"Slightly more than a thousand people live in the village."
Translation:Det bor drygt tusen människor i byn.
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154
Can someone please explain the difference between "Lite mer än tusen folket bor i byn" and "Det bor drygt tusen människor i byn"?
"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.
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
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/
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Is "drygt" here an adverb, or is it an adjective modifying ett tusen?
Would one say "drygt två tusen" or "dryga två tusen"?
39
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".