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- Topic: Ukrainian >
- "- Де ви? - Я у кафе."
21 Comments
Could someone explain the dashes? are they merely grammatical or do they serve some other purpose?
They try to show a short dialogue. In Russian and Ukranian it is quite common to punctuate a dialogue with dashes, starting each cue from a new like. About as follows:
— Hello!
— Hello! How could I help you?
— Um, I need a replacement for my broken arm...
— Say no more! We sell the best artificial limbs and even electonic brains. Come over here, I'll show you.
An English text would use quotation marks instead, I believe. It is also possible with Cyrillics, but not the most common way to do it in books.
I love your story! Thank you. I guess dashes would be more common considering I can't even use an apostrophe on the Ukrainian Keyboard
Mine has it on the button to the left-up from the Q (right about the Tab key). You sure you know the layout and set up the correct one? Or is it that your keyboard is more compact and uses fewer keys?
No mine doesn't have that, or at least the on-screen keyboard, which has a different layout than my actual keyboard. Honestly it feels easier to get a Cyrillic keyboard :D That would be nice to have
I guess it would be worth mentioning that I live in Canada, so we may have different keyboard layouts which change things
On the Ukrainian keyboard setup I have for Windows 8, the apostrophe is on the key to the left of the number 1 key. You could try that and see if it works. :)
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Is there a case change on кафе here? I know that would happen in Russian but I'm not sure how it works in Ukrainian
In the audio, are the stresses on the correct words? For example, in English, in "Where are you?" we would stress "are" (or "you" if we're comparing to the location of someone else) , but never "where". In the example audio, "де" is stressed. Would that be the normal way to say it?
Yes, of course. It does not even have "are" in the Ukrainian sentence, so it is either that or stressing "you".
It is a bit different with a verb:
Shouldn't this be Я в кафе? Can anyone tell me the difference? thank you
In Ukrainian, у and в are phonetic variants of the same word. That said, I found that vowel + в + кафе will indeed more often that not use в, not у.
I hope a native speaker can clarify how likely they are to use у there :)
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In the question does ви imply the plural' you', so could or should the reply be we are in the cafe
Ви is used for plural or polite you. The answer (in both English and Ukrainian) says "I", so it is just polite in this particular sentence.
