Adverbs and Adjectives
从 Nala_Cat15, 2019年2月16日
讯息: 4
语言: English
Nala_Cat15 (显示个人资料) 2019年2月16日下午11:28:05
when you say "i am tired" you say "mi estas laca" but when you say "i am well" you say "mi estas bone"
Why do you have one ending with -e and the other with -a, and how do you know weather to end with -e or -a in this specific sentence construction?
Dankon
sergejm (显示个人资料) 2019年2月17日上午7:18:23
I am well => mi estas bonstata = mi estas en bona stato = al mi estas bone = mi sentas min bone
Similarly:
I am cold = al mi estas malvarme.
But:
Ice cream is cold = glaciaĵo estas malvarma.
"It is ..." if 'it' means nothing, will be translated "estas ...e", "estas ...a" is impossible without a subject.
It is well => estas bone.
Metsis (显示个人资料) 2019年2月17日下午6:15:36
To elaborate, what sergejm said, germanic languages (e.g. English) have a fixed word order, which is subject-verb-object (SVO; "I love you") except for questions, for which it is VSO ("Do you love me?"). English complicates things by lacking any marking for object (except for person pronouns), which is done either by the accusative case (e.g. in E-o) or a special object marking (e.g. in Japanese) in many other languages.
Before reading further you may want to take a look at a Langfocus video on Youtube.
The fixed word order and the lack of grammatical cases cause together a need for formal subject in a sentence.
- It rains : What "it"?
- There is poverty in the world : Where "there"?
The verb be (en)/esti (eo) can be used as a copula, as a linking verb, i.e. it describes the subject ("What are you? I am tired"). The descriptive word is grammatically called predicative, and predicatives are in E-o always nouns or adjectives ("Mi estas studento/Mi estas laca") in nominative.
What throw you off, is that formal subject. In the English sentence "It is well", "it" doesn't denote anything. Consequently "well" isn't a predicative, a description of the subject, but an adverbial, which describes the predicate, main verb. Adverbials in E-o are either adverbs (English "well" is also an adverb; "Estas bone") or prepositional expressions ("James respondis en la angla").
Finally as a remainder most verbs are non-copulative, and if they take a direct object (i.e. are transitive), that object is in accusative in E-o ("Mi farbis domon").
nornen (显示个人资料) 2019年2月19日下午9:53:42
Nala_Cat15:when you say "i am tired" you say "mi estas laca" but when you say "i am well" you say "mi estas bone"The word "well" in the sentence "I am well", is not an adverb, but an adjective. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/well and also Esperanto uses an adjective here: Mi estas sana.