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- "The boy cuts with a knife an…
"The boy cuts with a knife and the girl cuts with scissors."
Translation:Pojken skär med en kniv och flickan klipper med en sax.
32 Comments
Klippa applies for scissors and cutters, and skär for everything else, a knife, a sword, helicopter blades?
1487
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.
- 1487
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.
- 783
For those who learn both Swedish and German, it is weird that the German noun Schere means scissors. The German verb is schneiden, no matter whether you use a knife or scissors, but there is also a verb scheren, for example to shear a sheep or to trim a man's beard. So the common root of the Swedish and German words has developed to different meanings.
- 83
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.
- 1393
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.
- 1487
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.
English uses the word in the plural, much like with e.g. "trousers". But Swedish doesn't.
- 1778
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?
- 1487
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.
- 501
I left out the word "en" before sax and was (of course) marked wrong. But I think leaving it out is fine, as well. I'll report.
It is fine, yes. I would say though that if you leave it out in one place, you should leave it out in both. Otherwise you get a mixture of styles that though not wrong isn't very idiomatic.
- 259
the english is 'a knife' and 'scissors,' not 'a pair of scissors,' so klipper med sax is fine
Swedish uses klippa for the kind of cutting you do with scissors - never skära.
Why Can't I say pojken skär och flickan klipper. So if you know that one is for knives and the other if for scissors, it is redundant to say skär med en kniv and klipper med en sax. It is like watering with water.
No, one is for the kind of cutting you do with knives, and one is for the kind of cutting you do with scissors. But you can cut with other things as well.
Plus, you're being asked to translate the sentence, not interpret it further.
skar is cut and does not depend on if it is a boy or a girl who cuts. Really now!
Of course gender isn't relevant. But the tool is not. If the sentence had said that the girl cuts with a knife and the boy with scissors, you'd still use skär with the knife and klipper with the scissors.
