"My brother and I have the same mother."
Translation:Min bror och jag har samma mamma.
25 Comments
Excuse me while I giggle at samma mamma. This is one sentence where I would definitely use mor just to avoid that rhyme ^_^
1871
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.
I'm sorry, I still don't understand. If the mother is definite, and same is describing the mother, then why not den samma mamman? Do you mean that samma is simply an exception to the rule?
Yes, if you use samma with a noun, it can’t be definite: samma mamman is ungrammatical.
I see. Is samma like a part of a class of words that don't follow the rule, or is it an "isolated" exception? Tack!
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.
There are some adjectives that typically don’t take the definite article, yes. Another example would be nästa as in nästa vecka (next week), but förra veckan (last week).
- 1871
'samma' is definite enough, it defines 'mamma', so it feels wrong to add the definite article as well.
This is exactly the kind of deep, real-life observation that we have come to love and enjoy from Duolingo's phrases.
Well, not all brother's have the same mother. ;) In the case of my father and my uncles, for example, two women and three men had four kids. My father is the only one biologically related to all the others. :p
I just spent like 5 minutes trying to figure out how that would work haha
I answered: "Min bror och mig... ... " Is this completely wrong? (and I would definitely say samma mamma) :-)
- 882
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.
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'
- 882
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).
- 848
I was taught that it is more polite to put others before yourself, but then it is 30 years since I went to school...
- 1871
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.
- 882
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).
