- Forum >
- Topic: Swedish >
- "My brother and I have the sa…
"My brother and I have the same mother."
Translation:Min bror och jag har samma mamma.
29 Comments
2457
Why? What's wrong with rhyme? I would not avoid it. 'Mamma' is a familiar way of speaking. 'Mor' is much more formal, but I have startad to use 'mor' much more frequently since my mother turned 80, and I have to talk about her to medical personel, farmacies, etc - it feels much more respectful.
You're looking at it from way too literal an angle. Strictly literal, word-for-word translations don't even work when the languages are close neighbors – try translating a Portuguese novel into Spanish by way of Google Translate and tell me how it works ;)
You can't look at samma and think "this word means 'same'". You have to look at it as "the same". You wouldn't say "the same the mother" any more than you'd say "samma mamman". The definite is already part and parcel of samma. This isn't an exception to the rule, it's how this word works. Rather than an exception, it is the rule.
2457
'samma' is definite enough, it defines 'mamma', so it feels wrong to add the definite article as well.
1454
Yes, we don't use the object form when it's a subject in the beginning of the sentence like this, it's not even an error that Swedes make.
312
Is Swedish similar to English that it prefers to put yourself as the subject last in a list of subjects? 'Min bror och jag -> My brother and I' over 'Jag och min bror -> I and my brother'
1394
I was taught that it is more polite to put others before yourself, but then it is 30 years since I went to school...
1454
I did a corpus search and jag och min bror is much more common than min bror och jag (more than twice as common) but on the other hand jag och du is much less common than du och jag. (that one is 22 times as common).
2457
No, it's up to the speaker, and the situation, if we want to begin with 'Jag' or the other person.
Detsamma is only used when samma does not stand together with a noun. Also it contains the element det which cannot refer to mamma which is not an ett-word. You could say something like: Han sa [samma sak/detsamma]. which means roughly ’He said [the same thing/the same]’, but you could not say detsamma sak, mixing the two.
1454
Not as a translation of this sentence, but of 'My brother has the same mother as I' (or ' …as me', '… as I do', depending on how you prefer to say it).