"It is the cats' food."
Translation:Det är katternas mat.
20 Comments
>Det är katternas knivarna. >Det är katternas vegetarian. Those are some badass controlling cats.
You don't own the cat, the cat owns you. :)
Also PS, "knivarna" is "the knives", "knivar" would be just the plural "knives", without the definite article!
One cat possessive is cat's, plural possessive cats is cats'. Tricky little apostrophe!
What would, "It is the cat's food" translate to? As in, if there was only one cat.
Why can we not use De intead of Det in this case? I thought it was for en- and ett- words respectively.
"De" is a plural pronoun. I think you mean "den". However, none of these apply here. Whenever what you're talking about is very general or not introduced yet, it defaults to "det".
It is a poor sentence. Cats' can be singular or plural in english. Why only allow the plural translation?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean - cat's is singular and cats' is plural in English. Since the Swedish katternas is in the plural, it needs to be cats'.
- en katt = a cat
- katten = the cat
- katter = cats
- katterna = the cats
Is it saying that there are several cats and its their food or is it one cat whise food it is?
I understand . I counsidered the cat as singular so did not type katternas. I did not reakise the apostrophe after the (s) makes the noun katt made it plural. Tack sa mycket .
Indeed.
Cat's represents the possessive of a single cat whereas cats' represents the possessive of multiple cats. It's just how we handle possessives in English. However, sometimes you'll also see proper names with just the apostrophe at the end and those are definitely singular most of the time (i.e. Jesus' sandals).
- -en is a definite singular suffix
- -na is a definite plural suffix
Hence:
- kattens = the cat's
- katternas = the cats'
