Tartalom

-ing

eddyguerrero-tól, 2011. március 1.

Hozzászólások: 3

Nyelv: English

eddyguerrero (Profil megtekintése) 2011. március 1. 23:16:08

how do i use -ing in esperanto?
exp: paroli-to talk
mi deziras paroli. (I wish to talk)
now how do i write I wish to be talking.

sudanglo (Profil megtekintése) 2011. március 1. 23:47:09

I'm having a bit of a problem imagining the circumstances in which an English speaker would say 'I wish to be talking'.

But taking a more natural sentence like 'I would very much like to be sitting on a beach in the south of France rather than stuck in this office', perhaps you might render that in Esperanto with 'mi tre volus esti (sidanta) sur plaĝo en Suda Francujo anstataŭ prizonita en ĉi tiu kontoro.

erinja (Profil megtekintése) 2011. március 2. 1:43:46

-ing is a tricky ending because there are several distinct grammatical forms that use it in English. Each of these forms has a different Esperanto translation, so there is no single translation for -ing.

The uses are:
- for participles. A participle is a verb put into the form of an adjective, so it's basically a verb used to describe something. "I see the running dog". "running" is an adjective to describe "dog". You could easily substitute "brown" or "sleeping", you can see how this is a description word. The -ing ending (present tense active participle) is -anta in Esperanto. Therefore "I see the running dog" is "Mi vidas la kurantan hundon"

- for gerunds. A gerund is a verb put into the form of a noun. It's a verb being treated as a concrete action, taken as a whole. "I like cooking" would be an example. "cooking" is treated as a noun here, as if it were a thing. Or "John's hobby is swimming". For this meaning we often use the ending -ado (it's the continuous action -ad- suffix plus the -o ending to indicate a noun). My two example sentences would be "Mi ŝatas kuiradon" and "La ŝatokupo de Johano estas naĝado". The other way you can sometimes translate these situations is with an infinitive (-i verb ending). "La ŝatokupo de Johano estas kuiri" is also possible (literally "John's hobby is to cook")

- for present tense continuous verbs. An action that is happening right now, and continuing. "I am sleeping" would be an example of this. In Esperanto we use a simple present tense verb for this. "I am sleeping" would be "Mi dormas". It is possible to use a participle, "Mi estas dormanta", but in most cases we prefer to use a simple verb.

If you think about it, English's use of a single grammatical ending for all of these uses can create some ambiguous situations. In these situations we use context to determine the meaning.

If I said "My joy is growing", I could mean that my joy is increasing (Mia ĝojo kreskas / Mia ĝojo estas kreskanta), or that for me, a joyful thing is the process of growing things, for example plants (Mia ĝojo estas kreskado, literally "my joy is growth")

In English the context would tell us which of these interpretations is the correct one. The grammar by itself does not tell us.

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