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- "في الْخَلْفِيّة اِمْرَأة غَن…
35 Comments
Hunak means "there" in the since of "at that place." You're thinking of the existential "there" in English, which expresses something that exists. There is no existential "there" in Arabic. We translate it many different ways. In this case, we use "fii" because it exists IN a specific place, the background. The existential "there" is implied. If we added "hunak" it would be more like, "There (in that place), in the background, is a rich woman" instead of "There is (exists) a rich woman in the background."
It's a subtle but important distinction.
1268
The skill "In my bag" introduces هُناك to mean "there is" if it's at the beginning of the sentence, and the course consistently follows this up until this skill. So the lack of هُناك is noticeable and probably should be explained in another tips and notes section.
370
I was using my phone for the longest time and didn't know there was a Tip section, until someone pointed out to me that it is only on the Desktop/Web version.
333
Is there really such a thing in English as "existential" there? Could you expand, westward_man?
333
Wiebke74... It is grammatically correct, but unidiomatic. It's not the natural order that a native speaker would use. It's what's known as a marked order.
333
Yes, Decybele, and that is what's known as a "marked" order. It's for a particular situation. The neutral (unmarked) order is the one given by Duolingo. There's no emphasis on anything in particular.
231
What about "There in the background is a rich woman"? I think this should be accepted by Duo but it is not.
333
'there in the background is a rich woman' is not wrong, but it's not the normal word order, ie, the word order is marked.
116
I would say "there is a rich woman in the background." Can the prepositional phrase be either leading or following the main phrase in Arabic?
231
"woman" is singular (one adult female person) "women" is plural (several adult female persons) but i haven't learned "women" in arabic so far.