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how do you mean generic things?
Like two sandwhiches or two unicorns ?
Instead of a duckbilledplatypus and an egg timer?
I don’t really get if the difference with “beide” or if its just a different way of saying the same thing …
What I mean is that as soon as the entity is specified (like saying “Sandwich”) then it’s not generic anymore and beides starts being weird/wrong.
– Wir können uns heute oder morgen treffen.
– Beides geht für mich.
You don’t know what noun “beides” refers to here, because there is none specified. If you wanted to use “beide”, you’d have to establish a noun.
– Duckbilled platypus or and egg timer, which one is more dangerous?
– Beide können tödlich sein.
Here, we have one living being involved, which rules out “beides” as well.
Does that help?
mmm, i dunno, could you give a few more examples where beides would and wouldn’t work please?
– 100 Euro für Zug, 200 Euro für Flug … beides war mir dann zu teuer.
The theoritical noun here would be “Verkehrsmittel” or “Reiseweg” or whatever. It’s pretty unclear, so beides works better.
– “Die Hard 1 oder Die Hard 2?”
“Ich habe beide nicht gesehen.”
Here, it’s clear that we’re talking about movies, we have an established noun, so “beides” would sound wrong.
– Entweder Marias Party oder das Yoga. Beides geht nicht zusammen.
This is an edge case. There’s an implied “Optionen” but it’s not strong enough for me.
Thanks, this seems very very nuanceed and subtle.
Does exchanging “beides” for “beide” in the two examples (zug /flug + party / yoga) work?
If its cool i might come back later with some examples of my own to check i got this ?
“beide” sounds okay for the travelling example and weird for the other one (to me).
But it would sound super weird/wrong in the first example I gave. The one about meeting today or tomorrow.
So basically if there isn’t a specific noun spelled out as a referent, then we use “beides.” Like it’s not responding to anything in particular syntactically. But if there is an actual noun it can connect to then it takes endings. Is that right?
This would be another good mini-artikel, the beide/beides thing is one of those situations that doesn’t affect how understood I am at all, but always makes me feel a little disoriented because I never know exactly wtf I’m saying
Actually, I think I’ll indeed give this an article :).
Maybe advent calendar or regular, depending how long it ends up being.
I think the approach you described works well enough for daily life though.