"Tabakta makarna var."
Translation:There is pasta on the plate.
12 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I think you are over thinking this, Alex. "In the plate" is perfectly fine in English to refer to what is on the plate. No one really thinks of a plate as a three dimensional object. It is a circle (i.e. 2D). I would use "in the plate" to refer to what is within that circle. Ask any English speaker "what's in your plate?" and I bet no one is going to say "ceramic". Just mark it as an acceptable answer, please :)
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I definitely do not think that "in the plate" is acceptable. Maybe that is some local (or British, I don't know) dialect where that sounds normal to you but I've lived over most of the United States and I don't think "in the plate" is something anyone would ever say unless they actually were referring to the interior of the plate.
With Spanish, on the other hand, you would say, "The pasta is in the plate (La pasta está en el plato). The preposition en translates as both "on" or "in" depending on the context. This is yet another example of the heinous unruliness of prepositions (and in Turkish, postpositions) in all languages--at least the ones I'm aware of.
No. Not technically incorrect but also not semantically correct. We just use "tabakta" for the food in or on the plate unless the food is under or next to the plate. You do not specify the exact preposition when you don't have to emphasize the preposition itself. If the food is where it's meant to be, you just use "de,da, te, ta". Let's say there is a bed and a storage under the bed. Your mom asks you where your grey shirt is. It could be on the bed or under the bed. You want to specify where exactly it is, so you say "yatağın üstünde" or "yatağın üzerinde". Because it can be on the bed or under the bed. If your mom asks you where you are from another room, you say "yataktayım". Because it would be weird if you were under the bed or next to it bla bla. If you're in bed, you just use the proper common preposition "de, da, te, ta". If you're stuck inside the storage under the bed, you would not say "I'm in bed". You are technically in the bed but this is not what you emphasize. You emphasize that you are inside the storage under the bed so you would say "yatağın altındayım". Soooo.. if the food is on the plate, you don't need to specify that it's "on" the plate. If the food is under the plate, you specify and say "yemek tabağın altında" because it's not where it should be. This is a thing you should learn in Turkish way of thinking. -de, da, te, ta are common prepositions for "in", "on" and "at".
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At normal speed, I hear something like "Tabákta makarná ve" (with a long, stressed a at the end of "makarna" and almost nothing behind the v of "var"). Is that the way a native would pronounce the sentence? (It is a nice rhythm, but hard to make out the components of the sentence.)
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As you could note there are other examples with bad pronunciation, and they can't do nothing with it, so the last "a" in makarna should be very short, but "a" in var should be longer.
Of you copy the same sentence to Google translate, there you can find better pronunciation for this example.
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Thank you very much, I will try that!
Unfortunately, I am not able to 'note' bad pronunciation because I don't know what the proper pronunciation should be, or if the voices maybe present some regional language variety. In Spanish, for example, Duolingo variably presents European Spanish or one of the varieties of Latin American Spanish. So, you never know!
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You're welcome. Will, I am neither English nor Turkish native, so i can't talk about the regional variety, but the thing that I know is that once you learn how to pronounce the letters in Turkish it is simple to read it, as it is a language "read as it is written". My native Bosnian language has the same tactic, read as it is written, so, for me it is easier to pronounce it..
Thanks for the first one who gave me a lingot :)