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How should I express "let it be" in Esperanto?

by Fohenmaz, April 5, 2020

Messages: 11

Language: English

Fohenmaz (User's profile) April 5, 2020, 2:17:16 PM

Listening to the song of the Beatles, suddenly I bethought of this question.

flanke (User's profile) April 5, 2020, 2:27:16 PM

"Ĝi estu"!

Metsis (User's profile) April 5, 2020, 3:02:11 PM

No, do not translate to "ĝi estu", because "it" doesn't mean anything in the English expression.It is just a formal subject, which Esperanto doesn't need.

For a translation see the discussion in Stack Exchange.

RiotNrrd (User's profile) April 5, 2020, 4:21:00 PM

Ne sin trudu.

sudanglo (User's profile) April 5, 2020, 4:58:18 PM

The problem here, as is often the case in translation, is to tease out the meaning. I looked up the lyrics of the song and didn't feel much wiser. The best I could come up with was - don't fuss about it; it will be all right.

So ne ĝeniĝu, solvo venos (subtext ne implikiĝu)

PrimeMinisterK (User's profile) April 5, 2020, 8:09:47 PM

Metsis:No, do not translate to "ĝi estu", because "it" doesn't mean anything in the English expression.It is just a formal subject, which Esperanto doesn't need.
Can you explain this further? In my extremely brief time so far getting to know Esperanto, I have noticed that in many cases where I expect to see an "it," there is not one.

Metsis (User's profile) April 6, 2020, 6:52:11 AM

There are three ways to show what role or function a nominal (noun, pronoun, adjective or numeral) has:

1. grammatical case
2. pre- and postpositions
3. word order

Esperanto has two cases, nominative and accusative, but there are languages with 15–20 cases. Cases are shown by endings (cf. -n for accusative in Esperanto).

Pre- and postpositions are small words before or after the main word. English and Esperanto have a lot of prepositions, while Japanese uses postpositions. Some languages have both.

English is known for having extremely sparse marking and mainly uses only word order to show the role (e.g. only the word order in "A lion ate an honey badger" reveals which animal ate the other). But in order for this to work you must carve the word order in stone (almost always SVO in English), which requires a formal subject (like "it" in "It rains", but the word "it" doesn't mean anything).

Most of the languages use a mixture of those three ways.

Since Esperanto uses explicit marking, cases and prepositions, and not word order(*), there is no need for formal subjects.

*: Not counting so called existential clauses (in "Leono estas besto" the word order counts).

RiotNrrd (User's profile) April 6, 2020, 2:44:03 PM

English sometimes uses "it" for grammatical reasons and not because "it" refers to anything in particular. "It's raining", for example. What is raining? I suppose you could say "the sky" or "the weather" or whatever, but really "it" in that sentence doesn't refer to anything. It's just filler stuffed in there because English requires something in that position in the sentence.

Esperanto does not do this. In Esperanto, "ĝi" must always refer to something, and where it doesn't it gets dropped. To translate "It's raining" we would just say "Pluvas" as the complete sentence.

Balbutanto (User's profile) April 6, 2020, 5:10:01 PM

Tiel estu

PrimeMinisterK (User's profile) April 6, 2020, 11:02:10 PM

That would've been my guess, albeit an uneducated one.

I was looking through the Esperanto Biblio last night and saw the translation of "Let there be light" as "Estu lumo." And therefore "Ĝi estu" would seem to me to be the proper translation of "Let it be."

It seems others in the thread don't agree, though.

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