Messaggi: 51
Lingua: English
erinja (Mostra il profilo) 20 marzo 2011 15:56:47
Miland:There are also plenty of Google hits for "Mi amas vi", but that doesn't make it right.erinja:Telefoni is also a transitive verb, but the object of telefoni is the information being passed over the telephone.That is consistent with PIV 2005, but has there not been a popular use of telefoni, similar to words like "knifed (someone)"? Googling telefoni min or telefonu min will show what I mean.
Maybe the meaning of "telefoni" will change in the future but as of yet I haven't seen it being misused on any kind of wide scale by experienced speakers. I see telefoni being misused among people who don't bother to do their homework, who usually have errors in what they've written beyond "telefonu min".
When my students write *telefoni [iu]n, I always mark it wrong and explain why.
I think the tendency to misuse telefoni has two sources; [1] people who don't speak Esperanto well tend to use -n for indirect objects, which they shouldn't, since Esperanto doesn't mark indirect objects with -n, it uses a preposition, and using -n for indirect objects is bad form and can lead to confusion; [2] people often don't bother looking up words in a dictionary to find out their correct Esperanto meaning, so they make abundant use of false friends, or else they use an Esperanto word as they would use that word's equivalent in their native language, even though they don't work the same grammatically.
Both of those come down to laziness, using Esperanto grammar in a lazy way rather than learning how to do it properly.
Saying "Telefonu lin!" in Esperanto is just like saying "Téléphonez-le!" in French; of course the correct French sentence would be "Téléphonez-lui!"
Kateno (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 07:24:50
ceigered (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 08:21:21
Kateno:Personally I don't like "lasu iun fari ion". I rather use the form "lasu ke iu faru ion", but I'm not sure if that way is right.From what I've read and seen here, I'm gonna go for a stab in the dark and assume that in the latter (lasu ke), what you're "letting" is the entire "ke" phrase, which I don't think works very well - it looses that idiomatic idea of "letting someone loose to do something". I'm probably wrong though since I'm tired and not really thinking much. Brain's saturated with Starwars and Gundam and other high relevant subjects.
darkweasel (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 08:56:31
Kateno:Personally I don't like "lasu iun fari ion". I rather use the form "lasu ke iu faru ion", but I'm not sure if that way is right.Both are equally fine.
sudanglo (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 11:44:22
With diri, what you say is often needed to complete the idea; with telefoni, far less so - the destination of the phone call is more dominant than the content.
So sentences of the type Telefoni ion al iu are much rarer than those with Diri ion al iu.
I well might say telefonu al Francujo, or telefonu al la oficejo, or telefonu al tiu restoracio.
But Telefonu min doesn't seem so shocking as Diru min.
By the way, would you say telefonu 01524 27000 or telefonu al 01524 27000?
ceigered (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 11:59:48
Because it does seem, linking to what Sudanglo said, that it's like putting a transitivity label on the verb "paroli", since when you're ringing someone you're effectively having a "telefonparolado". So the root being so unrelated to a transitive action I think is core to this... interesting discussion
.(once again, I'm ignoring usage - I don't use a telephone to use Esperanto, I use a telephone to complain to the ISP that something's wrong with the DSL connection again. But I don't see how any definite transitive action can be encased in the definition of "telefon-", when the core idea of the root is that of a special device that uses electrical signals for communication - is there a secret rule to how transitive originally-noun-root verbs should work?)
sudanglo (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 12:03:15
Mi vidis la trajnon venanta.
Mi vidis la trajnon alvenantan de Parizo.
The first doesn't tell us anything about what sort of train it was, you just saw the train further down the track and that it was coming.
The second is all about characterizing the train which you saw.
sudanglo (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 12:22:00
It depends on the nature of the world.
The relationship of marteli to martelo is different to the relationship between telefono and telefoni, and the relationship between biciklo and bicikli
It's largely a commonsense sort of thing. What action do we normally associate with this object.
Some words defined as nouns have no application as verbs (outside poetry). For example, 'urbo', 'pomo', 'maro'.
T0dd (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 12:48:50
sudanglo:The relationship between an Esperanto word whose dictionary entry is defined first as a noun, and any usage in verbal form, follows no secret rule, CeigerLogically, telephoning is parallel to saying and writing, i.e., it's a way of directing a message to someone. But in terms of the way it's actually used, in English anyway, it's closer to chatting. I don't know if that carries over to other languages.
It depends on the nature of the world.
The relationship of marteli to martelo is different to the relationship between telefono and telefoni, and the relationship between biciklo and bicikli
It's largely a commonsense sort of thing. What action do we normally associate with this object.
So, if you think of telefoni as diri per telefono, you'll be inclined to use it transitively; if you think of it as babili per telefono you'll want to use it intranstively. ReVo defines it as transsendi/paroli per telefono and lists it as transitive. I don't have PIV handy, and I don't own NPIV, so I don't know what they do with it.
In a case like this, where the noun root itself doesn't strongly favor either a transitive or intransitive construal of the verb, I guess you just have to look it up.
erinja (Mostra il profilo) 21 marzo 2011 13:12:21
sudanglo:By the way, would you say telefonu 01524 27000 or telefonu al 01524 27000?I would say "telefonu al". The number is the destination of your call. The object of telefoni is the information that you are transmitting over the line.