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- "The boy is next to the dog."
"The boy is next to the dog."
Translation:Drengen er ved hunden.
23 Comments
Yes. "Næste" implies a sequence of objects or events. "Next" and "næste" probably have the same origin, but the use of "næste" as "next to" in Danish got lost many centuries ago.
By the way, the suggested translation is a bit weird. Everyone would say "Drengen er ved siden af hunden." The suggested translation would be more appropriate for "The boy is by the dog".
It's the same as the difference between "by" and "to". "Til" indicates movement from one place to another. "Ved" is static. Drengen gik hen til døren. Nu står han ved døren.
So you're saying if I say "jeg rorer ved dig" it means I'm being touched by you? That's not the example we got. And this example is being portrayed as a matter of distance like "naer" yet the suggested word is ved.
Pretty sure “jeg rører ved dig” means I am touching you. The thing with Danish is that it seems to be more specific about actions and space than English, so here you touch to, rather than just touch. I don’t know if it helps, but I think of ‘rører ved’ as a fixed phrase, rather than 2 individual words.
So is med and mad pronounced the same? Do you just distinguish the two with context and spelling?
No, they have different vowel sounds. "Med" has the e-sound from "ending". The vowel sound from "mad" does not exist in English but it's the standard Danish a-sound.
Also, even if you can't tell the difference between the vowels, "med" is usually just pronounced "mæ'" - especially when it's not the last word in the sentence. "Mad" always has the "d" at the end pronounced (except - for completeness' sake - in a few regional dialects).
The synthetic voice isn't great, but the a in mad sounds somewhere between an a and an e to me. I found this video really useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvCIdu0BAoo&index=27&list=PLqsA5kK1_Ui-AfqX0alux2XQTd0VeMjOu
