Messages : 7
Langue: English
vikungen (Voir le profil) 12 juin 2015 20:52:47
Sentence says:
"The church was far from the house."
Translation: La preĝejo estis malproksime de la domo.
When there is a subject to esti, it acts as an equal sign to two different things. So logically, "la preĝejo estis malproksima" (the church = far); an adverb after esti is usually with subjectless sentences (doesn't apply here as la preĝejo is the subject). I was marked wrong for saying malproksima, but I want to know if that's really a bad translation for the sentence. To me the way with malproksime makes less sense.
nornen (Voir le profil) 12 juin 2015 20:58:32
The sentences basically boils down to: La preĝejo troviĝis malproksime de la domo.
"Esti" has a lot of meanings and a lot of constructions.
?La domo estas proksima. = ?The house is a near one. (Not sure what this is supposed to mean.)
La domo estas proksime. = The house is near. = La domo troviĝas proksime.
eshapard (Voir le profil) 12 juin 2015 21:01:03
vikungen:Screenshot from DuolingoFar is considered an adverb because it describes 'where' something 'is'. It actually does modify the verb esti instead of 'The Church'. (though that's debatable)
Sentence says:
"The church was far from the house."
Translation: La preĝejo estis malproksime de la domo.
When there is a subject to esti, it acts as an equal sign to two different things. So logically, "la preĝejo estis malproksima" (the church = far); an adverb after esti is usually with subjectless sentences (doesn't apply here as la preĝejo is the subject). I was marked wrong for saying malproksima, but I want to know if that's really a bad translation for the sentence. To me the way with malproksime makes less sense.
It's usually an adverb in English too, but in some forms you can use it as an adjective e.g. the far reaches of the galaxy.
It is maybe an arbitrary choice, but location is usually thought of as being a manner in which you exist (adverb function), rather than a quality that you have (adjective function).
Tempodivalse (Voir le profil) 12 juin 2015 21:42:52
"The church was far from the house."Fascinating, I'd never thought of this before. Compare with the Russian translation:
Translation: La preĝejo estis malproksime de la domo.
Церковь была далеко от дома. - Adverb.
I guess it's nice that Russian's syntax is very similar to Esperanto's, so I don't have to worry about this stuff
On the other hand, that makes it harder for me to explain why you don't use -a (which would be more intuitive for an English speaker).I think of "malproksime" here as playing a role similar to a spatial preposition like "apud" or "ekster". It relates more to the verb than to "church", because you're not ascribing a property of the church per se.
eshapard (Voir le profil) 12 juin 2015 22:11:16
We don't change the word to indicate it's usage.
- The far reaches of the universe.
- The reaches that are far away in the universe.
orthohawk (Voir le profil) 12 juin 2015 23:10:47
Tempodivalse:Fascinating, I'd never thought of this before. Compare with the Russian translation:Side note: I never "got" the "ne X-ante" construction in Esperanto (well, I accepted its meaning but I couldn't figure out the "why" of it) until I learned the "нe + деепричастие" construction in Russian. Why I accepted it without the cognitive dissonance in Russian and not in Esperanto, I don't know. Maybe it had to do with my age when I learned "ne x-ante"? who knows. But long story short (I know: too late!) my knowledge of russian helped with my esperanto.
Церковь была далеко от дома. - Adverb.
I guess it's nice that Russian's syntax is very similar to Esperanto's, so I don't have to worry about this stuff
Tempodivalse (Voir le profil) 12 juin 2015 23:18:43
But long story short (I know: too late!) my knowledge of russian helped with my esperanto.I think Slavic-language speakers have a big advantage when learning Esperanto - the syntactical similarities are enormous. For me, it all came very intuitively. For instance, I don't recall ever having serious trouble differentiating tio - tiu - ke.
The fastest learners of Esperanto, in my experience, are Slavic speakers - followed by Germans and Hungarians, because they're simply awesome at languages.
This suggests that lexical differences aren't as difficult to overcome as syntactical differences. A monoglot anglophone can have a huge vocabulary and still struggle to use a participle correctly.
On the other hand, an English speaker who's mastered Esperanto will find Russian syntax far less daunting