Meddelelser: 33
Sprog: English
Miland (Vise profilen) 4. feb. 2009 12.17.18
RiotNrrd:I'm sorry, but I was unable to find anything in there that says that "-ita" only goes with transitive verbs...The reason is that ita only applies to actions on an object. We have, in PMEG: Pasiva participo prezentas agon aŭ staton kiel priskribon de ĝia objekto. I translate: A passive participle presents an act or state as a description of its object.
It is only the roots of transitive verbs that can take ita.
RiotNrrd (Vise profilen) 4. feb. 2009 16.32.50
tommjames (Vise profilen) 4. feb. 2009 17.04.46
RiotNrrd:So, if you want to indicate that in the future, some activity (in this case burning) will have been completed, then the construction you want is "estos brulita"."Brulita" makes no sense because the passive participle shows that the subject received an action, done by some agent. But an agent cannot "bruli" something, because the verb is not transitive. Therefore a field cannot be "bruli"-ed. One can only "bruligi" a field, and for that reason the correct participle form is "bruligita".
Johano iris fronten. Tiam, kiam li revenos, la kampo estos brulita ĝis stoplo.
RiotNrrd:Then explain the appearance of both "fermita" and "ferminta" on page 121 of TYE."Fermi" is a transitive verb, so these forms are unrelated to what we're discussing.
The PMEG page that Miland linked to is quite clear on the impossibility of an "ita" form in an intransitive verb:
PMEG:Pasivaj participoj eblas nur ĉe agoj, kiuj povas havi objekton. Ne eblas diri ekz. *okazata*, ĉar okazi neniam povas havi objekton."Bruli" is not a verb that can have an object.
ceigered (Vise profilen) 5. feb. 2009 09.25.11
Transitive = to yourself, intransitive = to yourself or others, right? And how do you determine a transitive verb from an intransitive verb?
tommjames (Vise profilen) 5. feb. 2009 10.31.59
ceigered:all this talk of intransitive and transitive verbs is very confusing Transitive = to yourself, intransitive = to yourself or others, right? And how do you determine a transitive verb from an intransitive verb?A transitive verb performs a direct action upon some thing or person. For example "make" as in "I will make a cake". But it dosn't have to be something other than yourself, for example "I will wash myself".
An intransitve verb dosn't perform a direct action upon something. For example "I am sleeping". You don't sleep something, you just sleep.
In Esperanto you need to remember the transitivity of every verb you use, because it dictates how the verb will function within the grammar. To some degree, the transitivity will be automatically obvious (for example, it's safe to assume that "make" is transitive, since we often talk of making things, rather than just making).
Apart from that there's no way to infer a verb's transitivity, so you'll just have to make sure you remember it when you learn a new verb. Decent dictionaries will show the transitivity.
Miland (Vise profilen) 5. feb. 2009 16.11.07
ceigered:all this talk of intransitive and transitive verbs is very confusingtommjames' explanation (message just before this one) should clarify matters.
Regarding learning them:
Here is my message (of 2008-10-13, at 18:35:37) in an earlier thread, in which I provided two useful lists from Teach yourself Esperanto. You will find it useful to memorise them.
vejktoro (Vise profilen) 18. feb. 2009 05.29.53
As a native speaker of English, I learned this property when I learned the word.
I 'know' that the verb "to put", for example, must take two objects for the sentence to be grammatical.
"Grammar puts me off; you have to put the words in the right place ."
So I guess I have to accept the fact that 'knowing' an Esperanto verb means knowing how it`s used.
But...
"Mi manĝas" has no object. Is it implied? It`s transitive.
"Mi manĝigas la beston" takes a suffix, but is still transitive.
Er...
Would "Mi manĝiĝas" mean "I made myself eat," or "I got my poor old self eaten."?
I burned the field. The field burned. The field went and got itself burnt.
Seemed simple till I started to think about it.
Help.
tommjames (Vise profilen) 18. feb. 2009 10.16.14
vejktoro:I guess it`s safe to say that a transitive verb must take an object.As your example with manĝi demonstrates, this isn't the case. When you say Mi manĝas it is shown that you are eating something because the verb is transitive, but there's no need to show precisely what it is you're eating. In some cases the object won't even be known, or be particularly important.
Would "Mi manĝiĝas" mean "I made myself eat," or "I got my poor old self eaten."?The meaning of manĝiĝas is a bit difficult to render in English, since we would rarely, if ever, put the verb eat into the middle voice. We would almost always use the passive transitive form of being eaten, which in esperanto would be estas manĝata.
If that confuses you consider the verb sell. In English, we might say something like "These books sell well", but this dosn't show that the books are being sold. In the same way Tiuj ĉi libroj vendiĝas bone dosn't show that the books are being sold. It is of course true that to sell well a book has to actually be sold, but that is incedental.
Another example of that is the verb break. If I say The branch broke, that dosn't show that the branch got broken by somebody. Merely that it became broken. In Esperanto you would say La branĉo rompiĝis. To show that the branĉo got broken by somebody/something, you would say La branĉo estis rompita.
In my opinion it's important to understand the difference between the middle voice of the passive and the transitive passive, as they have very different nuances and you can end up saying something completely unintended if you're not careful. As to what mi manĝiĝas actually means, in my opinion I'd say it probably dosn't make much sense. I can't think of a context in which a middle-voice rendering of "manĝi" would be appropriate, but other people who know the language better than me may well be able to. Certainly I would advise against thinking of "manĝiĝi" as meaning to passively receive a transitive action of being eaten.
Miland (Vise profilen) 18. feb. 2009 11.09.05
vejktoro:I guess it`s safe to say that a transitive verb must take an object..It might be safer to say that a transitive verb is associated with an object, which might not be explicitly mentioned. Mi manĝis is a case in point. There's an implied ion there, for the speaker must have eaten something.
I burned the field. The field burned. The field went and got itself burnt.
Mi manĝiĝis could mean "I was eaten" or "I became a meal" (Mi iĝis manĝo), but in that case you probably wouldn't be alive to tell us about it, so that's rather a fishy statement.
I would translate the first two of the others respectively
Mi bruligis la kampon and La kampo brulis.
Now the third: La kampo bruligigis sin is about the best I can do, but this is really only an 'academic' exercise. In practice I would go after the meaning in context, for which the simpler tenses of Esperanto should be sufficient. If someone was rhetorically 'blaming' a field that got burned in a forest fire and saying 'Damn, did the field have to get itself burned?' I might put it Diable, ĉu la kampo vere devis bruli?'
russ (Vise profilen) 20. feb. 2009 09.13.16
RiotNrrd:Then explain the appearance of both "fermita" and "ferminta" on page 121 of TYE.The exact same concept exists in English: a transitive verb can have an active participle (for the verb's subject) and a passive participle (for the verb's object), while an intransitive verb can only have an active participle (for the verb's subject).
In English we can say things like:
"Having closed the door, I sat down". (active)
"Having already been closed (by me), the door blocked our view." (passive)
Translating literally:
Ferminta la pordon, mi eksidis.
Jam fermita (de mi), la pordo blokis nian vidaĵon.
Both active and passive participles are meaningful for such transitive verbs. Note that in passive participles, there is some agent, explicit or implied, who performed the action on the object.
Compare with an intransitive verb like "die / morti":
"Having died, the man lay motionless."
Mortinta, la viro kuŝis senmove.
It makes no sense to imagine a passive use of "die". The verb is intransitive and can take no direct object. In English it would not make sense to say "Having been died, ..." (what would the thing you're talking about be? How can you die something?), nor in Esperanto to say "Mortita ..."
I.e. this is not some weird special rule in Esperanto; it's a basic concept of many (most?) languages: if a verb takes an object, you can make a (passive) participle that refers to the verb's object; if the verb doesn't take an object, then trying to form such a participle makes no logical or semantic sense.