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Plejparton de la vs plej de la

by Vestitor, June 25, 2015

Messages: 5

Language: English

Vestitor (User's profile) June 25, 2015, 10:19:49 AM

I happened to see this dispute in a Duolingo discussion thread. The sentence in question is:

"I want most of the bowls, because half of them is not enough."

The only translation is:

Mi volas la plejparton de la bovloj, ĉar duono de ili ne estas sufiĉa.

Someone was disputing it and asked why 'plej de la bovloj...' is not acceptable.

Is it? And if not, why not?

Kirilo81 (User's profile) June 25, 2015, 12:14:23 PM

It's not acceptable, because plej does not always mean "most", as the latter has two meanings: 1. the highest number = plej multe, 2. the highest grade = engl. -st (finest etc.) = plej.
As plej corresponds only to the second, grammatical meaning of most, it can't be used without an additional word expressing what is actually measured.

Vestitor (User's profile) June 25, 2015, 4:34:44 PM

Thanks. That what I had sort of concluded by looking at the dictionary entries, but wasn't entirely sure.

Tempodivalse (User's profile) June 25, 2015, 4:39:53 PM

Textbook case of why it is inadvisable to translate English sentences directly into Esperanto using a dictionary ... there are so many situations where English simply fails to indicate explicitly the correct part of speech ...

Vestitor (User's profile) June 25, 2015, 4:58:03 PM

I wasn't doing that. I happened to see someone else complaining about it on the Duolingo discussions. Having said that, people always have some sort of structure coming from their mother tongue that will influence how they naturally think about sentence construction.

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