Messages : 11
Langue: English
Fohenmaz (Voir le profil) 5 avril 2020 14:17:16
flanke (Voir le profil) 5 avril 2020 14:27:16
Metsis (Voir le profil) 5 avril 2020 15:02:11
For a translation see the discussion in Stack Exchange.
RiotNrrd (Voir le profil) 5 avril 2020 16:21:00
sudanglo (Voir le profil) 5 avril 2020 16:58:18
So ne ĝeniĝu, solvo venos (subtext ne implikiĝu)
PrimeMinisterK (Voir le profil) 5 avril 2020 20:09:47
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 (Voir le profil) 6 avril 2020 06:52:11
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 (Voir le profil) 6 avril 2020 14:44:03
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 (Voir le profil) 6 avril 2020 17:10:01
PrimeMinisterK (Voir le profil) 6 avril 2020 23:02:10
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.