"be saturated with sth." or "be saturate with sth."

It's not a very precise match but yes you have the general idea.

Example:

The market is saturated with many similar companies.

What's sth? I can't think of a situation where you would ever say "be saturate with" or "be inundate with". It's always "saturated" or "inundated". "Inundated" has more the connotation of a sudden massive piling-on of stuff that wasn't there before.
"Saturated" doesn't have that rapid connotation.

Huh. I've NEVER seen "sth" as an abbreviation for "something". "sthg", conceivably, maybe once or twice, and deducible from context, but not "sth". I googled it, and got this discussion from some other forum:

"I am by no means a "beginning learner of English", but if I had never been on this forum and I encountered "sy" or "sb" in what was supposed to be an English-language text, I would certainly not know that it was intended to be an abbreviation for "somebody". When I was a new participant on this forum I would occasionally run across the letters "sb" and "sth" (almost always written by non-native speakers) and it took me quite a while to figure out what these strange letter combinations were supposed to mean; indeed, at first I thought they were just typographical errors!!

"The abbreviations in question occur in dictionaries used by learners. Native speakers, however, do not use these dictionaries, and do not commonly abbreviate "someone" or "somebody" or "something". When native speakers come upon such things as "sb" or "sy" or "st" for the first time in the writings of non-native speakers, many native speakers will have no idea what words these "abbreviations" are supposed to represent.

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Last edited by GreenWhiteBlue; 7th January 2008 at 11:43 PM.


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#5 8th January 2008, 12:45 AM
ewie
moderate member Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Manchester, UK
Native language: British (East Lancashire) English
Age: 45
Posts: 10,149

Re: abbreviation for somebody and something

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I've always thought sthg was a fairly common abbreviation of that word ~ I've certainly come across it quite a lot, and use it all the time. But the difference there is that you're very likely to know what it means at first glance, unlikely to construe it as anything but something. Whereas sy or sb or so are probably going to make you falter in your reading, particularly if they come in the middle of a sentence:
I've never understood how so as clever as you can make such booboos. "
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I'd tend to agree that if it's in a dictionary it's not one native speakers use.

There are probably a lot of abbreviations you haven't seen. This one seems like SMS speak to me.

Both are common in the field of ESL/EFL, MJ. Much easier than always writing them in full.

'awash' is an adjective and the other two are verbs, so, as MJ noted, and because the other two are passive constructions, the past participle form is required.

Having thought this thru a bit, I don't believe it's possible to state categorically that the two collocations,

"be saturated with sth." "be indundate with"?

are passive.

In the form they are in, they haven't really been "deployed" in an actual life situation so it's impossible to say how they might come out.

Regardless, the past participle form is needed, UNLESS ... .