23 Comments
Oh, thanks duolingo for this useful phrase! Who cares about god morgon, ett lejon åt upp honom is way more useful.
Once in French, I got the sentence "They didn't want to leave my prison". Very useful... I like the tricks duo plays on us though. :)
Well, it's a cultural thing you know. We, in France, like to keep our friends close to us so...
1114
That was been really wild, I guess that this is a common day if you live in a Swedish forest full of lions. But now a serious question, why you use "upp" here?
- 830
It's a particle verb. In fact this would be the most normal way of phrasing this in Swedish. I know we have some sentences where dogs eat cats or whatever early on in the course with just äter, but in reality that's less idiomatic.
So, äta upp is a particle verb, which means that the particle upp is always stressed. The meaning is sort of that it eats "all of" him. In practice, a sentence like this does not have to mean that the lion ate every last piece of this poor man's body, it's enough that it ate enough to kill the person. So I guess we could say that the particle upp adds the meaning of something final, that the action somehow gives a result.
I wrote "The lion ate all of him" and it was marked as wrong. Is it grammatically correct, so is it just the content I misinterpreted?
This little nuance right here, is my favorite part of the Swedish language ... the phrasing is very descriptive.
I suppose "eat up" has slightly childish connotations in English. A mother will say, "Eat up all your carrots!" but the lion sentence would probably just use "ate".
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And in Swedish, this sentence would be a lot less idiomatic without upp. It's still an accepted answer but it sounds a little unnatural on its own. It'd be fine in a context like Ett lejon åt honom till middag 'A lion ate him for dinner' where the action isn't "finished" in the same way. Particle verbs are used a lot to express this kind of thing (lexical aspect) in Swedish, but we don't really teach it in depth in this course. For one thing it's a bit too advanced and for another, it's a topic that's hard to teach via this system, since it's often difficult to capture the nuances of meaning in a one-sentence translation. But you're absolutely right that you have the same phenomenon in English, it's just that it's more important in Swedish and more typical of Swedish grammar.
As various mods have said above, 'äter upp' has connotations of finality, if not eating the entire man! However, I think that although 'devour' shares those connotations to an extent, there are extra nuances relating to the speed and enthusiasm with which the subject eats.
