Erinja, your grammatical analysis is perfectly valid, but functionally the day is also being described. Without additional information the following is a contradiction - estis malvarme hieraŭ, sed hieraŭ estis varma tago - isn't it?

Grammar is just a way of describing a language in an orderly/systematic fashion, grouping certain patterns together - it has no independent reality.

Forigite

@RiotNrrd and Erinja:

Take a look at this PMEG page: Spertanto, sentanto

sudanglo:Grammar is just a way of describing a language in an orderly/systematic fashion, grouping certain patterns together - it has no independent reality.

I would say that that is true for natural languages. I hesitate to say that that has to be true for Esperanto, as Esperanto was engineered in ways that natural languages were not. Whereas natural languages are full of somewhat arbitrary rules that we sort of sweep together as best we can, Esperanto was cut from whole cloth. It's rules are not arbitrary.

You seem to be saying that if we don't allow adverbs to describe nouns, then there are some things that we simply cannot express. Could you list some examples of English sentences that cannot be translated into Esperanto unless adverbs are allowed to describe nouns? Because I can't think of any, myself (and naturally, I'd like to take a shot at translating them without using adverbs to describe the nouns; clearly a total failure to do that would illustrate the need for treating adverbs like adjectives like nothing else could).

Short sentences would be best, of course.

In looking at some of the responses, it is possible that I am not being entirely clear by what I mean by "describe" or "modify".

I am not talking about the "who, what, when, where, why, how" that also falls under adverbs domain. I am talking about them only insofar as they describe the qualities, or attributes, of nouns.

Which they don't.

Quality/attribute descriptions are provided by adjectives. Which is why I still contend that you can't say whether someone feels a sensation described as well/good* or unwell/bad with an adverb. With an adverb you can say that they DID something badly, but you can't say that they feel bad (unless you mean that they felt it incompetently, in which case you are still saying that they DID it badly).

So, sure, you can provide examples of adverbs showing where a noun is sitting, or why it's sitting there, and I won't disagree that those are perfectly fine applications of the concept. But you can't (legitimately) tell me that an adverb is going to describe a sensation that someone feels, or a color that something is painted, or whether a piece of music was happy or sad, or etc. Because ALL of those things are described by adjectives and only adjectives. If you use adverbs to try to describe the qualities of nouns, you end up with sentences that do not mean what you think they mean.

----------
* Depending on whether you're an American or not.

RiotNrrd, it seems you still haven't read that PMEG explanation about the use of 'AL'. See the link in my previous message. Then reconsider this:

Mi sentas min bonE = Mi sentas, ke al mi estas bonE.

Mi sentas min bonA = Mi sentas, ke mi estas bonA.

Two rather different meanings.

Riot, in phrases like "Mi estas hejme" or "Li estas ekstere", what do you think "hejme" and "ekstere" are describing?

Perhaps you will say that they describe, or at least 'modify', the verb "estas". And on some grammatical level (I'm not sure), that may even be true. However from a logical standpoint I think it would be fairly bizzare to deny "hejme" as a direct description of my own circumstance, and hence of "Mi".

The problem seems to be that your definition of a "description", as I gather from your above post, is limited to descriptions of qualities, rather than circumstance. But Esperanto does allow adverbs (as far as I know, only adverbs of location) to be used instead of an adjective, precisely for the purpose of avoiding a qualitative description. "Mi estas hejma", "Mi estas ekstera" etc have different meanings. So we use the adverb instead.

In PMEG's section about use of an E-vorto as perverba priskribo, it mentions that the described subject may be an I-verb or a subphrase. I would humbly submit that PMEG is incomplete in this regard, and that its statement "Se la subjekto estas subkomprenata O-vorto aŭ O-vorteca vorto, oni kompreneble uzu A-vortan formon", requires some qualification. If "Mi estas interne" isn't E-vorta perverba priskribo of a pronoun, then what is it?

That last question may have a well established answer to which I have thus far remained ignorant, but to me all that stuff about which word modifies what, is a red herring. It is quite clear that an adverb may appear in a phrase and not necessarily be modifying a verb. So when we have a phrase that happens to have a verb in it, I think it's wrong to go "Aha! A verb and an adverb in the same phrase! The adverb MUST be modifying the verb!"

Anyway nobody has yet bothered to disprove my suggestion that "bone" can simply be linked to the subkomprenata ke mi fartas. This seems to me a more satisfactory explanation than agonising over the possible uses of adverbs.

tommjames:Anyway nobody has yet bothered to disprove my suggestion that "bone" can't simply be linked to the subkomprenata ke mi fartas.

I agree with you - I just think it's perhaps better to relate it to 'ke al mi estas', rather than to 'ke mi fartas', so that the distinction that you mentioned earlier between 'mi sentas min bone' and 'mi fartas bone' remains.

I am not talking about the "who, what, when, where, why, how" that also falls under adverbs domain. I am talking about them only insofar as they describe the qualities, or attributes, of nouns.

But here you have the answer, Riot.

When speakers of the Queen's English think that Americans sound comic when they say 'I'm good' it is precisely because they sense that they are inappropriately ascribing the attribute of goodness to themselves.

Now 'bona' really can cover a multitude of meanings. So mi sentas min bona could mean somewhat more than mi sentas min bone. The latter breaks no grammatical rule, of course, since mi X-as Y-on Z-e is a standard pattern of the language.

Whether the specific meaning of mi sentas min bone has been adopted in Esperanto because of a pattern in the European languages I feel well, Je me sens bien, or for the avoidance of vagueness of mi sentas min bona, I could not say.

But to think of mi sentas min bone as a rule-breaking idiom is taking things a bit to far.

As you say, adverbs are frequently used to elaborate on the circumstances - used as adjektoj.

And if you want to express the particular idea of feeling yourself in an intense ('goodly') way, the language offers you mi bone sentas min.