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- "Mereka pesan kopi, namun mer…
"Mereka pesan kopi, namun mereka tidak pesan makanan."
Translation:They ordered coffee, however they did not order food.
15 Comments
To my understanding, there is no tense in Bahasa. The time which a sentence is referring depends only on the conversation context. Using pass tense for the sentence seems more logical in general.
Although you can argue this is a conversation between waiters, in which case, describing a gang of usual customers that always only order coffee in the waiters' restaurant.
1694
In English we mark tense on our verbs, but Indonesian doesn't. It's all understood through context. But if you want to make the time explicit, you can use adverbs. For example, "sudah" indicates that a verb was completed in the past, and "akan" indicates that the verb will take place in the future.
So, for this sentence ("Mereka pesan kopi, namun mereka tidak pesan makanan"), past tense is just one option. It can also be translated as "they are ordering coffee, but they aren't ordering food."
Hope that helped.
1228
A user explained that Namun should only be used at the beginning.Is it wrong here or there is no such rule?
314
'however' is a direct translation for namun, but no one speaking English would actually use 'however' in this context. It's formal and not used in conversation.