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Plejparton de la vs plej de la

od Vestitor, 25 czerwca 2015

Wpisy: 5

Język: English

Vestitor (Pokaż profil) 25 czerwca 2015, 10:19:49

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 (Pokaż profil) 25 czerwca 2015, 12:14:23

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 (Pokaż profil) 25 czerwca 2015, 16:34:44

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

Tempodivalse (Pokaż profil) 25 czerwca 2015, 16:39:53

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 (Pokaż profil) 25 czerwca 2015, 16:58:03

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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