訊息: 35
語言: English
Miland (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午3:10:51
However devus is often used as an approximate translation of "should", and the tense depends on context. Thus "You should visit us" (soon, or some time in the future) can be translated Vi devus viziti nin, while "You should have visited us" could be Vi devintus viziti nin, or perhaps Vi devus esti veninta vin. But there are other ways to put the same thing. We could have Domaĝe, ke vi ne vizitis nin, Pli bone, se vi vizitus nin ..
sudanglo (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午8:55:43
And the argument HB that it is sufficient to rely on other time markers in the sentence would mean that in Mi vidos vin morgaŭ that you don't have to bother with the -os.
Hyperboreus (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午9:43:29
Hyperboreus (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午9:50:10
tommjames (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午10:40:20
sudanglo:You have to judge by actual usage. Ĉu vi preferus kafon is not used to mean ĉu vi estus preferinta kafon.Yes, "ĉu vi preferus kafon" is a phrase that would most often not be perceived as a past conditional. Though it seems to me this is evidence only of bias in your selection of an example of "usage". A reasonable appeal to usage would not use a single example of that type.
Examples of -us being used for a past conditional can be readily found in the literature, so IMO the usage argument is not really on your side.
Miland (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午10:47:42
sudanglo:It's no good quoting authorities Miland. You have to judge by actual usage. Ĉu vi preferus kafon is not used to mean ĉu vi estus preferinta kafon.I would say that "usage" and "authorities" are being falsely opposed. Butler was an akademiano who would have both had a comprehensive knowledge of and been a sound guide to usage. The application of preferus is wrong here because, as I made clear, devus is an approximation for "should" and in that context would not have the same precision as preferus.
sudanglo (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午10:49:22
Now this is getting silly.Jes HB, I over-egged the pudding. But I'm fed up with hearing it trotted out that -us has no temporal value.
If you look at the usage it patently does have a temporal value. It normally means now/in general/in the future/.
Ĉu vi bonvolus fermi la pordon hieraŭ - doesn't make sense.
tommjames (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月6日下午11:19:39
sudanglo:Ĉu vi bonvolus fermi la pordon hieraŭ - doesn't make sense.Oh come on. That's just because when someone says "ĉu vi bonvolus" what follows is always a request, and you can't request someone to do something in the past. This reminds me of Strunk and White's ham-fisted attempt to denigrate the passive voice, by presenting invented phrases deliberately designed to sound inept. Not convincing at all.
-US is time neŭtral because it can be used for any tense, and therefore has no inherent tense of its own. To say this is wrong because -us is used in practice for one or some tenses more than others is simply to impose a definition of "time neutral" that serves no particularly useful purpose, other than to allow you to have a rant about aspects of the language you don't like, for whatever reason.
sudanglo (顯示個人資料) 2012年10月7日上午9:16:30
1. Search the Tekstaro for instances of X-us, then change to estus X-inta and see if that changes the meaning or renders meaningless.
2. Search the Tekstaro for instances of estus X-inta, then change to -us and see if the meaning is preserved or if the sentence then becomes genuinely ambiguous or unclear.