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Transitive verbs from adjectival roots

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Ubutumwa 21

ururimi: English

Tempodivalse (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 02:32:53

So I embarrassed myself in the EO-language forums by casually asserting, in response to a query, that egali is intransitive. My rationale was that the root egal' is adjectival, so the verbal form is essentially just esti egala - similar to the way blui = estas blua, alti = esti alta, atenti = esti atenta, and so on. [Edit: So atenti can be transitive also. Never mind. But the point is, most adjectival roots don't seem to do this.]

Fortunately, someone offered several examples where egali takes a direct object, and so my mistake was caught before too much damage was done. PIV and ReVo apparently both list egali as transitive.

Zamenhof:Ho Dio, kiu Vin egalas?
I subsequently checked in the Universala Vortaro, and no, I didn't lose my mind:
egal' égal, qui ne diffère pas | equal | gleich | одинаковый | jednakowy.
This surprised me, since it is a counterexample to what has been, in my experience, a very reliable pattern.

Can someone provide other cases where adjectival roots turn into transitive verbs when they take -i? I am unable to think of one.

Christa627 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 05:29:03

I always thought "atenti" was transitive, meaning "to pay attention to". ReVo appears to support this.

Tempodivalse (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 05:41:54

Christa627:I always thought "atenti" was transitive, meaning "to pay attention to". ReVo appears to support this.
Hm. I'm very used to seeing the combination atenti pri, not so much atenti + acc. - though that doesn't sound wrong, come to think of it ...

Guess I'm just error-prone lately. Maybe I need a break from the forums.

It would be interesting to figure out what causes certain adjectival roots to do this, though.

Kirilo81 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 08:31:54

Taking an accusative object is not sufficient in order to qualify as transitive, a given verb must also show a passive.
I didn't find any attestations of egali/ata, so egali seems to be intransitive, while for atenti/ata there are 16 hits in the Tekstaro, even a Zamenhofian one.

tommjames (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 09:44:51

Tempodivalse:Fortunately, someone offered several examples where egali takes a direct object, and so my mistake was caught before too much damage was done. PIV and ReVo apparently both list egali as transitive.
Personally I prefer to think of egali as basically intransitive, and for the same reason as you - it derives from an adjective, so the most logical meaning is "esti egala" - an intransitive meaning. In cases where the accusative is used, that's just a replacement of a preposition rather than marking a direct object as such. However some people perceive egali to also mean "esti egala al", which strongly suggests an object, and hence the ability to be thought of as transitive.

To my mind transitivity is better attributed to definitions of a verb - of which there can be several - rather than the verb as a whole. I think this is why ReVo stops short of marking 'egali' a full-on transitive verb, giving it instead the "[x]" designation for sometimes transitive sometimes not (depending on the meaning of the verb in context).

For example you might say "suspekto ne egalas pruvon" is a transitive usage. When you start off with "suspekto ne egalas" you expect the phrase to be followed up with something that suspicion is not equal to, i.e an object. On the other hand, "ĉiuj popoloj egalas" suggests no object, other than the implicit "unu la alian". Here the verb is simply another way to say "estas egalaj", without the implied "al".

Sxak (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 10:37:29

Tempodivalse:
Can someone provide other cases where adjectival roots turn into transitive verbs when they take -i? I am unable to think of one.
simil
sam
and "interes" is an adjective root by any dictionaries

sudanglo (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 12:04:39

One shouldn't get too bogged down with the idea that roots rigidly belong to certain grammatical classes. This largely a grammarians imposition in an attempt to systematize an account of Esperanto's word-building.

Nobody speaks in roots. The language is conducted in words. And there is certain level of pragmatism in the customary meaning of those words.

The meza Esperantisto will often not be certain as to whether a certain word is listed in the dictionary with a certain part of speech as the head word or some other part of speech.

Sxak diris "interes" is an adjective root by any dictionaries. However, In my copy of NPIV the head word is interesi. But I wouldn't expect my usage of interesi interesa intereso interese to be substantially different to Sxak's.

Anyway, what part of speech is given top-listing has in some cases changed over the years.

orthohawk (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 14:09:05

Kirilo81:Taking an accusative object is not sufficient in order to qualify as transitive, a given verb must also show a passive.
I didn't find any attestations of egali/ata, so egali seems to be intransitive, while for atenti/ata there are 16 hits in the Tekstaro, even a Zamenhofian one.
We also need to remember that the -n is used to replace a preposition. Z's "Ho, Dio, kiu Vin egalas" might have been a poetic translation (was this from a psalm maybe?) for "kiu al Vi egalas". Dr. Z also may not have felt that the confusion was enough to warrant a "Lingva Respondo" type directive to avoid using the -n ending with a "verbalized adjective".

Tempodivalse (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 15:08:51

Kirilo81:Taking an accusative object is not sufficient in order to qualify as transitive, a given verb must also show a passive.
I didn't find any attestations of egali/ata, so egali seems to be intransitive, while for atenti/ata there are 16 hits in the Tekstaro, even a Zamenhofian one.
This is what I thought at first. My initial reply in the other thread was that here -n is not used to strictly mark a direct object, but simply to indicate a non-subject.

There is indeed no precedent for passive egali in the Tekstaro, but I did find elsewhere:

Ĝia beleco povas esti granda kaj nur egalata de ĝia fragileco

This doesn't seem implausible, just as we could say in English that X "is equalled" by Y.

I think egali could be seen as having two senses: 1) a plain contraction of estas egala, which would naturally require al or another preposition (or an accusative to substitute a preposition); or 2) a transitive "equals" in the sense of "to match something" or "to rival something".

nornen (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 4 Ntwarante 2015 15:56:20

Tempodivalse:My initial reply in the other thread was that here -n is not used to strictly mark a direct object, but simply to indicate a non-subject.
-n simply marks accusative and that's all there is about it. We should be careful not to mix up grammatical categories (like case) with syntactic functions (like subject or direct object).

Now in Esperanto the accusative case (which is a category) has various uses (which are functions), among them the direct object, adverbials of direction, adverbials of time and adverbials of measure.

So, yes, the accusative does not exclusively mark a direct object, however not all non-subject nominal phrases are in accusative: Kaj Dio nomis la lumon Tago.

Subjects of infinitival phrases may be raised to object position of a matrix verb and hence -although being the subject of the infinitive- receive the accusative: Mi vidis vin fali.

Summa summarum:
Some subjects don't mark accusative, some do. Mi vidis lin fali.
Some direct objects mark accusative, some don't. Mi prenis pomon kaj multe da piroj.
Some non-subject nominal phrases mark accusative, some don't. Tri fojojn mi nomis vin amiko..

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