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- Topic: Arabic >
- "اَلْكَلْب كَلْبي."
10 Comments
62
It wasn't accepted because that's not the pattern Duo was going for. The teacher is a teacher. The professor is a professor. The dog is a dog. Now adding possessive pronouns: The dog is my dog. It's just a dumb teaching sentence.
891
But the Arabic does not sound like a dumb teaching sentence. It's something an Arab would actually say. Hence why translating it to a dumb teaching sentence in English is misleading.
891
You could say something like الكلب ملكي ("The dog is my property."), but the thing is Arabic is quite fond of repeating words like that when in English it would sound redundant, so translating this as "The dog is mine" flows quite naturally if you consider the rest of the language, you know. The -ii ending, which means "my," needs a noun and can't stand alone, so you have to either repeat the noun or use another noun. That's not the case in English: "mine" can stand alone.