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Couple of beginner's questions

od daz7887, 22. avgust 2016

Sporočila: 16

Jezik: English

daz7887 (Prikaži profil) 22. avgust 2016 16:38:44

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sudanglo (Prikaži profil) 22. avgust 2016 16:48:17

Do you believe in God? – Ĉu vi kredas je Dio?
Do you believe in a god? – Ĉu vi kredas je iu dio?

Or depending on the desired nuance you could say:

Ĉu vi kredas je ajna/ia dio?

Are you still getting ready? – Ĉu vi ankoraŭ pretiĝas?
• Are you getting ready yet? – Ĉu vi jam pretiĝas?

daz7887 (Prikaži profil) 23. avgust 2016 08:38:19

Sporočilo je skrito

bartlett22183 (Prikaži profil) 23. avgust 2016 19:25:50

One matter that comes up with adult/adolescent learners of almost any foreign language is that they tend to treat the new language as just a relexification of their own language: the same sentences with only other "strange" words substituted. Obviously, this is not the case.

When I was a beginning student of French in the early 1960s (as an adolescent), there were some students in the class who seemed genuinely baffled at the notion that "Je suis allant à ville" was not a perfectly good way of saying "I am going to to town" in French. They just had not internalized the concept that languages differ and are not mirror images of one another.

It is no different with Esperanto (or most other constructed international auxiliary languages, for that matter, such as Interlingua, which I can also generally read). Learners simply have to wrap their heads around the idea that they just cannot take a sentence in their native language and plug in supposedly corresponding words. Languages just do not work like that, even Esperanto. No matter how so-called "easy" Esperanto is with respect to (some, at least) "native" languages, nevertheless it just is not someone's native tongue with one-for-one words plugged in.

Vestitor (Prikaži profil) 24. avgust 2016 22:01:02

sudanglo:Do you believe in God? – Ĉu vi kredas je Dio?
Do you believe in a god? – Ĉu vi kredas je iu dio?

Or depending on the desired nuance you could say:

Ĉu vi kredas je ajna/ia dio?

Are you still getting ready? – Ĉu vi ankoraŭ pretiĝas?
• Are you getting ready yet? – Ĉu vi jam pretiĝas?
These are making me feel like I'm not progressing as well as I might think.

I would have assumed that: Do you believe in a god? would be Ĉu vi kredas je ia dio?

I can't for the life of me work out how iu renders a god.

david_uk (Prikaži profil) 25. avgust 2016 09:52:37

I think I can answer that one, Vestitor.
I would have assumed that: Do you believe in a god? would be Ĉu vi kredas je ia dio?

I can't for the life of me work out how iu renders a god.
ia = some sort (of)
iu = some (one). Meaning some specific individual person or thing.

So:

Ĉu vi kredas je ia dio? = Do you believe in some sort of god?
and
Ĉu vi kredas je iu dio? = Do you believe in a (particular/specific/individual) god?

But in practical terms, the questions are really interchangable.

sudanglo (Prikaži profil) 25. avgust 2016 10:20:12

It might be helpful to you Vestitor to consider the distinction in English between 'some' and 'a/an'

Why is it so cold in here?

Because some idiot left the windows wide open all night
Because an idiot left the windows wide open all night.

The first reply, is more natural than the second reply. And, in Esperanto, would be Ĉar iu idioto .....

However in other sentences there may not be so much difference.

How do you know that?
I read it in some book (iu libro)
I read it in a book

Vestitor (Prikaži profil) 25. avgust 2016 15:15:57

I see. It's just that I saw 'iu' as being more particular (as in David's reply above).

I'm not going to worry about it too much since you say it's more-or-less interchangeable. ridulo.gif

daz7887 (Prikaži profil) 26. avgust 2016 01:12:30

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sudanglo (Prikaži profil) 26. avgust 2016 12:33:14

But it still bugs me when I cannot see a way of distinguishing between two concepts in Esperanto that are easily delineated in English.
I know how you feel. It still bugs me a bit, for example, that Esperanto seems to confound two separate ideas, share and divide, in 'dividi' so that Ĉu ni dividu la kukon might be Shall we share the cake or Shall we divide it.

Of course it is easy enough to make the distinction by suitable re-phrasing or adding a preposition, but nevertheless I sometimes think that it would be nice to have a separate word for share as not everything that can be shared is divisible, and sharing may not imply division.

Anyway my point is that perhaps 'Do you believe in a god' might itself cover two meanings, so maybe the English is not so precise as imagined.

1. Do you accept the idea of a supernatural being?
2. Is there a god you believe in? (or something like that)

By the way, in early Esperanto (perhaps still) sometimes unu was used for 'a/an'. [But that won't work with your sentence as it would sound like do you believe in one god (ie a single god).]

Unu virino havis kvar infanojn (there was a woman who had four children)

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