"Hon äter inte kött."
Translation:She does not eat meat.
17 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Does this sentence really means both "She does not eat meat" and "She is not eating meat"? It is quite ambiguous as she might be vegetarian (never eats meat) or just that she is not eating meat right now...
It means both; Swedish does not distinguish between simple present and continuous. If it's necessary, we can always clarify by saying Hon äter inte kött just nu ('She's not eating meat right now') or Hon är vegetarian ('She's a vegetarian').
In slavic languages continuous and simple tense is not distingiushed as well, so it's pretty normal ☺
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And if it is the first sense (she is vegetarian), "she eats no meat" bears the same meaning. So why is "she eats no meat" wrong?
This caught me off guard as well. At least in Midwestern American English, you're just as likely to hear "She eats no meat." as "She doesn't eat meat.", and provided this was the intended meaning from context I'd actually think it makes more sense to translate it as 'She eats no meat.' because that preserved the syntactic structure of the original.
Does initial /k/ always sound like an English sh? It seems very odd to me...I keep want to associate it with 'a cut of meat and give it a /k/ sound here...
No, it's not. First of all, it's not an English sh-sound. It's a different one. It sounds similar but it's not the same. Compare English sh /ʃ/ to Swedish tj/k /ɕ/.
Generally, k is pronounced /ɕ/ before i, e, ö, ä and y. However, we have a lot of loanwords that makes it a bit harder. For example, "att köra" (to drive) is pronounced with /ɕ/ while "en kör" (a choir) is not. Other examples of this are "keps" (cap) and "kö" (queue/line).
I don't doubt that, we've had lots of comments like that recently. If it happens again, I would appreciate it if you could leave an error report or a screenshot so I have something to share with the developers.
- I do (not)
- You do (not)
- He / she / it does (not)
- We do (not)
- You do (not)
- They do (not)
So it depends on the person speaking, and it's always "do" except in the third person singular.
