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Half of an infinitive

von LordRatte, 24. April 2016

Beiträge: 12

Sprache: English

erinja (Profil anzeigen) 25. April 2016 19:38:15

LordRatte:It may seem like a trivial difference, but it can really influence a conversation. If I say, "I want to...", people will generally understand the completion of the sentence to be an action.

However, the equivalent in Esperanto would roughly be, "Mi volas..." i.e. "I want..." This could be completed with an object as well as a verb.

Long question summarised: is there a grammatical token that can be used as the "to" in infinitives?
Like everyone else says, there is no marker that marks this precise idea in Esperanto. However, you will find that Esperanto also has ways to express things that are difficult to express in English, ways to leave a sentence unfinished that gives a certain impression, whereas English might require more words to give a similar impression. You will also find that context matters a lot. Few people say "I want to...." in a vacuum (and if they did, you could easily mistake it for "I want two..." and expect a noun to come next!). Context will often tell you whether to expect a noun or a verb as the ending of a sentence, if that's a particular situation that you wonder about.

For that matter, English tends to use much more complex verb tenses than Esperanto, but context will frequently be enough to give the impression of a complex tense in Esperanto, even if a simple tense is used, such that if you were to translate the sentence back into English, there is no question which complex tense would be used in the English translation.

Fenris_kcf (Profil anzeigen) 27. April 2016 17:52:32

And another side mark: In English, like in most Germanic languages, it depends on the verb. Modal verbs can not take an infinitive with "to" as their object, so it's wrong to say e.g. "you must to say" or "we can to walk". And did you notice that modal verbs in English also behave differently for the 3rd person singular? See: "He wants to sing." vs. "He shall sing." — not "He shalls sing.".

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