"Ett lejon åt upp honom."
Translation:A lion ate him.
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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...
We do accept "a lion ate him up", actually.
Saying åt upp rather than åt puts some emphasis on that the eating was done to completion, but it's not overly explicit, so it normally doesn't translate literally.
That sentence could be used for mice, ghosts or cockroaches. "They did not want to leave my prison." ..I can't think of who else would want to stay.
Åt upp. Ate up. I know that I say 'ate up' or 'eat up'. My mom said it that way. One wonders if this is a phrase she learnt from her Swedish father!
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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?
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.
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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?
I mean, it's in essence what the sentence means, but it's also much too literal. The normal English translation would simply be e.g. "a lion ate him", and if we wanted to be literal, we'd say ett lejon åt upp hela honom in Swedish as well.
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".
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.
I just commented that in our family we would say "ate up" or "eat up" and now I believe it is from my Mom's Swedish father that we must get it. I don't know if it is said that way by many Americans. I also noticed that my aunt had some Swedish vowel sounds in her speach. I like that!
This little nuance right here, is my favorite part of the Swedish language ... the phrasing is very descriptive.
This reminds me of a record we had when I was a kid, with the story of the Lion and Albert, by Stanley Holloway. Now of course, it is on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaw-savyK0s
Is it possible to write "åt honom upp" or does it have to be "åt upp honom"? The first one would be more natural to me as a native German (= aß ihn auf)
No, it does need to be åt upp honom. It's a very common mistake for German learners to make, though - for good reason. :)
Thank you for your quick response, devalanteriel. Even though this was not the answer I was hoping for :)
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.
