"Today is my twentieth birthday."
Translation:Dnes mám dvacáté narozeniny.
7 Comments
My answer -- Dnes je mé dvacaté narozeniny -- was wrong. The correct translation offered was "Dnes jsou mé dvacáté narozeniny." I'll assume that the plural is used in the correct answer because "narozeniny" is plural, but I don't quite know why that is. In the English sentence, which is to be translated into Czech in this exercise, the subject is "today," not "birthday," which is why I used "je." Can someone help, please?
"Narozeniny" belongs to a category of words that are "pomnožná", plural-only or "plurale tantum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurale_tantum These exist in English as well. There is no singular *"narozenina" and it is weird to have one scissor or one trouser.
Thanks for your quick reply and for the explanation! I understand that "narozeniny" is a plural-only word, and I understand the often-used "to jsou" construction, which is somewhat confusing at first.
The problem here is that I don't understand why the verb in the correct translation that I was given matched "narozeniny" and not "dnes," since "today" (dnes) is the subject in the original sentence and was also the subject in my answer.
Oh, well. Maybe it will be safer to use "mít" as in the translation given at the top of this page... :-) Thanks again for your help.
Dnes can be either a noun or an adverb (specifying time). Here it is an adverb and the subject of the sentence is "narozeniny". And the verb agrees with the subject and is further specifies by the adverb.
1080
In my opinion “dnes” (an adverb) is not the subject of the sentence; rather, “narozeniny” is. You can easily see that by replacing “dnes” by “on the twentieth” (dvacátého), which does not change the grammatical structure. Obviously, dvacátého cannot be the subject.
Edit: Thanks to Vlada for mentioning dnešek; I had overlooked that.
