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- "Де мед?"
49 Comments
Russian has more influence from Old Church Slavonic, whereas Ukrainian has more influence from Polish.
Ukrainian has more similarity to Polish than Russian overall, but it's similarity to Russian shouldn't be over looked. I just started this course but I've already found many close words:
Ukrainian/Russian/English де/где/where і/и/and так/так/so тітка/тетя/aunt etcetera, etcetera.
68
Ukrainian is not older than Russian. The Old East Slavic of the Kievan Rus diverged into Russian and Ruthenian over several centuries and Ruthenian subsequently diverged into Ukrainian and Belarusian. Russian was influenced by another East Slav dialect, Old Novgorod. Russian obtained South Slavic influences through Old Church Slavonic. Ukrainian and Belarusian were further influenced by Polish. Ukrainian has retained features of Old East Slavic that Russian has not.
Not weird, but linguistics :) In Proto Indo-European, honey is *médʰu. Almost every branch of Indo-European retains that root in some way. In English "mead" comes from the same root.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/m%C3%A9d%CA%B0u
555
In this case "honey" used as "любий/люба" or "милий/мила".
Honey, please, bring me an apple! -- Любий, будь-ласка, принеси мені яблуко!
I can't believe that 5 years after someone first flagged up the missing "the", this issue still hasn't been fixed. "Where is honey?" is totally wrong in English - no matter which way you look at it or try to justify it. It doesn't matter that "the" isn't required in Ukrainian, it still needs to be there in English.
Can someone please change this? This example is simply not correct in English, I don't understand why there continues to be any debate about it. No native English speaker would say "where is honey?" with no accompanying article in front of the noun honey unless they were asking a philosophical question that could not be inferred from the simply sentences that Duolingo uses to create these modules. The question "where is the honey?" can be general to any amount of honey that the location of said honey desires to be known. One could even say, "where is a honey comb?" or "where is the honey jar?" but never in a million years would the question "where is honey?" be some kind of every day meaning that could possibly refer to any portion of honey in a house or a store. What would it take for someone to edit this translation? Is the offer of lingots something that would motivate action?
I complained about this a month ago (https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/8727717?comment_id=39541127) and someone argued with me that I was wrong, that "the" wasn't necessary, and marked me down! Seriously, the level of stupidity is mind-blowing.
428
yeah; "the honey is where?" would probably only come up in a very specific situation in which someone told you where the honey is but mumbled and you're asking them to clarify where they said the honey is
As many have already pointed out, this is not a grammatical English sentence. There are very few and rare cases in which this might be considered grammatical in English. This is clearly not one of those cases. It makes Duolingo look bad to keep this English translation with no definite article to support the word honey. Please correct this glaring error as soon as possible.