"De köper kläder."
Translation:They are buying clothes.
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The verb "köper" seems to be something between the german verb "kaufen" and the english verb "to shop".
It's related to German "kaufen", as well as to English "cheap" (think of how "sale" has the dual meaning of "commercial transaction" and "temporary reduction in price", a similar shift happened with "cheap" at some point in English)
it's even close to dutch "kopen" which i think was inflected from german "kaufen"
That's a result of a consonant shift that occurred between high German abd Low German dialects.
I also find it close to the russian word "купить" which is pronounced "koopit'" and means "to buy"
What are the rules for pronouncing the "k" when followed by a vowel ? Does it depend on whether there's a trema or a ring above it?
K before e, i, y, ä or ö is pronounced like the k in köper in any other case it's pronounced like a normal k if I'm not mistaken.
Yes. It's not quite the "sh," in "she" though. It's more frontal, where your tongue is on your gum ridge.
Kind of like "קויפּן" (koyfn) in Yiddish. And kopen in Dutch, að kaupa in Icelandic. It seems like English is the only one missing out on the Germanic kaupōną party xD
As pointed out by Christina elsewhere under this topic, we retain it in the adjective ‘cheap’, but otherwise it's lost.
ursäkta mig , men jag hörde att det finnes någon skillnad mellan köpa och shoppa, kan jag be att någon förklarar den, är ni snälla?
shoppa means 'to walk around in shops and look at things and buy various things' – it's more of a process/a whole activity. köpa only refers to the act of buying itself.
Why "... shopping for clothes"?!! I have never heard it before! Why they used" for" here?
That is only an accepted translation. If it was shown to you, you must have input something that the system thought was similar to it. The recommended answer is They buy clothes.
PS: I'd like to add that the best way of saying they are shopping for clothes in Swedish is de shoppar kläder.
well, i put "they are shopping clothes", and it said i should have added the "for". as i'm not a native speaker, the question remains whether for is needed in this version or not.
'shop' had been added by mistake here, I've removed it again.
In English, you can say both they are shopping clothes and they are shopping for clothes, but those two sentences don't mean exactly the same thing and neither of them means exactly the same as the Swedish sentence here.
In Greek we say: Ψωνίζω/βγήκα για ψώνια (psonizo/vgika yia psonia) which means: I am shopping/i went out to shop
Sie kaufen Kleider. I'm very lucky to speak German AND Swiss German, It helps me quite a lot.
