Kwa maudhui

Some Esperanto Questions

ya SPX, 7 Agosti 2012

Ujumbe: 97

Lugha: English

sudanglo (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Agosti 2012 12:40:52 alasiri

8. The store badly makes the small bread.
My God! Is this supposed to be English?

SPX (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Agosti 2012 2:25:22 alasiri

sudanglo:My God! Is this supposed to be English?
LOL.

I've noticed that both in the Kurso and in the book I'm going through that there are some very awkward sentences. I just remember, though, that it's a teaching tool and they're just trying to come up with something that drills the vocab/concepts that are discussed in the lesson.

Vespero_ (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Agosti 2012 4:04:15 alasiri

sudanglo:
8. The store badly makes the small bread.
My God! Is this supposed to be English?
In my experience, if you want to find terrible, terrible sentences, look no further that language-learning resources. My German professor is always saying "Now, this is an awful sentence, but it exercises the grammatical tools that we're going over." Everything always gets an adjective and an adverb and it's all a trainwreck.

sudanglo (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Agosti 2012 6:39:54 alasiri

But how can you judge if any translation is good if you can't understand the original?

The way to do this, if you want to practise certain structure in Esperanto, is to first choose a natural sentence in Esperanto and then render it naturally in English - not to ape the syntactic structure of the original, so, as it were, providing the answer in the exercise. Do that and it is really only a vocabulary exercise.

What is being practised here? La V-o W-e X-as la Y-an Z-on?

I suggest then La aŭtoro malbone regas la anglan lingvon.

Hyperboreus (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Agosti 2012 8:34:59 alasiri

Forigite

Hyperboreus (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Agosti 2012 8:45:03 alasiri

Forigite

creedelambard (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 8 Agosti 2012 8:10:54 alasiri

sudanglo:
8. The store badly makes the small bread.
My God! Is this supposed to be English?
Why couldn't they have said "The boutique botches the baguettes"? ridulo.gif

marcuscf (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 9 Agosti 2012 9:06:11 asubuhi

SPX:
"Tri" doesn't get it but "tria" does. And "miliono" as a noun when "mil" is not?

Seems kind of arbitrary.
It's not that hard. If it ends with an A or O (*) you can add N. Otherwise you don't add the N (it would be very awkward to pronounce miln, kvarn, etc.).

(*) or U, as in “kiu(n)”, “tiu(n)”, “neniu(n)”, but not “unu”. Despite the difference, it is fairly easy to remember this.

SPX (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 10 Agosti 2012 12:20:57 asubuhi

marcuscf:
It's not that hard. If it ends with an A or O (*) you can add N. Otherwise you don't add the N (it would be very awkward to pronounce miln, kvarn, etc.).

(*) or U, as in “kiu(n)”, “tiu(n)”, “neniu(n)”, but not “unu”. Despite the difference, it is fairly easy to remember this.
Cool, thanks. I will keep that in mind.

I still don't get why miliono is a noun, though. I mean, if I say "one thousand dollars" or "one million dollars," the number shouldn't be a noun in one case but not in the other.

erinja (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 10 Agosti 2012 12:31:58 asubuhi

I think the miliono issue is a carry-over from some other languages that treat millions and billions differently.

You should note that it's possible to add -o to the other numbers, though, and treat them like nouns.

You see this usage frequently in situations like "Dekoj/centoj da vizitantoj venas al mia urbo" (Tens/Hundreds of visitors come to my city)

"dekoj" ends up getting used in situations where we'd say "dozens" in English.

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