"Ænderne svømmer ikke når svømmebassinet intet vand har."
Translation:The ducks do not swim when the pool has no water.
14 Comments
Does the Danish sentence have correct word order? "svømmebassinet intet vand har" looks very strange, shouldn't it be: "svømmebassinet har intet vand"
I think it has something to do with the subordinate clause - here it starts with 'når'. In these clauses the word order changes significantly, but I'm not 100 % sure.
No, in subordinate clause word order changes from (subject verb adverb) to (subject adverb verb). But here it goes like: (subject object verb) - doesn't make any sense, must be a mistake!
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I am German, and when I translate the second part word by word into German without changing anything: "... wenn das Schwimmbecken kein Wasser hat." it is perfect. Nonetheless, the Danish sentence confused me, since I haven't seen such a word order before in Danish sentences here on Duolingo.
So I looked it up in the text book and it says that in the subordinate clause the word order is: - subject - 'ikke' / adverb like 'altid' and also noun with 'ingen' - verb - object. So I guess that 'intet vand' is counted as similar to 'ingen'
Still, none of the correct word orders allow for the verb to be the last item in the sentence. If I run into this sentence again, I'll make sure to report it to the developers.
I'm not sure about Danish but in an equivalent German sentence, this word order would be 100 % correct. Since there are many similarities like this between the two languages, I'd say this sentence is correct.
Sorry, but for example sentence like 'Ministeren siger at journalisterne ingen informationer har.' is totally correct. So yeah, there are certain types of sentences that allow the verb the be at the last position
I just started reading some books in anish, and every once in a while they invert the order of the words, away from all inversion rules.
Thus, my understanding is that your suggestion is correct, and it would be the simple way of writing. However this rearrangement is also fine.
I think "har ikke vand" negates the verb ("does not have water") whereas "har intet vand" negates the subject ("has no water")
