"Don't you have a cat?"
Translation:Har du ingen katt?
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I don't think the proposed translation means the same thing as the english, unless I am very much misunderstanding the swedish. From my understanding, "har du ingen katt" would mean "have you no cat?", i.e. "You don't have a cat?" "Don't you have a cat?" suggests more commonly that you have an expectation the person you are asking DOES have a cat, and you are confirming that. If I answered "yes" to "don't you have a cat?", I am confirming I do have a cat. If i answered "yes" to "have you no cat?", I am confirming I do NOT have a cat.
Exactly this is tripping me up. The two phrases, in English, are very different in tone. "Don't you have a cat?" commonly implies the one asking expects that the person being asked does in fact have a cat. "Have you no cat?" implies some surprise by the person asking that the person being asked doesn't have a cat.
Guest arriving, looking around the apartment, exploring a rumor he had heard about the apartment's resident: "Don't you have a cat?"
Shocked health inspector watching a mouse dash across the kitchen floor, assuming the resident knows the traditional deterant for such a pest: "Have you no cat?!"
Anyway, I wrote "Har du ingen en katt?" and got dinged for the "en". Is it that the "en" is implied by the "ingEN"?
The "Questions" section is kicking my butt in general...
I don't think that "have you no cat" and "don't you have a cat" mean the same thing in English. The first is asking if a person does not have a cat, of course, but the second is something I would say if I knew the person had a cat, and I was looking for confirmation. One expects a negative response and the other a positive.
1488
I understand that it's inte for verbs and ingen for nouns, but I'm confused in this usage, would the "don't" be applied to the verb in the english version? Wouldn't "Har du ingen katt?" translate to "You have no cat?"