37 Comments
Yup. Rocken har inga knappar.
However, we are quite adamant on keeping the distinction of inte/inga and not/no in translations.
Google went with the alternate translation - Rock music has no buttons. :) Just another reason to learn the language instead of counting on a translator.
Nowadays it says "rocker is not scarce"
Nice to see google translate has improved over the past few years. x3
In german the exact same word rock means skirt. Can it have that meaning in swedish too?
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Well, the german "Rock" can also mean a kind of coat with a seam at the waist, but that's a historical piece of clothing. In modern usage it always means "skirt". Still a good mnemonic, though. See http://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenrock
Yup. Or "Bratrock". I've been using images from the Chereau "Ring of the Nibelung" to memorize the Swedish usage. (And if, as mentioned below, the Swedish "rock" only applies to males that would seem to indicate that the usage is very closely related).
What is the difference between a jacket and a coat? In English, I might assume that a coat will be longer or more formal. Does this interpretation hold true in Swedish?
Yes, it does. Note that a female coat is normally not called "rock" but "kappa" though.
Inte is an adverb, while inga is the plural of ingen, a pronoun meaning no/nobody/nothing. As noted above, you can say Rocken har inga knappar for "The coat has no buttons." But for the coat does not have buttons, it's negating the verb rather than using a pronoun, so you need inte.
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In Tinycards Duolingo Swedish Course "en rock" = "a long coat", but "The long coat..." is not accepted here.
I just came here because of that very issue! I said "the long coat" here because of the translation in Tinycards.
That's not grammatically correct in English, at least not in American English. You could say the coat hasn't any buttons, the coat has no buttons, the coat doesn't have buttons, or the coat doesn't have any buttons, all of which translate a little differently into Swedish and the best translation of this sentence is the coat doesn't have buttons because inte negates the verb har, rather than the noun knappar. Hasn't any is probably accepted, but generally you would translate any as a separate word in Swedish (such as några).
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I think the "-n't" contractions in English are limited to the copula and modal verbs. Now "have" is a special case in that it can be both a modal verb ("he has seen buttons") and a regular one ("he has buttons"); I'd only use "hasn't" in the first case, the second one ("he hasn't (any) buttons") sounds quaint/period/dialect to me.
That translates into "the coat hos not buttons" which isn't proper English.
The closest sentence is "the coat hasn't got buttons"
Another translation would be 'The coat hasn't any buttons' but it was marked as wrong
This has already been mentioned in this thread, so there is really no need to keep bringing it up again and again. Just report it.
Just to make it clear - I haven't been 'bringing it up again and again' as you suggest
Wasn't talking about you specifically. Not the first time people have done that. You won't be the last.
