Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
The question is about: позволять

Someone here translated the following sentence:

to
I wanted to enter позволть to my word list, so I looked up the dictionary definition. To my surprise, neither English Lingvo, nor English Wiktionary even mention "afford" as a possible translation for this word!


Wiktionary: to allow, permit
Leo doesn't mention it either.

But Swedish-Russian Lingvo gives:
позволять = ha råd (=afford) ONLY! They give no other translation!



What is going on with this word? Why is one dictionary ignoring "afford" and the other giving it as the only possible translation?

How would you normally say "I can't afford to....... " or "Can you afford that? etc?
Try pressing "Ctrl+F" in your Lingvo after entering "позволять", and some of the examples you'll see will correspond to that meaning as "afford". Why didn't they give that meaning straight to the word? Well, maybe because the word "позволять" when used as "afford" always requires an indirect object, "позволить кому?". When you translate something like "I can afford a new car", the translation is "Я могу позволить СЕБЕ новую машину". "Себе" can't be omitted.