"Are we waiting for my wife or your husband?"
Translation:Čekáme na mou ženu nebo tvého muže?
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Why isn't it "Čekáme na mou ženu nebo tvou muže?" -- I'm confused because I was expecting the my/your to look the same.
You must decline the pro noun based on the grammatical case and the gender. The gramatical genders of muž and žena are different.
"Čekáme na moji manželku nebo tvého manželA" is accepted. The accusative is needed here.
Could you tell me, what is wrong with the option "Čekáme na moji manželku nebo na vaši menžela" ? I should have thought it was even better than the correct phrase. Thank you!
The wrong word in your sentence is "vaši", that's the feminine gender. The masculine animate form (accusative singular) is "vašeho". You also have a typo in "manžela".
Other than that, it's all right and would be accepted. But what do you think makes it "even better" than the translation given here? If anything, it's a bit less natural.
I'm sorry that I didn't reply sooner to your answer. Thanks a lot for the explanation! Now I understand my mistake. I was rather confused about the meaning of manžel/muž and manželka/žena. I thougt, that only manžel was the correct translation of "husband" while muž simply meant "man".
Yes, by itself, you would use "manžel" for "husband" and "manželka" for "wife".
But as soon as you say "můj muž" or "moje žena" (or "tvoje" or "jeho", or "její"), they immediately become "my husband/wife", because saying "my man" or "my woman" makes sense only in some pretty marginal contexts.
The appropriate case forms of manželka and manžel are also accepted.
In this case, why not manželka (na mou manželku) for “wife?”
Or are you suggesting that it sounds more polite to use the formal word (manžel) for the other's spouse, and the less formal one (žena) for one's own?
That would be a very Japanese thing :) There is no such distinction in Czech. Theš key difference is that "muž" and "žena" are usually accompanied by a possessive pronoun even in situation when "manžel" and "manželka" don't have to be.
Děkuji mnohokrát: I was judging from German where some people consider it polite to call somebody else's wife „Ihre Gattin“ and one's own wife „meine Frau“. I am not sure how many people follow this rule.
Certainly such a dualism is much more universal in Japanese. The Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman wrote that it made him give up learning Japanese.
This may be off-topic, but as a native speaker in German I can tell you, that I rarely hear somebody use the term "Gattin". It's quite old-fashioned and most people would rather say "Ihre/deine Frau".
That would be accepted with a typo warning. The correct accusative pronoun is "moji", not "mojí".
"svůj" always refers to the subject. The subject here is "we". Therefore, "čekáme na svou ženu" means "we are waiting for our wife".