sequence in english sentence with auxiliary CAN
Hello. Recently I had some doubts about translation of chinese sentence into english. Can you please give me a hand and say if such a sentence is correct: Its (city) average temperature is more than 20 degrees below zero and only when you are being there can you feel a true winter of ice and snow. -or can we say: Average temperature (of this place) is more than 20 degrees below zero so only when you are there you can feel a true winter of ice and snow / true ice and snow winter. I have such a doubt if we can invert sequence: can you feel instead of you can feel- What is correct? Thanks in advance for your help.

Question

sequence in english sentence with auxiliary CAN
Hello. Recently I had some doubts about translation of chinese sentence into english. Can you please give me a hand and say if such a sentence is correct: Its (city) average temperature is more than 20 degrees below zero and only when you are being there can you feel a true winter of ice and snow. -or can we say: Average temperature (of this place) is more than 20 degrees below zero so only when you are there you can feel a true winter of ice and snow / true ice and snow winter.  I have such a doubt if we can invert sequence: can you feel instead of you can feel-  What is correct? Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer

"Its (city) average temperature is more than 20 degrees below zero and only when you are there can you feel a true winter of ice and snow." This is technically correct, but the end rings a little untrue to me. Something a little more natural would be "...a truly snowy and icy winter."

The second sentence is definitely wrong to me. You can say something like "The average temperature is more than 20 degrees below zero so you can feel a truly snowy and icy winter only while you are there." That sounds fine to me, but something about that adverbial phrase in the middle makes it sound off.

Answer

We have to use inversion after a dependent clause introduced by "only." Your mistake was using "to be" in the continuous aspect -- there are relatively few occasions to do so, since "to be" is nearly always a stative verb.

Correct:
"...only when you are there can you feel...."

Answers · 4

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