tungemål wrote:Let me try this sentence. I'm just a learner like you, so let's hear what Le baron has to say, but I'd say:
Vanavond schreef ik alleen maar de woordenlijst uit. Niets anders (or niets meer) (ik had niet genoeg tijd (or geen tijd) om wat anders te doen!)
1 - vanavond: in case you didn't do this in the middle of the night. Tonight in English usually refers to the evening
2 - alleen maar - maar is probably not necessary, but my feeling is that they use this expression all the time.
3 - geen genoeg tijd - my feeling is this is wrong
4 - wat anders - my feeling is that this is better, but I'm not sure.
I'd say top marks! I left it alone because I didn't want to be very persistent, but this is pretty much exactly what I envisaged. Especially the '
niet genoeg tijd/geen tijd' specification.
1. Further up in the log we had a discussion about 'vannacht'. It's actually a problem word because it means both 'yesterday evening/night', but also 'the coming evening/night'! This is not good. Our guide is thus whatever tense Ug_Caveman uses. So to say: 'Vannacht
schreef ik...' we should immediately assume that it was yesterday night. Whereas 'Vannacht
ga ik schrijven...' should tell us immediately that it's the coming night. So indeed,
vanavond is the more stable choice.
2. Indeed
Alleen maar is very correct because it fully gets the sense of 'nothing else but...'.
3. Yes, it is incorrect, but we should say
why. I wonder if Ug wrote it primarily as
geen in connection with the word 'tijd' as an indefinite? On the view that it wasn't some specific amount of time and thus uncountable?
Genoeg is an undefined number/amount and these 'telwoorden' are negated with 'niets'. See: weinig/veel, meer/minder etc. Without the 'genoeg' it's much easier to just choose on the basis of countable/uncountable noun. One note though...there is a popular phrase '
er geen genoeg van krijgen' which breaks that rule. Ik kon er geen genoeg van krijgen...' which seems to be treating 'genoeg' as a noun. Where what is under discussion is omitted and
genoeg ervan substitutes.
4. I'd quibble with this one. Not because 'wat anders' isn't a real collocation, but because the sentence would have to change to accommodate it and there could be some confusion as to meaning, because '
wat anders' has the air of: 'something else'. As Ug_Caveman's sentence stands after 'om' it is correct and has clarity...'om iets anders te doen'. It could have been rendered as: '...meer had ik nergens tijd voor.' If you negate
wat anders you're effectively saying 'not something else'. Though of course in translation to English something like:
heb je niet wat anders op voorraad? Could be rendered as '
anything else in stock..' as much as 'something else'; which it why it would be better to only negate 'anders': '
heb je niks anders op voorraad?' Translation is deceptive though.