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- "There is nobody to lead us."
"There is nobody to lead us."
Translation:Nemá nás kdo vést.
15 Comments
35
Well, I would translate the Czech above as "We have nobody to lead us" and the English above as "Není nás kdo vést."
Are those both correct?
339
I understand "Nemáme nikoho kdo by nás vedl." and "Není nikdo, kdo by nás vedl." But I don't understand "Nemá nás kdo vést." Would a native Czech speaker please explain? Thank you.
339
Yes, the only relevant thing there was this: "Nemá nás kdo vést. - here the unknown non-existing person is the subject, so (ni)kdo for the subject". Why is it used in such a way, with the presumptive subject in singular? Is it typical? If yes, can you give a couple of other, widely-used examples?
here is a relevant reference if you want to get into the mechanics of it. "why" the language does that, for that you may be on your own.
339
Thank you for the reference. It seems that even the linguist is not quite comfortable with such usage:
"There is a time such that it can rain then.’ This case is bad in Czech too, but there still are other potential cases to warrant the other conclusion (arguing for Raising rather than Control) Je/není kdy pršet. ?Má/nemá už kam pršet. - There is/isn’t already place that could take rain."
consider reading section 5.2. and the "grammatical" example
- Tady (to) nemá (to) kdo uklidit.
(obviously at most one "to" would apply.)
but perhaps you refuse the existence of this structure. no one can force you to accept it, or us to pretend it does not exist.
for various examples, you could search books or news for NEMÁ X KDO, with X being a personal pronoun or even a pronoun pair, like NEMÁ JE KDO, NEMÁ MU TO KDO...