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Verb with two infinitives

de ras52, 27 septembrie 2014

Contribuții/Mesaje: 8

Limbă: English

ras52 (Arată profil) 27 septembrie 2014, 16:00:08

I'm doing a translation exercise that asks me to translate they prefer to break the branches and find the sweet cherries into Esperanto. I have translated this as ili preferas rompi la branĉojn kaj trovi la dolĉajn ĉerizojn, but the answer given has trovas instead of trovi. I chose to use the infinitive trovi because I wished preferas to apply to both rompi and trovi. Is my translation wrong? Or are both valid?

nornen (Arată profil) 27 septembrie 2014, 16:06:41

Both are distinct but valid. I would have used two infinitives too.

Fenris_kcf (Arată profil) 27 septembrie 2014, 16:34:23

Merely from the written version in English it is not possible to tell exactly what statement is expressed due to the "missing" conjugation.

sergejm (Arată profil) 27 septembrie 2014, 16:41:58

they prefer to break the branches and to find the sweet cherries
ili preferas rompi la branĉojn kaj trovi la dolĉajn ĉerizojn
I don't know English, do the sentence without second "to" can mean both "trovi" and "trovas".

ras52 (Arată profil) 27 septembrie 2014, 17:00:28

sergejm:they prefer to break the branches and to find the sweet cherries
ili preferas rompi la branĉojn kaj trovi la dolĉajn ĉerizojn
I don't know English, do the sentence without second "to" can mean both "trovi" and "trovas".
In English, with the second "to", it definitely means "trovi". But without the second "to" it is ambiguous. It could mean
they prefer to break branches and [they prefer to] find the sweet cherries
or it could mean
they prefer to break branches and [then they] find the sweet cherries.

What I wasn't sure about was whether it was okay in Esperanto to have one present tense verb serving two separate infinitives, e.g.
li ŝatas kuri kaj salti.
But from everyone's answers, it seems that's perfectly okay. So thanks, all.

bartlett22183 (Arată profil) 27 septembrie 2014, 17:01:14

As a native speaker of (General American) English I would parse the sentence as that "find" in this instance is an elliptical infinitive ("to" elided), so that "trovi" is the proper rendering. That to me makes the most sense.

ras52 (Arată profil) 27 septembrie 2014, 17:12:21

bartlett22183:As a native speaker of (General American) English I would parse the sentence as that "find" in this instance is an elliptical infinitive ("to" elided), so that "trovi" is the proper rendering. That to me makes the most sense.
I agree. Interestingly it's not ambiguous in English if the subject is singular instead of plural:
he prefers to break the branches and find the sweet cherries versus
he prefers to break the branches and finds the sweet cherries.

The first has an elliptical infinitive which the second does not.

sudanglo (Arată profil) 29 septembrie 2014, 11:30:54

Is my translation wrong?
The 'right' answer is wrong.

Perhaps the analysis of the sentence to be translated should be they prefer to break the branches to (in order to) find the sweet cherries.

Then the best translation would be preferas rompi ... por trovi.

Or the sentence should be understood as break and find being one block, so to speak, like a single word.

The alternative analysis (with the trovi in the indicative) seems to me to require extra context or extra words.

Ili preferas rompi la branĉojn kaj tiel ili trovas ..

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