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Quickly interpreting Ĉu?

de AmericanBull, 1 august 2015

Contribuții/Mesaje: 14

Limbă: English

AmericanBull (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 03:33:55

I find that when I read a sentence that starts with "ĉu", I have to read the rest of the sentence, and then go back and interpret what "ĉu" is. Is there a rule of thumb way of quickly translating "ĉu" so I don't have to rely on reading the whole sentence and go back?

orthohawk (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 03:43:01

AmericanBull:I find that when I read a sentence that starts with "ĉu", I have to read the rest of the sentence, and then go back and interpret what "ĉu" is. Is there a rule of thumb way of quickly translating "ĉu" so I don't have to rely on reading the whole sentence and go back?
Technically there is no "translation" of cxu. it's simply a spoken question mark put at the beginning of the sentence.

Try to think in Esperanto instead of translating into English. it's hard at first but it gets easier.

AmericanBull (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 04:07:40

Dankon. I'll try some different approaches, and forgo a "translation" mindset.

Tempodivalse (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 04:26:31

Ĉu simply indicates the presence of a yes-no question. In English we rely on word order and intonation to express this.

Other questions (what, when, where etc.) are formed using the interrogative ki- correlatives (find a table of correlatives to figure out what I'm talking about, like this one).

AmericanBull (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 12:54:46

Tempodivalse:Ĉu simply indicates the presence of a yes-no question. In English we rely on word order and intonation to express this.
Can it be used to ask simple questions, such as "Ĉu la mapo estas lia aŭ ŝia?", that are other than yes/no answers?

orthohawk (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 13:21:39

AmericanBull:
Tempodivalse:Ĉu simply indicates the presence of a yes-no question. In English we rely on word order and intonation to express this.
Can it be used to ask simple questions, such as "Ĉu la mapo estas lia aŭ ŝia?", that are other than yes/no answers?
In a word, yes. When asking a question, if there is no "ki-" word, then use cxu.

Tempodivalse (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 13:57:49

Can it be used to ask simple questions, such as "Ĉu la mapo estas lia aŭ ŝia?", that are other than yes/no answers?
I would say that technically, your example sentence is still yes/no - you've just combined two yes/no sentences into one. Expanded, it would be: "Ĉu la mapo estas lia, aŭ ĉu estas ŝia?"

In informal speech, sometimes the ĉu is dropped for very short questions, or to ask for confirmation (or express disbelief).

-Ni alvenos por la festo fruvespere.
-Kiam? La sesa?

-Min ĵus telefonis la Gubernatoro mem.
-La gubernatoro?! Kio diable!

It's a bit of a grey zone whether this is 100% kosher, but you see it a lot, and even in literary dialogues. For any longer yes/no questions, though, I'd definitely say use ĉu.

Fenris_kcf (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 15:06:40

AmericanBull:Is there a rule of thumb way of quickly translating "ĉu" so I don't have to rely on reading the whole sentence and go back?
You could insert "is it true that". The more exact representation would be "whether" or "if".

Breto (Arată profil) 1 august 2015, 18:14:53

AmericanBull:I find that when I read a sentence that starts with "ĉu", I have to read the rest of the sentence, and then go back and interpret what "ĉu" is. Is there a rule of thumb way of quickly translating "ĉu" so I don't have to rely on reading the whole sentence and go back?
I believe ĉu means "whether", though it obviously gets a lot more use than whether does in English. While this isn't technically correct, my brain likes to read it as "do" at the beginning of a sentence, echoing English's own question-starting dummy-word.

Ĉu vi scias? "Do you know?"

That said, it's only a translation shortcut, the mental equivalent of doing math on my fingers. As others have said, the ideal would be to simply think in Esperanto and forego any translation.

Miland (Arată profil) 2 august 2015, 14:30:17

The meaning of ĉu is not unique, but if it is not used to mean "whether", it could be translated as "Is it that" or "Is it the case that". Thus Ĉu vi scias? could mean "Is it the case that you know?"

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