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- "Om du var vaken skulle jag g…
"Om du var vaken skulle jag ge dig mat."
Translation:If you were awake I would give you food.
35 Comments
1331
This sentence is sort of making fun of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX2ccZ1Dmu0
Ha! I had translated that song as part of my own studying. It's a beautiful love song, and the singing is very easy to understand.
My gut doesn't sit right with "If you were awake I would give you food". I put "If you were awake I would have given you food", which was wrong. The first sentence doesn't even sound like a valid alternative.
As a native English speaker, "If you were awake (then) I'd give you food" with the contracted form of "I had" and an optional then is normal and fairly common.
But in written form I'd definitely include the "then".
Of course, "I would have given" works too but that would translate to "skulle jag ha gett dig", I believe.
As a native speaker who enjoys writing concisely I would remove then as superfluous.
This sentence has brought a question to mind: I would have given would be in the past while I would give is in the present. The latter case I could see myself saying where I actively talking to a sleeping pet, but not after the moment had past. So I wonder if Swedish uses the present conditional where English uses the past perfect.
- 1331
So I wonder if Swedish uses the present conditional where English uses the past perfect.
No, this sentence is strictly in the present in Swedish too. It can only mean 'if you were awake (now), I would be giving you food (now)'. The person is talking to someone who is asleep. I blame it on the song I linked to in the top comment.
Yes! That's what the issue is. I see this as an answer to, "why wasn't there anything to eat last night?"
- 1331
Which it isn't, that one would be Om du hade varit vaken skulle jag ha gett dig mat 'If you'd been awake I would have given you food'.
It is okay to put a "då" before "skulle", right? I assume that that is done more in speech and less in writing?
- 1331
If you want to add something, add så instead, that sounds natural. då doesn't really work here.
Can you say om du vore vaken or does "vore" only work in the main clause? Om du var här, vore jag glad. Correct?
I don't see why you couldn't use it like that: om du vore vaken skulle jag saga adjö.
What about:. When you are awake, I will feed you? Or is 'om' always used conditionally meaning 'if', ie 'in case', and not meaning 'when' , ie 'as soon as'? Or would I use 'när' in this second case? Linguistically I assume 'om' is related to 'when'
It would be: "När du är vaken, kommer jag mata dig". "Om" is indeed a word for if and not when. "Om" does not really have any correlation to "when".
Another way to look at it is that skulle means würde, so with var being the simple past, this is like using wäre in German.
Ok, if it were a question - if you were awake would i give you food? What would that be?
What I entered is EXACTLY what the app says is the right answer, but it marked my answer wrong
I can see you left an error report, which is great. Your answer was not accepted because you used an l (lowercase L) instead of an I (uppercase i). They look very similar, so I can understand why. :)
Thank you. I didn't realize I was posting to the forum. I appreciate your help.
Why skulle jag and not jag skulle? I nearly translated this as more of a question, until I realised it didn't sound right. Is it the v2 rule?
Yep - om du var vaken is the subclause, so when you move it to the front, you need to move the head verb of the main clause so that it comes directly after.
So, can you swap the clauses around and retain the meaning? E.g. jag skulle ge dig mat om du var vaken...
EDIT: spelling and punctuation, as per replies.
There's no grammatical reason for a comma there, and you don't really need one for clarity or pronunciation either.
What is the V2 Rule, please? I like this app, but I'm not learning rules as much as I would like. Sorry that I don't have an actual answer for your question
It's a rule that all Germanic languages except English have to some extent. It simply says that the verb wants to come second in normal main clauses.
