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- "You are drinking my cat's mi…
"You are drinking my cat's milk."
Translation:Du dricker min katts mjölk.
42 Comments
Was this milk that was intended for the cat, or (even worse) given by the cat, for her kittens? In real life this could also play out with a guest: "Dude, you are drinking my wife's milk!"
We shouldn't be drinking the lactations of any other animals than our own mother's during infancy! Cow's milk is for cows, not for cats or humans. Watch Dairy is Scary on youtube
That is an important discussion - but in the wrong place. Please do not start debates on that topic in sentence threads.
Why can't i say "du dricker min kattens mjölk"? The cat is mine, therefore he is THE cat - katten. I am trying to find a logic, but Swedish breaks it completely.
My guess is that 'min katten' is redundant. Do you speak Norwegian? That's how they do it. I don't know Danish, it could be the same there too.
We most definitely do not speak like that. In Norwegian we would say "Du drikker melken til katten min."
961
It is quite simple really. You can say either "du dricker min katts mjölk" or "du dricker kattens mjölk" but you can't say "du dricker min kattens mjölk" just as in English you can't say "you are drinking my the cat's milk" - the rule works the same in both languages in this instance.
Exactly... I chose "kattens" as well because I thought that the speaker means a particular cat. His/her cat, so it's by all means THE cat. :( I can totally get why we ommit "the" in English. It's a separate word. Ending -en is just a suffix that slightly changes the meaning of the word so I assumed it should stay in place whenever this altered meaning is meant. Swedes should sit and think about it... :(
A genuine question: if the speaker has more than one cat, are “my cat” and “the cat” still the same thing? Either way, -en changes the meaning just as much as “the” and is excluded for the same reason as in English.
katt is an en-word, so you need the en-word form of the pronoun.
Why is there no apostrophe after katt if the milk belongs to the cat? (i.e Du dricker min katt's mjolk) (sorry I can't put the correct vowel in the sentence due to English keyboard)
There is no context given and therefore we have no idea how many people are drinking the milk, so surely both Ni and Du should be accepted?
Because "kattens" means "the cat's".
"Du dricker min kattens mjölk" tranlates to "You are drinking my the cat's milk", which sounds odd.
Yes and no:
du is to dig as "I" am to "me" - so dig dricker would be like saying "me drink" instead of "I drink.
ni is to er in the same way, but it's the plural you, i.e. more than one person. So we accept ni as well.
Swedish doesn't have a continuous tense, so "drink" and "are drinking" both translate to the same thing - just dricker.
- present = du dricker
- past = du drack
- future = du kommer att dricka
Swedish doesn't have the "you are drinking" continuous, so we use du dricker for both that and "you drink".
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what you mean would be "Ni dricker min katts mjölk." - if several people are drinking your cat's milk
