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- "This woman does not eat a ve…
"This woman does not eat a vegetable."
Translation:यह औरत सब्ज़ी नहीं खाती है।
12 Comments
If your answer was 'यह औरत सब्ज़ी नहीं खाती।', then it is right. You can report it if you see the sentence again.
Yes. But note that by moving नहीं after the verb, you emphasize the negation. So, it becomes more of an exclamation of surprise or exasperation rather than a neutral statement.
This is actually a weird translation.
The given Hindi sentence means that the woman does not eat vegetables in general. In English, you would usually use the plural form ('This woman does not eat vegetables') to say this. In Hindi, you can use either the singular or plural.
On the other hand, the sentence 'Yeh aurat ek sabzi nahin khaati' seems to imply that she does not eat one vegetable.
The English sentence 'This woman does not eat a vegetable' sounds unnatural and which of the two meanings it conveys is debatable. I would personally go with the second. So, your answer should have been accepted IMO.
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Thanks vinay. I always appreciate your thoughtful insights. I just wanted to make sure that I was on track.
I have picked up the language nuances of my Indian colleagues dropping "the" and pronouncing W as V and vice versa. I now appreciate from reading the discussion string that there is also such a thing as Indian English, which is interesting.
This is unrelated to the food topic, but how do I pronounce the Hindi word for God? परमेश्वर parameshvar, is it really pronounced parmeshWar?
You'll be fine with either parmeshwar or parmeshvar. Most Indians will not be able to distinguish the pronunciations.
The Hindi व is a sound that's midway between the English 'v' and 'w'. It's pronounced by bringing your teeth near your lower lip as if to say 'v' but then trying to say 'w' instead.
All three ('v', 'व' and 'w') sound the same to speakers of Hindi and most other Indian languages.
To a non-subcontinental English speaker, व sounds like 'v' in some Hindi words and 'w' in others. परमेश्वर is in the latter category.
Taking my own experience, for example, I learned to pronounce v/w correctly as a teen in school but I still can't make out the difference when I hear the sounds unless I am really paying attention. I guess the human brain gets hardwired to the sounds it hears in the first few years of childhood and it is very difficult to reprogram it later on.
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You explained that very well. Thank you very much for sharing your personal perspective.
It is optional in negative sentences (provided there is another verb in this sentence).
So, यह औरत सब्ज़ी नहीं खाती। is also acceptable.
