"Kvinnan lagar mat."
Translation:The woman is cooking.
20 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
664
So this isn't a verb word so much as a verb phrase? Does "lagar" ever mean "cooks" on its own? (Cooking up trouble, cooking as in being too hot, cooking as in Breaking Bad, etc, or possibly some non-idiomatic phrase that doesn't occur to me at the moment.)
Since Spray's comment doesn't have a correction following it, am I correct in assuming that lagar+mat means "cooks," and that "lagar" on its own doesn't?
EDIT: Nevermind! I found https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5892480 :) Great note!
That's not right. Lagar is /lɑːgar/ and the TTS has it right here.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/laga#Swedish has audio of laga too, if you want another source with a human saying it.
Hope it helps! :)
First, ‘laga’ is the infinitive form of the verb, which in English is just ‘cook’ (or ‘to cook’ sometimes), never ‘cooks’. In the present tense, this becomes ‘lagar’, so that means ‘cook’ (after ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘they’, or a plural noun) or ‘cooks’ (after ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, or a singular noun).
Meanwhile, ‘lag’ is a noun that means ‘law’. The plural becomes ‘lagar’, which means ‘laws’. (And the definite forms are singular ‘lagen’ and plural ‘lagarna’.)
So ‘lagar’ can mean either ‘cooks’ (or ‘cook’) as a verb or ‘laws’ as a noun.