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- "They understood that somethi…
"They understood that something bad had probably happened."
Translation:Pochopili, že se asi stalo něco špatného.
14 Comments
642
I screwed up word order: "Pochopili že asi něco špatného se stalo". Would it have been correct if I put se in "second" place like this: "Pochopili že se asi něco špatného stalo"?
Probably yes. It is not very natural, but it is our tradition here to accept even quite marginal orders when they are not ridiculous. It very strongly stresses that it really DID happen, not that it was bad.
Or maybe we will just disable the exercise because we already have several thousands of translations.
Thank you for the explanation of what the differences in word order communicate. But that leads me to another question. How would one discern from this sentence that the emphasis is on something bad? And not that it actually happened? For reference, I'm seeing the English and have to put the correct Czech word order.
Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment The comment typically comes to the end, but see the text about the word order implications.