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- "Kvinnan lagar mat."
16 Comments
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.
1456
Someone posted a link to this post, which explains how the verb works: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5892480
There's a collection of useful links as a pinned topic under Swedish Discussions, where you can find more of these explanations.