"The black castle is in the Valley of Death."
Translation:Det svarta slottet ligger i Dödens Dal.
20 Comments
Is there an acceptable translation for "Valley of Death" that's like "Dalen om död?" Or do you have to make death possessive?
The only other way I can think of is to make it a compound word "dödsdalen".
Trots att jag går genom dödsskuggansdalen, jag blir rädd för inget ont, eftersom du finns med mig. Would that work at all as a literal translation of that line?
You were close :)! Om jag ock vandrar i dödsskuggans dal, fruktar jag intet ont, ty du är med mig.
Helen is quoting the 1917 Bible translation, which uses a lot of Swedish that is not grammatical in modern language.
Edit: Wasn't thinking straight when I first replied. This is indeed accepted. :)
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I wrote 'slottet står' and was marked wrong. Why does a castle 'ligger' rather than 'står'?
A lot of things use ligger if it's in a geographical sense - cities, forests, mountains, buildings, etc. I imagine it's because it's not about spatiality. Then again, ligger is pretty arbitrary even in that sense.
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Some unanswered questions here. E.g., why ‘ligger’, why not ‘är’ or ‘stär’? And though you’ve explained it before, I keep missing the ‘a’ on words like ‘svarta.’ I knew that ‘slott’ was an “ett-word,” But I still got it wrong. :(
Well, keep at it - I'm sure you'll get the hang of it eventually. :)
Swedish adjectives generally follow this pattern:
- Use -t (lång vowel) or -tt (short vowel) for singular indefinite ett-words.
- Use -a for definites and plurals.
svart already uses -t in its base form, so it only changes in definites and plurals.
