"We sleep before we eat."
Translation:Vi sover innan vi äter.
14 Comments
I said "fore" instead of "innan" - so "fore" relies to physical location in space, and innan is more the concept in time?
No, not really. They used to have slightly different grammatical uses, but they're entirely interchangeable nowadays.
In the Tips Notes for this lesson you said that "innan" is one of those conjunctions/adverbs that might affect the sentence's word order.
I wrote "vi sover innan ater vi" but that was incorrect. Why is it considered wrong? What have I missed here?
890
Innan starts a subclause. In subclauses, the subject goes before the verb (and if there's an inte, it goes before the verb too).
So the deal is: main clause: verb second. Subclause: subject before verb.
I think that would be "We sleep before eat" which is wrong, but when we learn the present participles in a later lesson, maybe we won't need the subject: "We sleep before eating".
- 890
We don't use the present participles that way in Swedish, so that won't work either (we use them mainly as adjectives). If you really really want to skip the second subject, you'd have to switch to a noun instead: Vi sover innan maten works, which literally means 'We sleep before the food', only it sounds natural.
And how does the sentence "Vi sover innan att äta" sound in Swedish, if we desperately wanted to avoid repeating the "vi" pronoun? :-) I think this construction might work in Norwegian.
But would a Swedish native understand what we meant if we got it wrong but used these main words?
- 890
innanför is only used in a spatial sense. It can be translated as inside or within in English, but not before.
