The first sentence appears to be missing a subject. I don't understand the second sentence and it also sounds very unnatural to me.
The red ball emits light. It was inside the calf's brain so it came out when the prince split it open.
Oh, I see! I assume this is from some kind of folklore?
Yes, it's a fairy tale called "The Grateful Prince" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/641/641-h/641-h.htm
The book was published in 1901.
Thanks for answering my question Hybrid! :) It's neat to have sentences like these pulled from literature on Tatoeba!
It would be nice to be selective about what you chose to add to make sure that they not only sound natural, but have enough context to understand them.
In my opinion, it would also be more useful if you were careful to add only things that are pretty much the same way we use the language nowadays. This includes punctuation, vocabulary use, spelling, etc. There is nothing wrong with old language, but with a little care, the examples you choose to add can be much more useful to those studying English.
I imagine that this kind of situation could be very confusing for an English learner. Because of that, I think it would be nice to have a feature on Tatoeba to mark and sort sentences by whether or not the sentences are using "old" or "very literary" language so that English learners are able to tell the difference. Actually, CK, is there a tag for that?
That's a really good point CK! There are so many things to take into consideration when trying to classify sub-sets of language into different categories especially in regards to different dialects and various individual opinions. Maybe at least having a way to broadly mark a sentence that you write as "seeming to be archaic" might be useful as doing so would reflect only the writer's interpretation of the sentence letting English language learners know that they may want to be a little more cautious than usual of any of the sentence's elements. Such a "marking" certainly could never be consistent across sentences since they would all be written by many users. However, despite providing users with varying degrees of debatable accuracy, such a system might potentially make sorting through sentences by an English learner easier to some degrees as long as the users were aware of how the system worked. Finally, perhaps such a system overall would be too much burden to set up and maintain for the amount of potential gain it could give. Of course, I don't want to misconstrue my actual intentions; this is all just a light suggestion on my part of which I carry no real expectations for the future. I would actually describe such suggestions myself as simply "playing with ideas." since the word "suggestion" is sometimes used to imply that one expects such a "suggestion" to be implemented. Nope, I just value the mutual sharing and discussing of ideas whilst learning from others at every opportunity I have to be able to do so! :) There's nothing more I could ask for in any interaction.
Yes, it's a good point.
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This sentence is original and was not derived from translation.
added by Hybrid, October 11, 2015
edited by Hybrid, October 11, 2015
edited by Hybrid, October 12, 2015
linked by Pfirsichbaeumchen, October 14, 2015
linked by GrizaLeono, October 29, 2016