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- Topic: Swedish >
- "Hon har sovit i hundra år."
42 Comments
I think törn = thorn. the prickly bits - was the castle covered in it or something? don't recall which story is which!
Yes, ett törne is 'a thorn'. (More common word for it would be en tagg in most cases).
@GabyCalvo8 As helmad stated, törne means thorn; the name makes sense because in the English version her peasant name is Briar Rose, so it's basically the Swedish translation of that.
The first thing I thought of is that she is dead. This could be a euphemism, but, yes, I like the humorous side to yours. :)
i is the default preposition for "for" in the sense 'during some period of time', like 'for a week' i en vecka, 'for a year' i ett år, 'for a month' i en månad and so on.
We probably think of it as being "inside" that period of time.
When used for time, does i also indicate that the action was continuous during the span of the time period?
Yes, typically. It works much like English does:
- Han har sovit i tio år = He's slept for ten years - i.e. without waking up
- Han har ätit vegetarisk mat i tio år = He's eaten vegetarian food for ten years - doesn't mean he's been eating non-stop for all that time
Most often "after a duration of", but it can also mean something that triggers habitually.
- om två veckor = in two weeks
- om helgerna = on weekends
879
In “har sovit”, the voice pronounces the s as an s, not the retroflex sh that it usually becomes after an r. Is that correct, and if so, why doesn’t it become sh here?
The TTS is not very good at capturing retroflexes between words. You are completely right. It should be a "sh"-sound here.
If it gets an article it would be ett, not en, as it is ett år. Though that still does not answer your question why you can skip the article at all...
We don't use the article before numbers. But it's possible to say etthundra if you want to stress that it is one hundred as opposed to two hundred or something. However ett in that word is always ett and it doesn't agree with år but with hundra.
There's a colloquial expression with 'en' before numbers that means 'approximately', 'about'.
So it is possible to say Hon har sovit i en hundra år, but that means 'She's slept for about 100 years'.
We use på for durations where something is expected not to have happened. For instance: jag har inte ätit på tre timmar = I haven't eaten in three hours. To contrast, jag har inte ätit i tre timmar would mean you haven't spent the past three hours eating, but you may have eaten at some point during that time.
Do I actually have to memorize which verb belongs to which group (as in: present is 'pratar' --> supine is 'pratat', pres. is 'äter' --> supine is 'ätit'), or is there a more general/better way to tell the difference?
English can skip the "for" in "slept for a hundred years", but Swedish can't - that's why you need the preposition i. As for "a hundred", Swedish can say either hundra, ett hundra, or etthundra - we're flexible that way. :)
- 1348
I wrote 100 years instead of a hundred years. It was marked as incorrect. In other examples numbers are accepted. Is there a reason why "100 years" is incorrect?
Duolingo is supposed to convert some written numericals to numbers automatically, but I'm not exactly sure how this works. Sometimes, we need to enter the numbers manually, which appears to be the case here. I'll fix the sentence in a minute.
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Unlike other languages that do not need an article, English requires either a or one before the numbers hundred, thousand, million, billion, etc. Saying a hundred is much more common, and can be used in cases of rounding (i.e. she actually slept for 99 years or maybe for 102 years), whereas if you say one hundred, you are being either more precise or more formal. It was exactly 100 years, or you are at a fancy dinner party.
She has slept in 100yr? Why is it not för or till. They seem like a much more accurate words given their use and translation
Because it's a timespan, so you can do something in that span.
Anthropoid3 refers to supine here and I would like to know what that term means linguistically.
The supine is a way of conjugating a verb in Swedish. We use it to construct the perfect forms:
- har [supine] = present perfect
- hade [supine] = perfect
The supine form always (?) ends in -t. The verb's declination decides whether to use -t, -tt, -et, or -it.
Can't you say "for hundred years" without "a"? Just like you would when it would be twelve years.
