"Det är katternas mat."
Translation:It is the cats' food.
70 Comments
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A cat - en katt - en katts mat
The cat - katten - kattens mat
Some cats - katter - katters mat
The cats - katterna - katternas mat
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There's some big problem on mobile platforms with the apostrophes. We've reported it but who knows if it will ever get fixed.
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I just solved this on desktop, and I got called out for using an apostrophe, so it might not be restricted to mobile.
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Correct, it not only hasn't been solved, it's gotten worse. So sorry about that, unfortunately there's nothing more we can do.
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The apostrophes problem is pretty annoying. It's now the very end of 2017. Let's set how long until someone fixes it.
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(I know we're here to learn Swedish not English, but as a lot of people on Duolingo are language lovers, the appalling lack of apostrophes is enough to drive me / us to drink! I, too, (July 18) have just started to use the app and it's just dreadful to see errors of this magnitude!)
Sorry for the rant! I had thought MODs were working for Duolingo...
I'm giving you, devalanteriel a lingot for having to put up with comments like mine!
What do you want us to do? We don't have access to the developers, we're unpaid volunteers, we've reported the bug multiple times, it exists all over Duolingo...
We think it's just as annoying as you do but there is literally nothing we can do about it except remove sentences with plural possessives from the course, which is even worse.
Does anybody else feel all these possessive pronouns are kinda difficult? I get it but I can't respond quickly. Is that normal?
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Well, it's normal for me. Just takes regular practice to have it come more intuitively.
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Yes, but it is well worth the studying of the tables that you see when you scroll down here: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/sv/Possessives
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I too asked this. But then I realised. This is would be 'det här....' This here is the woman's newspaper.
I too thought 'this is', as in English you could say 'this is the cats food' or 'that is the cats food'. depending of the location of the food. Then of course we could clarify by saying 'this here is' or 'that there is', but rarely would we say it that way unless there was two different types of food :P
I think it's fairly natural to say "It is..." in reply to a question, e.g. "What's in the blue bowl?" "It is the cats' food."
It really works with any sort of follow-up phrase, too, e.g. "You mustn't eat that, it's the cats' food!"
It does sound rather strange as a stand-alone sentence, but without any context it probably sounds strange in Swedish too.
"Det är katternas mat" = "That's the cats' food"
"Det här är katternas mat"/"Detta är katternas mat" = "This is the cats' food"
"Här" = "Here"
Just to be sure, the plural at the end of the word here is indicating that it is the food belonging to a group of cats, not a single cat?
edit: I meant to say 'apostrophe', not 'plural'. Sorry for the confusion.
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Since the end of the swedish word is an -s, remember that that is not the plural.
In "katternas", the plural is the "-er", "-na" is the plural article and the "-s" is the genitive.
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No, you wouldn't hear it said, but written it is more correct than "it's the cats food".
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My exercise said cats, not cats' . This is the third with a missing ' after the plural s. I have a screen shot of all 3.
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There's a technical problem with putting hints on words that contain apostrophes which may be causing this, but there may be something else going on too. I'd actually appreciate having a look at that screenshot. If you could upload it to some image service and post a link here, it would be great.
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Since it doesn't look like anyone ever followed up on this, here you go:
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Thank you! I didn't update this forum, but the bug has been reported to Duo and it exists in other courses too. Actually it's been pretty long since it was reported but it's not the only bug that seems to take forever to get fixed.
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So I guess this is meant to mean food that belongs to multiple, specific cats. What would it have to say in order to mean just cat food in general?
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cat food is kattmat in Swedish. We do love our compound nouns.
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"Katternas" is plural, i.e. 4 cats' food is katternas mat, one cat's food is katts mat?
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and if the plural cats in "cats' food" were indefinite, then it would be "katters mat". Scroll up to JefVanAlse to see the four forms together.
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Depends on how you form the sentence. If you have it as "the cats' food" it's just food but if you put the food at the beginning you would have to say "the food of the cats" because "this is food of the cats" wouldn't be proper english. Of course mat is in the indefinite form though.
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Why wouldn't that be proper English? Uncommon? Certainly. A bit old fashioned? Perhaps. But not improper.
why det ? it must be den because katt is an en-word ? or generally what is the difference bet. den and det ?
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In this case, det is the same det as in, det regnar (it's raining) and doesn't actually reference anything in particular. If you were using it to reference something though, it would be mat.
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In English, or in Swedish?
In Swedish, cat's (in the sense of "belongs to a single cat") would be either katts (indefinite) or kattens (definite), while cats' (in the sense of "belongs to multiple cats") would be either katters (indefinite) or katternas (definite).
In English, it's based entirely on the location of the apostrophe. Cat's is singular, while Cats' is plural.
- the cat's food = the food belongs to one cat
- the cats' food = the food belongs to multiple cats
Since it's the plural katternas in Swedish, it needs to be cats'.
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Because "mat" doesn't mean "meal", it only means "food". Most of the time, we wouldn't really NEED to make a distinction between meal and food, but when you think about it, there is a difference. For example, "I've just finished buying the food." - This would suggest that you bought a whole lot of food, maybe for a big event or maybe for the week for your family or something. "I have just finished buying the meal." would mean a single meal, probably only for one person, that would feed them ONCE. The Swedish word for "meal" is "måltid" and would probably (a lot of the time, at least) suggest that there was a bit of conversation and (hopefully) fun happening at the same time. For example "Vi hade en måltid tillsammans." - "We had a meal together." You didn't just share food for the sake of not going hungry, you had food and a conversation together.
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Why is the possesive apostrophe (') after the s in the english translation if the word cats is a plural, and not the normal noun? It should be cat's .
What do you mean?
- cat's = a single cat has something
- cats' = multiple cats have something
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Says i have a typo in the english for writing cats', which is correct... apostrophe to show possession
Yes, please see the many other comments on the same issue.
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I need to have this explained in German:
ist es das Katzenfutter oder ist es das Futter der Katzen? Und wenn es eins der beiden ist, wie würde das andere heißen?
Was ist der Unterschied? Ich dachte die meinten beide das, was Katzen fressen. :)
Yes, please see the many other comments on the same issue.
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As a native english speaker, I would use 'the cat's food' to mean food belonging to one cat and also several cats. The only way to distinguish would be to say 'the cats's food' (which is not acknowledged by Duolingo) or possibly to say 'this is the food for the cats' which makes clear that more than one cat is being fed.
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I believe the normal way of writing the plural version in English is the cats' food like we do here. The singular would indeed be the cat's food, so there's a difference.
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"--'s" for singular. "--s'" for plural. You only use "--s's" when it is a singular possessive noun that ends in s. For example, Chris's food. Chris' food would mean food belonging to more than one Chri.
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However, "Chris' food" is also correct for singular. Then there is no difference in spelling but the pronunciation can still include 2 s sounds as if it were spelled "Chris's food. Again, it doesn't have to have 2 s pronunciation, but it often does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive
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I will you grant you that there are some style conventions, particularly in journalism or for print, that would say "Chris' food" is acceptable for a singular possessive noun. But I strongly encourage writers to reject this due to the ambiguity that this usage creates. If you truly intended to write about food belonging to just one Chris and not more than one Chri, then how can you tell the two apart from Chris' food? You have a great way to do that, and it is to always use Chris's food to refer to the singular possessive, and Chris' food to only refer to the plural possessive for Chri. The convention that I recommend is what is currently being promoted in American legal writing. Give that whatever weight you want, but if you were to ever litigate the issue of whether something was the singular or plural possessive, I think that you would wish the drafter would have used Chris's food and not Chris' food if they meant the singular.
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How many times do you really use just a first name in a litigation? I can picture this being an issue if a married couple's last name were ending in an 's' and they wanted to differentiate between his property and hers in a divorce settlement, in which case you could say Mrs. Jones' car and Mr. Jones' car. We often have a word that means more than one thing, take the pronoun "you" which is plural and has come to mean the singular as well.
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It probably happens a lot more than you would think (i.e., any time you have multiple parties with the same last name). Anyway, perhaps I should have used a common noun ending in s instead of a proper noun to better illustrated my point. But I still stand by the argument that it is better to avoid the ambiguity and be as clear as possible. This debate is similar to the debate over the Oxford comma, and they both probably would not even be issues if journalists/editors had not been trying to save space in print media.