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- "Yargıcın kedisi var ama avuk…
"Yargıcın kedisi var ama avukatın yok."
Translation:The judge has a cat but not the lawyer.
56 Comments
1428
I think so. I also think you can take this sentence to mean "the judge has a cat but you do not have a lawyer", although I imagine that interpretation would be very unusual absent the "senin".
Not so much. First of all, yargıcı can't be director, it's "judge." For the rest of it, I think it's a trick of English more than anything.
In English, "There is" can mean something exists ("var" in Turkish). Like, there is a cat in the house - Evde bir kedi var.
Or, it can mean you're showing somebody something ("o" or "orada" or something like that). Like, look, there is a cat!
Var can never mean you are SHOWING something directly in the second sense. It just means you're talking about something's existing in the first sense, or somebody HAS something. So you could be super pedantic in your translation and say "The judge's cat exists but the lawyer's does not". (That's a dreadful translation. Don't do that.) What you're REALLY saying is, the judge has a cat but the lawyer does not.
But when you say "there is the director's cat" it sounds like you're SHOWING where something specific is, and var just doesn't do that. That would be more like "yöneticinin kedisi orada!" (the director's cat is there!) or just "o yöneticinin kedisi!" or just "yöneticinin kedisi!"
Impossible :) "The lawyer has not" doesn't make sense (or at least hasn't since probably the late 19th century). You must include an object for the verb "to have" when it means "to possess" and you must include either "do" (American English) or use the form "have got" (British English) when you negate it.
In ny opinion, the translation should be "The judge has a cat but the lawyer doesn't." That would be clear and it would test the intended objective: whether you understand the sentence, rather than letting you (me :-) get tricked into blindly following the Turkish sentence structure and forgetting proper English :-D
Sian431183
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161
Could somebody explain the "yargıc+ın" and "kedi+si" structure please? I was puzzled by an explanation bellow that says
Yargıç - Judge Yargıcın - Judge's (possessive)
922
Is the letter v in turkish pronounced just like in English? In the slow audio recording, 'avukatin' sounds like 'ah-ooh-katin'.