"The boy cuts with a knife and the girl cuts with scissors."
Translation:Pojken skär med en kniv och flickan klipper med en sax.
19 Comments
954
We use different verbs for cutting with scissors and cutting with a knife.
Klippa applies for scissors and cutters, and skär for everything else, a knife, a sword, helicopter blades?
- 954
Yes, in principle it's the idea of two blades joined together that makes it klippa. If you break a plate and cut off ropes with the shards, it will be skära.
Cutting grass and hair, even with machines, is klippa.
- 954
For a scythe (en lie) there's a special word, slå, 'beat' or 'hit'. If you use a sickle (en skära) though, it would be skära. I think the machines are seen as having a scissor-like mechanism inside them, but sickles and scythes obviously haven't. A barber/hairdresser can skära hair too, if they use unconventional tools like a razor blade, and the emphasis is on that they don't klipper, but skär.
I think there are more languases that do this - at least Dutch do it too. If you said your were 'knippen' something, the default would be with scissors, and you can't 'snijden' with scissors, which is what you do with a knife. Never thought about english not heaving words for that.
- 1240
So basically skär is a little more violent or stronger than klipper. I can skär with a sword, a knife, a broken glass everything, and can be by an accident or intentional... and klippar it's just for my hair, the grass, the clothes, the paper and it's always intentional. Right? If i cut myself with a paper (by accident) i skär myself?
- 954
The point is just that klipper is done with scissors or scissor-like things. It's the idea of cutting with two blades that has its own verb, we think of it as a different action.
- 851
Is it idiomatic in Swedish to say that you 'skär med en kniv' or 'klipper med en sax'? If there are different words for different types of cutting, then I'm guessing just 'pojken skär' and 'flickan klipper' are enough and the including the rest sounds redundant.
- 954
It doesn't sound too strange here since the sentence is clearly about the contrast between the two activities. It would be at least as unexpected to say Pojken skär och flickan klipper, because then you'd wonder what they're cutting. But in other contexts of course it's usually enough to say just klipper or skär.
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It depends on how you interpret "cuts." Skär med sax should be acceptable. This is a very dark statement to translate. Klipper assumes paper but that may not be the case.
skär med sax may be a Finland Swedish expression. It is really not advisable to use in Sweden Swedish, and it doesn't sound like a dark statement at all.
