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

door Fohenmaz, 5 april 2020

Berichten: 11

Taal: English

Fohenmaz (Profiel tonen) 5 april 2020 14:17:16

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

flanke (Profiel tonen) 5 april 2020 14:27:16

"Ĝi estu"!

Metsis (Profiel tonen) 5 april 2020 15:02:11

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 (Profiel tonen) 5 april 2020 16:21:00

Ne sin trudu.

sudanglo (Profiel tonen) 5 april 2020 16:58:18

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 (Profiel tonen) 5 april 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 (Profiel tonen) 6 april 2020 06:52:11

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 (Profiel tonen) 6 april 2020 14:44:03

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 (Profiel tonen) 6 april 2020 17:10:01

Tiel estu

PrimeMinisterK (Profiel tonen) 6 april 2020 23:02:10

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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