Към съдържанието
Отговор

Plejparton de la vs plej de la

от Vestitor, 25 юни 2015

Съобщения: 5

Език: English

Vestitor (Покажи профила) 25 юни 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 (Покажи профила) 25 юни 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 (Покажи профила) 25 юни 2015, 16:34:44

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

Tempodivalse (Покажи профила) 25 юни 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 (Покажи профила) 25 юни 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.

Обратно нагоре