"En bit snöre"
Translation:A piece of string
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Would 'bit' always translate to 'a piece of'? Or does this only refer to material things? Would a piece of pizza be 'en bit pizza'?
It's hard to say "always", but that's the general translation, yes. It certainly works for pizza.
So basically this works the same as "en kopp te", the preposition "av" is omitted here, correct?
Swedish people would rather say that it's like where the preposition "of" is inserted. It's not really omitted to a Swedish person, but yes that's correct
It's a valid sentence, but an incorrect translation. It would mean "a piece of a string", rather than just "a piece of string".
Why isn't the translation "A string piece" correct? Is it even correct in English?
No, you wouldn't say that in English (well, speaking as a musician, we actually do say "a string piece" quite often, but we mean a piece of music written for string instruments - so something totally different!). For this we'd always say "a piece of string" or "a bit of string".
Oh okay! Thank you! That helped. :) I like the example with a string piece being a piece of music written for string instruments. :D I would never think of it like that.
bit versus styck Could one also write En styck snöre? And if so, is styck the proper form of styck? When I look up styck in SALDO it appears that there is some inflection on gender which makes me think that styck unlike bit is inflected for the thing it is a piece of. ett stycket brod and en stycken tårta Are these correct? Perhaps I am not reading SALDO correctly, though. Tack.
It would still be ett styck snöre. Haven't checked SALDO so I don't know what that says, but I suspect it's referring to an older inflectional system in this case.
It's not wrong, but it changes the meaning from "a piece of string" to "one piece of string". It's also not that idiomatic.
If you liked that, you might want to check out the other works of de Maupassant - he's widely regarded as one of the foremost short story writers ever for good reason. :)
Thank you! I just found The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories on Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm
According to you the bit should be considered superfluos because snörre is a piece of string! This is becoming very confusing.
In England we have a rather sarcastic reply when someone asks "how long will it take?" We say, "how long is a piece of string?" As if to say the time-frame cannot be predicted. Is it the same in Swedish?
Thanks for the quick reply :) I was just curious because I find idioms quite amusing; Swedish has some great ones.
Perhaps you'll enjoy this older thread of mine, then. :)
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/22312367/Some-Swedish-sayings-and-their-origins
Wow that looks awesome! I'll have a good read of that. It's obvious you're passionate about language so thanks for sharing your knowledge on etymology etc.. much appreciated.
Edit: I thought I knew most, but now I see otherwise after looking at your post.
If it does, I've never heard it before. I did find a few hits searching for it, but I suspect those may have been translated literally by people not knowing the correct term or using Google Translate.