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missing pronouns?



In a message dated 2002-09-22 3:26:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time, sts@hidden.email writes:

but how do you distinguish between "nabyo" and "nasay"? using the table-words (tabelvortoj) in esperanto, the answer would be obvious:

this situation actually occurred in lesson 15, the next to last sentence:

I thought about the Katanda words after the teacher explained the words to me.
Pi si mi letadya te Katanda goynde koda kobyo mi letadya.

[Note that we must repeat the word "letadya".  If we had instead
used the anaphor "tahi", it would have referred to "Katanda":

    Pi si mi letadya te Katanda goynde koda kobyo mi tahi
    = I thought about the Katanda words after the teacher
explained it (meaning 'the Katanda language') to me.

Thus, we had to repeat the word "letadya" to get the desired
interpretation.]

i suspect that in a situation like this, a human translator would still use the pronoun, since the distinction ("them" = "words" vs. "it" = "katanda") can still be maintained without loss of information.

who = ki-byo (esperanto: ki-u)
what = ki-vatsi (esperanto: ki-o)

"what" is "kiva" (= "kivatsi", but only "kiva" is used.)

i mean, i would like to say something like "ti-vatsi" and "ti-byo" for "this thing" and "this person" and maybe "hi-vatsi" and "hi-byo" for "it" and "he/her".

"this thing" ("tio"?) is already "kya ju" or "junti".  "this person" ("tiu"?) is already "byo ju".  i just don't see what's lacking.  a distinction between "what" and "who"?  that's the difference between "kiva" and "kibyo".

steven