23 Comments
Good question - it's good English and was borrowed from Old Norse with exactly that meaning (as opposed to clip meaning to attach, which came from Old English clyppen).
... interesting, and in NE Scotland, Shepherds still talk of clipping wool from a sheep. Surprising how many of the words in that dialect make more sense in Swedish than standard English.
Yeah, "the man clips the string" sounds a bit specific and/or more informal, but I believe it should be an acceptable translation.
893
Hear snöret pronounced by a native speaker here: http://sv.forvo.com/search-sv/sn%C3%B6ret/
"klipper i snöret" sounds as if he is not cutting it in two pieces, which would be natural if he cuts a string, right?
OK, so in that other sentence that was something like "han klipper i papperet," the "klipper i" would be used kind of like "cuts into" or "makes a cut in" in English?
I'd say that you'd use "klipper i" for anything that you couldn't cut into two pieces in just one cut.
can "snöret" be a rope as well? As a Latvian native speaker, "snöre" sounds very close to Latvian "šņore", which means cord or rope - a thick string, generally speaking.
since snöre means string (could be translated as lace as well, like shoelace, "skosnöre") it can't really be a word used for rope since ropes are bigger, although the words are very similar "rep" is a better word for rope :) hope that helped!
I translated it as : 'the man cuts the thread' To my feeling that sounded more natural compared to string... Maybe because I just 'cut all threads' with my homecountry to move to Sweden :D
I feel like a string is thinner than a rope but thicker than a thread. Either way a thread is "en tråd" in Swedish.
Klipper is something you do with scissors meanwhile skär is to cut somethings with knifes or as Dee_Dee432 said, like an injure-cut but then you say it in past tense ex. I cut myself is jag skar mig.
I think that skär means to sort of like injure-cut, like getting a paper cut or something
Does this carry any idiomatic meaning at all? I could imagine it having ties to the English "cut the cord" or perhaps to the Dutch "knoop doorhakken (cut through the knot) -- (which means to make a decision).
Clipping and cutting is interchangeable. I can get my hair cut, and I can get it clipped -- same meaning.
In Dutch snor is mustashe, so it was so logical for me to say that the man was cutting the mustache. Sometimes knowing a lot of similar languages is confusing
