děkuji.
je rozdíl mezi TATO SLOVA a TO/TOTO BYLA SLOVA. jenže to vysvětlení v DL AJ asi všichni ignorujete.
so why is "toto" not correct or not accepted? I did not find a clear explanation in here...