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How i should say "what time is it?" in esper?

af Hyoyo, 13. okt. 2010

Meddelelser: 88

Sprog: English

Miland (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 18.00.00

erinja:quince jelly candies..
Sounds good, so if I am ever able to visit Washington in the future, I hope to try them (apart from visiting sites connected with Dan Brown novels). But I'd better brush my teeth afterwards!

sudanglo (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 19.14.42

Mihxil, I suppose you could argue that 'la tria horo' isn't necessarily the third hour.

It is the hour pertaining to the number three.

I look at my digital watch it says 3:05. So I say 'la tria kaj kvin', or 'kvin post la tria'.

Given a clock with roman numerals I to XII on the face, it is also quite natural that we should use the sistem we do.

mihxil (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 19.25.20

Chainy:
But then he decided to change things a bit, so that speakers of German, English (I'm not sure about other languages) etc wouldn't get too confused with such a system... so he ended up calling it 'la oka horo kaj kvin minutoj' - maybe during the transition he forgot to get rid of the ordinal! ridulo.gif Mere speculation, but it's a funny idea.
Something like that.

I tried - for fun - to think of some other things. E.g. we could say that the first hour of the day is actually from 01:00 to 02:00. It means the hour after midnight is actually belonging to the previous day. We could perhaps even write e.g. 24:15. It's not very congruent with how we normally write that, but it may be with how we say it. At least I figure that nobody finds it particularly strange to say 'a quarter past 12' for that (and not 'a quarter past 0'). It is also somewhat in accordance with the general idea that things happening after midnight but before going to sleep belong to the 'previous' day.

Another thing which we could try is to say that the 'naŭa' in 'la naŭa horo' is not an ordinal at all. Esperanto simply chose to use the adjektive ending to represent ordinals, but there is no absolute logic in that. So 'naŭa' could mean anything related to 'naŭ'. In case of hours, it could be the hour which is labeled with 'naŭ'. I don't quite get the use of 'kioma' then though. In this interpretation you should just ask 'Kiu horo estas?'.

The last thing what could perhaps be argued is that ordinals don't necessarily start with 1. Programmers in many languages (at least in the 'C' family of languages) will simply assign '0' to the first element of any set, and even call it the 'ordinal number'. This would be quite a good idea, but i'm pretty sure this conforms in no way with the use of for example 'unua' in the rest of the language. There is no-one talking about his 'nula esperanto-leciono' or something like that...

There is also no real problem if you use 'post'. "Estas 5 minutojn post la oka horo". The eighth hour ends at 8:00 so at 8:05 it is indeed 5 minutes after that hour.

mihxil (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 19.27.55

sudanglo:Mihxil, I suppose you could argue that 'la tria horo' isn't necessarily the third hour.
Yes. I thought of that too. See my post, which I wrote when you posted yours ridulo.gif

mihxil (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 19.37.34

I thought of another one. Perhaps the 'hour' in 'la oka horo' is not a period but a point in time. It does not very well agree with PIV which defines 'horo' as a period, even in 'kioma horo estas'. I think also the biblical 'the ninth hour', and similar usage in russian, actually mean a period. That simply is often precise enough.

horsto (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 19.56.38

mihxil: I don't quite get the use of 'kioma' then though. In this interpretation you should just ask 'Kiu horo estas?'.
But 'Kiu horo estas?' = 'Kiu estas horo?' is even more strange or wrong.
I would say:
Kiu horo nunas?
or
Kiu estas la nuna horo.
or perhaps even
Kiu tempo nunas?

qwertz (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 19.58.39

erinja:
Oh please, qwertz. Are you really trying to say that there is some kind of vast conspiracy to convince Esperantists online to use one form of grammar rather than another, through manipulation of Google hits?
Em, sorry what? That was not my intention. I just did wanna say that in my opinion Google hits are an very weak argument. Nothing something about "... conspiracy to convince Esperantists online to use one form of grammar rather than another ...". Even if I don't trust the Internet very much, I'm not paranoid.

erinja:
I would never say that something with 421 hits was obviously more common than something with 300 hits, but we are talking about a couple of factors of 10 here. Google searches are an unscientific tool but it gives you an order of magnitude idea of how common something is in everyday use.
Sorry, I don't trust a daft Google rating algorith which isn't capable to filter faked online banking webpages etc to build up my opinion about something. Hey, vere not.

mihxil (Vise profilen) 14. okt. 2010 21.47.44

horsto:But 'Kiu horo estas?' = 'Kiu estas horo?' is even more strange or wrong.
I think you're mistaken. These two are not actually the same. It is not true that 'estas' is only used with a predicative. It can also mean 'exists' or 'being real' or so. It this case it does not connect 'kiu' with 'horo', and the word order is suggesting that.

sudanglo (Vise profilen) 15. okt. 2010 08.22.22

In the matter of determining usage, it seems to me that CorpusEye and Tekstaro searches are likely to produce a more reliable indicator than the hit count on a Google search.

And with both those corpus searches you can select the corpus(es) to be searched.

From the various questions raised in this and other forums, it seems to me that these resources are not suffiently wide known or used in the Esperanto community.

ceigered (Vise profilen) 15. okt. 2010 09.17.26

mihxil:
horsto:But 'Kiu horo estas?' = 'Kiu estas horo?' is even more strange or wrong.
I think you're mistaken. These two are not actually the same. It is not true that 'estas' is only used with a predicative. It can also mean 'exists' or 'being real' or so. It this case it does not connect 'kiu' with 'horo', and the word order is suggesting that.
Ah, someone finally mentioned that! lango.gif
So, in that case, my interpretation of "La kioma horo estas" being an incomplete question is wrong... I was under the impression it was "La kioma horo estas (missing word)", or "La kioma estas horo", which seems disjointed to some extent.

From all the mud-slinging I've nomen a gander at, it seems that "la kioma" makes sense after all, if we translate it into English as "The which" instead of "the how-many-eth". (As in "the.... um... which hour??")

It seems like literal translation is nothing but a curse at least for me in this situation.

Anyway, for sake of simplicity, I propose that "kioma estas (la) horo" be used as the default, since "la" seems to introduce a sense of purpose or definitiveness that may be lost on beginners, and indeed people in the middle range who aren't well read up on these issues such as myself.

Because the reply expects a "la", e.g. "la tria horo", I don't think that necessarily means it's only correct to have "la kioma horo", since in grammar in general, language aside, a definite noun does not need to be a definite thing.

I say that since I saw referenced to many times that the answer is expected to be "la tria horo" or something, therefore "la kioma" needs to be used/is logically expected to be the question form, but I don't think that's actually right in the slightest - I think both question forms should be correct in making an answer that has a definite form in it.

Anyway, it's not so bigger issue. Ki- stemmed words that directly modify another word generally incorporate the idea of "la" into them anyway.

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