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- "Most people went home after …
"Most people went home after the break."
Translation:De flesta gick hem efter rasten.
13 Comments
322
Could you please explain "de flesta"? I understand that "flesta" is the superlative of "många" in the plural, but where is "people", and what is the function of "de"?
English sometimes uses adjectives as if they were nouns. For example, "take from the rich and give to the poor".
Swedish uses this construction even more than English does.
Here "de flesta" is literally "the most", but it means "most people", just as "the rich" means rich people in my earlier example.
1461
It's an accepted answer. You can use åkte hem if you want to stress the fact that they used some kind of transportation.
1461
The break in a play for instance is called pausen in Swedish, whereas rasten could be at school or work. (in English you can't tell, so both are accepted, I just felt I should point it out).
Aaron, when adjectives are used in Swedish before a noun, they are usually inflected. That is, they usually take a grammatical ending related to the gender and number of the noun that follows. For example, unga tjejer, stora hus.
So you can be pretty sure that in front of a plural noun like "människor", you can't just pop in a completely uninflected word like "mest" and expect it to be correct. Where is the adjective ending?
But wait, there's more. As it happens "mest" is the adverb meaning "mostly", not the adjective meaning "most". You want the adjective here, de flesta. (Note the inflection -a.)