Monday, February 25, 2019

plural forms - Is pronoun it really singular? Google transla


results of Google translator


Hi, I've used Google translator to translate a bunch of positive and negative sentences from Ukrainian, where the subjects of the clauses are plural. And I am really confused about, is it singular only? Or can we use it with plural objects? For me personally, when I speak English it is so inconvenient to say "these are not my problems" I usually say "it's not my problems" but then I think that I said it incorrectly. So why Google translator gave different results like


"this is my glasses"


vs


"these my glasses"


Thanks in advance.



Answer



"It" is singular. The plural third person pronoun is "they".




It's not my problem


They're not my problems.



In some cases you can get correct sentences in the form "singular is plural" For example "The problem is my friends". It is a little awkward, but grammatically correct. You might think of "my friends" to be short for "the group of friends" (and "group" is grammatically singular). So you can have:



What is the problem?
It's my friends; they want me to go out with them, but I need to study.



Nevertheless, normally we would use "they are my friends" "they are my scissors" "they are my glasses" "they are my problems".



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