"När vi skulle åka upptäckte vi att bilen var stulen."
Translation:When we were going to go, we discovered that the car was stolen.
23 Comments
755
Why is it "was stolen" instead of "had been stolen" here? For both the English and the Swedish sentences?
- 11
It sounds more like the car they were going to use was a stolen car (and that they still had it and might have still used it), not that their car had been stolen (so as to prevent them from using it go anywhere).
Is this what the Swedish sentence is trying to say (the subjects are about to drive around with a stolen car), or do the tenses of the English(/Swedish) sentences need adjusting?
Do these sentences with subordinate clauses ever have commas separating them from the main clauses, like they do in English?
- 1876
Yes, I use the comma all the time. I think it is a question of 'generation'. My daughter does not use commas. I do.
Do people still use them when they speak, like make a brake between "När vi skulle åka" and "upptäckte"? How would you say this in person?
Not a native speaker but I still have lots of observations commas are not at all common in the English language. :) Especially in legal documents one may come across complex sentences of like 10 lines or more w/o a single comma.
Just in case the error remains: was stolen indicated that the subject still has the car but that it's a stolen car.
I disagree; "När vi skulle åka märkte vi att bilen hade blivit stulen" isn't the same as "När vi skulle åka märkte vi att bilen var stulen."
- 886
The second sentence can cover both what the first says, and have another meaning that the first one doesn't have.
You technically don't know whose car you're going to take because it just says bilen (the car) instead of specifically vår bil. For all we know, "we" may be taking our great-great-grandmother's car :) I do see where you're coming from, though.
Ok... I was thinking of "jag kan inte hitta plånboken" / "I cannot find my wallet".. But it makes sense :) Tack !
My dictionary (Esselte Studium 1989) says: -stulit- for -stolen-. Is this gammaldags?
- 886
It's another form, it's the past tense of the verb, like in Någon har stulit bilen 'Someone has stolen the car'. But this is the past participle Bilen är stulen 'The car is stolen'. (= it's a stolen car)
Thanks a lot, Arnauti. So it would be: -bilen har stulits- equivalent to -bilen är stulen-. Could you give a few other verbs where this 'past participle' exists. I had never clearly realised this duality in Swedish. At the time I learned a lot from just being there and reading Dagens Nyheter.
- 1876
Någon har öppnat dörren, dörren har öppnats. Dörren är öppen. Någon har tvättat bilen. Bilen är tvättad. Någon har vattnat blommorna, blommorna har vattnats, blommorna är vattnade.
The V2 rule means that the verb must always take second place. The first place in this sentence is the subclause: “När vi skulle åka...” and the verb, ”upptäckte” has to take second place.
