"Acaba a greve da Polícia Civil."
Translation:The Civil Police strike is over.
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This is too weird a sentence to teach newbies like me. I thought it was a call for action : end the strike!
for some events when we want to emphasize the action we put the verb at the beginning. And it sounds like a progressive form sometimes
A floresta queima no verão - The woods burn in the summer
Queima a floresta durante este verão - The forest is burning during this summer
Começa o jogo depois da novela / O jogo começa depois da novela - The game begins after the soap opera
The comments here haven't helped me to understand this one.
Obviously, it seems as though it should be written as:
A greve da Polícia Civil é/ésta acaba.
or
A greve da Polícia Civil acabou.
Like many others, I can't get my head around why the sentence is formed in the way that it is :/
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A greve da Polícia Civil acabou. = the way a native speaker would say it. It's this way because in Portuguese we say "...is/are ended".
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A greve da Polícia Civil está acabada. = literal translation, which is awkwarwd in Portuguese.
But 'acabar' is at the beginning of the sentence, and that's what's hard to understand. It seems like it's an imperative, without the correct imperative word.
Yeah, I read that but I didn't find it helpful at all. In the first example, he used "forest" and "woods" for the one noun and it drew attention to that, making it difficult to get the point. In the second example, he just wrote the exact same English sentence for the two variant portuguese structures, so it was pointless.
A literal translation would be "(It) ends Civil Police strike". (ok, not a good translation though)
This kind of structure is used mainly as headlines in newspapers, so that's why it may cause confusion. As well as English has specific rules for headlines (which I have learned some time ago at college), Portuguese also does.
So, you don't need to be afraid to find this structure everywhere =)
Okay, thanks for that. I hope I don't encounter it much...or that I encounter it so much that it becomes normal. In between and I'm in trouble!
Out of interest, as a moderator can you see who gives your comments likes and lingots?
or that I encounter it so much that it becomes normal. In between and I'm in trouble!
Hahahahahha... it depends on your taste =P I mean, the kinds of things you like reading =)
Out of interest, as a moderator can you see who gives your comments likes and lingots?
No, I can't see it... =/
Ah....well you'll just have to take my word for it that I tend to give you at least one of the two every time you respond...even though I don't respond much haha
Finishes was even in the hints. Report and try not to let it ruin your day.
It's more like "the civil police strike is over". Sometimes, we use the simple present in portuguese to indicate something that just happend (likely in a newspaper headline). In this case "acaba a greve da polícia civil" can also be translated as "the civil police strike is finished".
Oi. I would have thought "A greve da Polícia Civil.acaba" to be the correct solution given the English translation. I would translate that as "he/she ends the civil police strike". How do you tell the difference? :)
If it were "he/she" (someone doing the action), it would be demonstrated in the sentence:
- O juiz acaba COM a greve da Polícia Civil).
If over is supposed to be placed at the end, it would be "(A) greve da Polícia Civil acaba".
The most common, though, is the one Duo has proposed. They both, however, are probably related to something on TV or newspaper, like a headline. In informal speech we'd say "Acabou a greve da Polícia Civil", as a past action.
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agree, i immediately thought about a headline. however, i think the SeaOfSand's sentence is better grammatically (subjet + verb + predicate)
I'm just spitballing, but maybe it's because acaba is always transitive? So it's structurally closer to "[Somebody] ended the police strike", and the reader just has to fill in the strike-ender from context.
Maybe a different order: " a greve da Polícia Civil acaba" (is over) does that make thinhs easier?
This is not so common. Maybe a headline, or even in literature.... they usually switch the order,
That order makes sense to me. Under what circumstances can (or should) you move the verb to the beginning?
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I love it when I am learning portuguese, and they call me out for choosing the wrong english preposition. Sorry DL, it is still Portuguese I am studying, even a Canadian like me can still use a less common expression.
Civil polícia should be able to translate to police, because the Civil Police in most Anglo countries is simply the police.
Wouldn't acaba also indicate that it's just now ending (or just now ended)? Yet "the civil police strike just ended" was not accepted.
