"There were fifteen dogs here in the morning."

Translation: Ráno tady bylo patnáct psů.

[Jeff77996]

Why is the genitive "psů" used here and not the nominative "psi"? "Patnàct," which describes the dogs, appears to be in nominative case. Also, the dogs are the subjects of the sentence, no?

[VladaFu]

All numbers above four use genitive. Also the advers of quatity. It should be in the Tips and notes where numbers were introduced.

[Simon522231]

Why is it "bylo" and not "byli"? Surely the plural is used here?

[VladaFu]

No, numbers above four use singular neuter verb forms.

[Tom307502]

Do you mean that the verb is agreeing with the number (of things), rather than with the gender of the things themselves?

[VladaFu]

For numbers above four.

[Eliska566142]

I thought forms of the verb to be (být) had to be the second element in the sentence. Why not Ráno bylo tady...?

[VladaFu]

Where did you read such a rule? Certain forms are clitics and have to be at the second position, but certainly not all of them.

You could use "Ráno bylo patnáct psů tady." to stress "tady" if you wanted.

[Eliska566142]

My Czech language teacher told me that. I cannot find any really good information about Czech word order in any of the multiple books I have. It’s incredibly confusing.

[VladaFu]

But there is a problem. Czech past tense is not a simple tense, it is a compound tense from the present tense of být which forms an auxiliary verb + past participle of the verb you are conjugating. But in the third person the auxiliary verb is omitted.

And the thing that does have to be in the second position is the present tense of být, not the participle.

So when you conjugate být in the past tense you have two things,the auxiliary verb (pomocné sloveso) and the participle (příčestí). I am sure your teacher can explain more to you in person but these are two separate things and they follow different rules.

[venik212]

I am not sure why tady should be in the second position here. Rano bylo tady patnact psu was marked as being wrong.

[VladaFu]

It sounds strange. Czech has preference for certain position for adverbs, Engish has too. And also some stress patterns sound strange for Czech sentences. The second position rule onlydescribea the strongeat tendency but there are other less strict patters. It is best to listen to the speach of native speakers. Often they cannot say why it sounds unnatural some other way.

I will add yours, but remember, it is not that natural. It forces some particular stress when pronouncing it.

[WendyGoldm2]

In the new format of "complete the translation", Ráno tady bylo patnact psů. should be accepted without the accent over the "a" as is for other translations.

[VladaFu]

I don't really understand. If Duolingo introduced some new exercise and forgot to include an on-screen keyboard, you have to tell them in the Troubleshooting forum or in a bug report. The same is true for their typo detection.

We will never add incorrect diacritics into the list of correct Czech sentences.

[Pollyhs]

is this morning also an acceptable translation instead of in the morning.