- Forum >
- Topic: Swedish >
- "Slightly more than a thousan…
"Slightly more than a thousand people live in the village."
Translation:Det bor drygt tusen människor i byn.
32 Comments
Jag vet att svenskar inte särskriver, men är verkligen "etttusen" korrekt? Det känns bättre med antingen "ett tusen" eller i värsta fall "ettusen".
1360
You're right, three T:s was a typo here. All of the following are correct: tusen, ettusen, ett tusen. I have hopefully fixed it now. Bit tricky with all those brackets.
Regarding the word order, why couldn't the whole 'det drygt tusen människor' come before the verb 'bor'? Why was it 'det bor drygt tusen människor'?
"drygt" and "slightly more" is not the same. "Slightly more" would be "något/några fler". "drygt" means "around"
- 1360
Some young Swedes use drygt in this way, but it has not yet become the accepted usage, so in Standard Swedish, drygt still means slightly more than, see this discussion: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/6104206
- 1360
Editing my comment – I read another comment of yours and realized I misunderstood this one: you're young but you still use drygt to mean 'slightly more than'. You're not the only one to be surprised at how some people use the word. Here'a an interesting article about the phenomenon: http://blog.svd.se/sprak/2012/04/16/dryga-metern-%E2%80%93-ar-det-95-eller-105-cm/
Can someone please explain the difference between "Lite mer än tusen folket bor i byn" and "Det bor drygt tusen människor i byn"?
- 1303
"Lite mer än tusen folket bor i byn" is not a correct Swedish sentence. It means "Slightly more than a thousand the people live in the village."
Let's modify it: "Lite mer än tusen folk bor i byn"
That is indeed a correct, slightly strange, Swedish sentence, however most likely not what you wanted to say. In that context "folk" would be a synonym to "folkgrupp" and mean a group of people with a common ethnicity, culture, history etc.
So, "en människa" or "en person" is not a synonym to "ett folk".
I'm not skilled enough the give a grammatically correct explanation, but I think is has to do with Collective Nouns.
But you can say "Det bor massor med folk i byn" (however, not a correct answer to this exercise), and then most Swedes would interpret it as "Det bor massor med människor i byn", and not think about groups of people. Maybe someone else can elaborate on that.
Concerning that in my questions there could by slightly more than a thousand in the boyfriend. ..
If i understand it correctly, 'lever' means live - as in living your life. 'bor' means live - as in living at a particular place. Two different meanings, right?
Could the word order also be "Det bor i byn drygt tusen människor"? I didn't report it because I'm not sure it's correct... but it would seem okay to me?
I'll add the construction, but please note that the word is tusen. This is important, because tusan is a mild swearword, commonly associated to devils.
- 202
Is "drygt" here an adverb, or is it an adjective modifying ett tusen?
Would one say "drygt två tusen" or "dryga två tusen"?
Can I write "Det bor ett drygt tusen människor i byn"? I thought dryg can be used as an adjective as well.
It can, but there are two problems with using it that way here.
- ett tusen can't be separated by an adjective. Compare English: "a thousand green trees" or "a green thousand trees", which sounds grammatical?
- Since adjectives describe nouns, you lose the connection to "a thousand". The adjective means "slightly more than", but you can't really say "slightly more than people".
Is the dummy subject really necessary? I used "drygt tusen människor" as the subject since the English sentence does the same, but it was wrong.
You mean as in e.g. drygt tusen människor bor i byn? That's actually accepted. We accept 163 different translations, though, so it's a bit hard to get an overview - and hence easy to miss one or two variations that should be added.
I thought that's exactly what I wrote, but on closer inspection, I made a typo and wrote "byn" as "bon". I woke up just recently.
This brings to mind a second question though: Does it make any difference at all whether one uses the dummy subject or not?
