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missing pronouns?
- From: BestATN@hidden.email
- Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 17:27:52 EDT
- Subject: missing pronouns?
- To: katanda@yahoogroups.com
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