How would you say “(it) makes sense” in your language? Does it “have sense”, “make sense” or “is sense”?

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I’m looking specifically for speakers of minority languages of Europe, but I know they won’t be too common, info on major languages is appreciated too! Thank you in advance!

Comments

  1. signequanon Avatar

    In Danish we would say “it gives meaning” (det giver mening).

  2. dogsbikesandbeers Avatar

    It gives sense here in Denmark

  3. sens- Avatar

    Ma sens – it has sense

  4. hobel_ Avatar

    German. Non of the above, the correct term is “Sinn ergeben” which could be translated as to yield sense.
    Sense can not be created, it is there and is found.

    Recent German language often uses “Sinn machen” as an english influenced term, but this is not proper German and will be called out by elder nitpickers.

  5. SalSomer Avatar

    None of the options. We say that something «gives meaning» if something makes sense.

    Det gir/gjev mening/meining – «that gives meaning»

    Å gi/gje/gjeve/gjeva mening/meining – «to give meaning»

    (In Norwegian Bokmål only the first form of the give verb can be used, while both versions of «mening/meining» are allowed. In Norwegian Nynorsk all forms of the give verb can be used, but only «meining» is allowed)

    I sent your question to a Northern Sami speaking friend to see if he can fill in with an actual minority language.

  6. lucapal1 Avatar

    I’ll do Sicilian, that’s more of a minority language than Italian.

    Maybe we’d use ‘ha sensu’, which is very similar to Italian..it ‘has sense ‘.

    Or maybe ‘è logicu’…. it’s logical.

  7. Vedagi_ Avatar

    “It makes sense” – Dává to smysl
    To answer the below – “make sense”

  8. mathess1 Avatar

    Dává to smysl, it would be translated roughly as it gives sense.

  9. RRautamaa Avatar

    In Finnish, you don’t have a word for “have”. Qualities are marked by the inessive or adessive case (corresponding to the English “in” and “on”), and the verb is the regular “to be”-verb, olla. So, if you want to directly translate something like “it makes sense to buy a car”, the structure would be auton ostamisessa on järkeä, which is like “in buying a car (there) is sense”. The word is järki, placed in the partitive case, and it “is” grammatically “in” the thing that makes sense. It doesn’t “make” or “have” anything.

    The problem is that English uses the phrase “make sense” a lot in different meanings and often it’s clunky to translate it directly. In this example, you’d more likely say auton ostaminen on järkevää, where järkevä is an adjective that means “makes sense”. It is more like “buying a car is sense-making”. But, if you say “I can’t make sense of this”, this translates to En saa tästä selvää, literally “I am not getting clear from this”. The phrase saada selvää, literally “to get or gain clear” means “be able to comprehend the language”. Whereas, if you said Tässä ei ole järkeä, it means that you understood what it says, but the proposition in it is logically incorrect. For instance, if I say “the moon is a traitorous orange”, you can probably understand what I am trying to express, but the logical meaning of my expression makes no sense.