"Hvem tilhører katten?"
Translation:Who does the cat belong to?
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In rituals, pretending to be high class, old fashion, the word «hvo» may be used. It is probably of Danish origin. From the online dictionary, it is stated to be outdated. It is synonymic to “hvem”:
http://www.nob-ordbok.uio.no/perl/ordbok.cgi?OPP=hvo
Looking it up in the online etymology dictionary returns a hit for “who”: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=who
“Whom” seems to originate from “who” if I get this text right? http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=whom
“Hvem” originates from Norrøn “hveim”, dative of “hverr”. http://www.nob-ordbok.uio.no/perl/ordbok.cgi?OPP=hvem
hi thelmajf, but don't you think that language is ultimately defined by useage, not by rules in the long term? english has been moving to ending in prepositions for some time, and eventually it will become "standard english" because grammarians will be unable to enforce natural linguistic changes made by people. additional evidence of this would be words in german and dutch like 'anrufen' or 'opstaan'.
Actually the whole "ending in prepositions" thing was a 17th Century grammarian's attempt to make English (a primarily Germanic language) to be more like Latin, a language which was viewed, at the time, to be perfect. If you study Middle and Old English texts (almost another language, but…) you will see that prepositions often end sentences as far back as Beowulf.
fredcapp, ah! thanks for the historical scoop!
although i have a very brief familiarity with old english, but it was so long ago that i don't remember that aspect of the grammar. now were are my OE texts?!
as an edit, i loved the sound of OE when i took a course as an undergrad an ice-age ago. your comments inspire me to pick it up again!
Bronzdragon presented a similar translation, just above yours. I am a native Norwegian speaker and to me your translation is correct ;-) . My pronunciation of the sentence depends slightly upon who is belonging to who. In any case, I would not phrase a question using this wording. I would perhaps say, “Hvem eier katten?” which is also slightly ambiguous. Independent of the ambiguity my preferred term would be, “Hvem sin katt er det?” (Whose cat is this? - the same as the suggestion of jairapeytan, beneath).
717
Different meanings: In one, the cat belongs to someone. In the other, someone belongs to the cat.
I can't help but be amused at the fact that this can mean either "Who does the cat belong to?" or "Who belongs to the cat?". In software terminology we have the concepts of master/slave and peer-to-peer. Perhaps "tilhører" has more of a peer-to-peer meaning? In English, "belongs to" is definitely a master/slave meaning. What I'm getting at is maybe "belongs to" is not such a good translation of "tilhører"; maybe it should be something like "associates with". Then you would get "Who does the cat associate with", or "who associates with the cat". Now the two meanings are essentially the same.
1203
So if "hvem tilhører katten?" means "to whom does the cat belong?" how do you write, "whom belongs to the cat?"?