"Räven är röd. Dessutom har den en lång svans."
Translation:The fox is red. In addition, it has a long tail.
27 Comments
Is the second part ambiguous, as in German? If so, the juxtaposition with the learned conjunction is funnier.
As "röd" also refers to a person with communist sympathies, and "svans" can mean a line of supporters running after him, I think this sentence has a funny ambiguity.
Well, I guess not then... I thought 'svans' might additionally refer to the male genitalia, as with 'Schwanz' in German!
As a native English speaker, the word Räven looks like Raven to me, which is a bit confusing. I know it's just the Swedish definitive form of räv, but still.
English speakers seems to be able to easily look past diacritics. Myself, it's the reverse.
Stargåte? I can't read it as [geit], but as [gotɛ]
I like my font a bit small on my screen, so it's hard to see the ä in Räven. Also, my glasses are splotchy (I should probably clean them, but whatever)
"moreover he's the long tail" makes zero sense to me yet it's the correction it's giving me.
841
the tail is not in any of the accepted answers, so I don't understand how it could ever show up. The thing with he's I've seen before. The accepted answers have it/he has and it/he has got, and Duo is supposed to generate contractions automatically, but there are some errors in this process, so that sometimes he's can be mistakenly generated from he has. This is bound to happen in all courses so hopefully they'll fix to it sooner or later. It's pretty annoying though.
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In some contexts, that would actually be accepted English (and almost a bit 'high brow', in a sort of 19th century Britain kind of way; the sort of thing I would expect to hear in Dickens) for example: "He listed all the state capitals in alphabetical order." "Yes, he's quite a memory does he not?"
Of course that is very confusing for people not used to it, but if someone like my mum said it, I wouldn't baulk.
Why is "svans" pronounced with a long a? Seems like a common error with the voice.
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Yes, it's an error. When said this way, the word means swan's, like in "belonging to a swan".
I'm glad "in addition" is accepted for "dessutom". The English word "moreover" implies some sort of connection between the fox's colour and the length of its tail, which is clearly nonsense.
I'll reply here in regards to some other comment threads that were getting out of hand.
We accept a wide variety of alternatives to "moreover" for this sentence. It's certainly not that we think "moreover" is an excellent idiomatic way of phrasing that natives use all the time - however, we do need to consider which alternative best suits the criteria of being correct, hard to misunderstand, and teaches the Swedish word in the reverse exercise. The last of those is by far the most important, and will frequently lead to less idiomatic English constructions. Having said that, though, we continuously reevalute the course, and I think "in addition" will fit the above criteria better, so I've changed the default translation to that. :)
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Thanks devalanterial - would you say that "dessutom" (regardless of how we choose to translate it) carries a connotation of both "additionally" and "therefore"? A Swedish learning programme that I use, often puts it in a context like "Stockholm är byggd på 14 öar. Stockholm är dessutom känt för det otroliga bålivet." which to mean, sounds like BECAUSE it's a city built upon islands, it is known for its amazing boat life. Would that be right (in that context) or not?
No, I'm afraid it doesn't really work as "therefore". In your example, they definitely do mean "in addition", even though your suggestion, given the context, would have made a lot of sense otherwise. :)
It doesn't have to be nonsense; we don't know the context. Furthermore, describing nonsense scenarios is not nonsense!
Earlier in the chapter, Darwin might have identified long tails and red fur to be the two key clues to solving some mystery on the Galápagos; finding both on the same fox is "more" evidence than finding only one.
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Would it accept "also" for "dessutom" instead of "in addition"? I would consider these two to be functionally identical in English.
Yes, we accept the following before the clause:
- in addition
- furthermore
- besides
- moreover
- what is more
- also
- additionally
And also "as well" and "too" after the clause.
