"These people need food and water."
Translation:Dessa människor behöver mat och vatten.
13 Comments
The translation above says "människor" but that's what I put and it marked it wrong and said it should be "människorna"???
Oooooohhhh thank you! I thought Dessa and De har were interchangeable.
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They mean the same, but they don't work quite the same – it's a bit tricky :)
Folk has a slightly different meaning. It is used to address an entire people.
- Hela folket. (The entire population, the whole nation.)
- Jordens folk. (The peoples of the world.)
- Det svenska folket. (The Swedish people.)
Människor in this case is used to address a specific group of people. If we hypothetically had some kind of humanitarian crisis, we could say dessa folk behöver mat och vatten, which would mean these peoples need food and water. This translation uses peoples in plural because the Swedish sentence implies that there are different peoples (different cultures or similar).
Hope this explanation isn't a complete mess.
For clarifaction, examples number 5 and 6 in the following link are examples where we in Swedish would use the word folk. http://www.learnersdictionary.com/qa/What-is-the-difference-between-people-and-peoples-
Thank you! I use folk a lot, and see now that it isn't always in the right context!
There are some explanations at the bottom of this page: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/sv/Determiners
I had a multiple choice question with three possibilities, and one of them I checked was marked wrong. Why was "Denna människorna behöver mat och vatten" marked as wrong? It seems to translate to "These people need food and water" in Google translate, which should be correct? Or not? Why?
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This was a long time ago, but... Denna is ised with singular indefinite nouns, and människorna is both plural and definite.
Denna människa behöver mat och vatten would have been a correct sentence (but not a correct translation though).
