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- "It is a book."
"It is a book."
Translation:Det er en bog.
19 Comments
Yes, that would be the logical, and when I think about it there is not really much wrong in saying that. But the reasoning is that the word does not really depend on the noun, not in this case. Just think of "det" af the general "that". If it can only be "that" in English, then it is "det" in Danish.
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One of the options is "Det er en avisen." I just want to make sure the translation of that sentence is "It is a the newspaper.", thus grammatically incorrect. (Nevermind the task itself) Am I right?
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Sorry for inconvenience. I just happen to translate separately all the answer options in this task, neverminding how obvious it is which answer is correct. I am just checking the translation of "Det er en avisen.", which was one of the three options to choose as a correct translation for "This is a book". Is it grammatically incorrect?
I am not sure how you got "avisen". The sentence should be "Det er en bog". For it to be "en avisen" then the English sentence would have to be: "It is a the newspaper".
Having both indefinite article and definite article before a noun is always grammatically incorrect, since it is either or. In Danish the definite article is a suffix of the noun. "en avis" = "a newspaper", while "avisen" = "the newspaper".
Hope this helps.
1868
I think he's referring to when the sentence translation is presented as a multiple-choice question. He knows that "Det er en avisen" is clearly not the correct choice, but he is asking if in addition to being an incorrect choice, is it also grammatically incorrect. (I hope this helps, two years later.) :)
Yes, but it's important to remember that grammatical gender and biological gender are two completely separate concepts (although they can be somewhat tied in with each other). So in Danish "a book" (en bog) is grammatically gendered (common gender/n-word), whereas "an animal" (et dyr) which can be male or female is neuter (t-word)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_grammar
There are two grammatical genders in Danish: common and neuter. All nouns are mostly arbitrarily divided into these two classes. The singular indefinite article (a/an in English) is en for common nouns and et for neuter nouns. They are often informally called n-words and t-words.
En dreng. A boy.
Et fængsel. A jail.
Maybe wikipedia can help :)
241
Just when I thought I'd see elision [deTeRen bo'] - nothing!. It sounds like [Déan bo']. Crazy language...