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| peppelanguage Triglot Groupie ItalyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5865 days ago 90 posts - 94 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, English Studies: French, Swedish | Message 9 of 162 07 November 2008 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ah..I forgot to translate "Man"...That's "Uomo"...sorry :P
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 10 of 162 07 November 2008 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My Esperanto is not good; I wouldn't dare propose the following translations if I didn't know that Sprachprofi is fluent. Hopefully any necessary revisions will be less work than rewriting the translations from scratch, and hopefully the notes can be of some help.
Lesson 1 - Esperanto Anna: Saluton Tom! Tom: Saluton Anna! Kiel vi fartas? (1) Anna: Mi fartas bone, kaj vi? (2) (3) Tom: Mi estas tre bone, dankon. Mi devas iri. Ĝis revido! (4) (5) Anna: Ĝis! (6) Ekstra: Bonan matenon! Bonan posttagmezon! Bonan vesperon! Bonan nokton! 1) Literally: How (in what manner) do you fare? 2) Literally: I fare well, and you? 3) Pronunciation of Esperanto can be fairly similar to English, with a few exceptions. "Kaj" ("and") approximately rhymes with the English 'sky' or 'guy'; the Esperanto 'j' is more like a 'y' than an English j. 4) 'Ĝ' is pronounced somewhat like the English 'j'. Ĝis is approximately pronounced 'Jiss', rhyming with 'hiss'. 5) Ĝis revido = Until again-see. The Esperanto use of the 're' prefix parallels English. 6) Ĝis = Until. It's a shorter and more colloquial way to express 'bye'. A fairly wide range of accents are acceptable in Esperanto, and the large majority of speakers do not speak it natively. It's good to make an effort to not speak it exactly as English (refer to any Esperanto recordings), but the concept of good Esperanto pronunciation does not entirely parallel that of other languages. Lesson 2 - Esperanto Tom alvenas al fervoja stacidomo en alia urbo, kie li devas renkonti Alex. Ili konas unu la alia de forumo kaj ili renkontas sen retumi pro la unua fojo. Tom: Pardonu min. Ĉu vi estas Alex? (1) (2) Viro 1: Ne, mi ne estas. (3) Tom: Ho, mi bedaŭras. Viro 1: Ne problemas. ... Viro 2 (promenadas al Tom): Saluton! Tom: Saluton Alex! Mia nomo estas Tom, kaj mi venas de Kanado. Man 2: Mi bedaŭras, mi ne estas Alex. Ŝi estas tie. Tom: Ŝi??? Alex estas virino? (4) (1) English changes statements to questions without using "question words" (who, where, what, why, when, how) by inverting words: "You are Alex. Are you Alex?". Esperanto is easier: you simply start the question with 'ĉu', and everything else stays the same. "Ĉu" is pronounced approximately like "chew" in English, or like the sound of a train - "tchoo tchoo" - but without the t. (2) The Esperanto copula is almost identical to the English one, but easier: it's the same no matter who it refers to. The verb in "I am, you are, he/she is" is always "estas" in Esperanto, and it's used to link things in the same way. 3) Similarly, the negation of the copula is very simple: just put 'ne' before it, which makes 'ne estas' - it's like putting not after it in English. 4) Esperanto uses affixes (small sounds that change the meaning of words and go before or after them) heavily. '-in-' is the suffix that makes a noun refer to a female: hence, because 'viro' means man, 'virino' means woman. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BGreco Senior Member Joined 6394 days ago 211 posts - 222 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish | Message 11 of 162 07 November 2008 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Another input from a native English speaker: Nobody knows what the word "copula" means.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 12 of 162 07 November 2008 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A few things:
1) Perhaps transcriptions for non-Latin alphabets should be given? 2) The second lesson is hard to translate in parts, as others have noted. I like the way that it's handled by the Italian translation - "in person"/"face to face" and so forth should translate, while 'offline' is a bit of a neologism. Perhaps the English should use "in person"? Similarly, "see you later" is quite nuanced and hard to preserve exactly across languages; I don't think it really belongs in the first lesson - "see you this evening", "see you tonight", or "goodbye" would probably be better. "No problem" also doesn't translate particularly literally. I might go for the stiffer "it is not a problem", perhaps? (An irrelevant aside: in touristy parts of Southern Italy, some monolingual Italian speakers have taken to saying "kein Problem", even to people who speak no German - this is really a phrase that mutates). In general, the English is, in my opinion, almost a little too slangy/colloquial in these first lessons - which is bad, inasmuch as it gives an inaccurate view of what the phrases in the target language mean. Stiff language is uglier, but it doesn't strike me as having as sharply misleading nuances. 3)
Simply untrue. "I'm well" vs "I'm good" varies regionally; "I'm good" is colloquial American English. Prescriptivists tend to say "I'm well" is correct and "I'm good" isn't. In all honesty, while I'm not a prescriptivist, I am a native English speaker, and "I'm good" makes me wince. "I'm fine" or "I'm ok" is what I usually say. To Sprachprofi: please, please, please don't change it to "I'm good".
... except for people with an interest in linguistics. If you know what a copula is, it's quite annoying to try to figure out what's meant when people use various vague descriptions for people who don't know grammatical terms. A middle ground could be explaining what is meant by 'copula' briefly, although even that would scare some people off (but if it does, I doubt they'd finish the lessons anyhow). The patterns "X is Y" and "X is not Y" are quite fundamental, and vary fairly sharply between languages; as noted in the Russian translation, Russian doesn't even have a copula, and just says "X Y", for example, while Japanese says "(X wa) Y desu". Edited by Volte on 07 November 2008 at 6:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6031 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 13 of 162 07 November 2008 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would like to see a grammar project started. I don't know a thing about it.
I'm good" is totally fine to my Australian English ear. We more likely drop "I'm" to simply say "good" or "good, mate". The project is looking good and I wish I could contribute to it. One thing I will ask is about gender. How will it be done and still keep up with other languages without it? Hebrew makes a distinction between: I (am) drink(ing) 1.m.sg = shoteh 1.f.sg = shotah I (am) able 1.m.sg = yeXol 1.f.sg = yeXolah then for the plurals: we (are) eat(ing) anaXnu oXlim anaXnu oXlot I wont even bother with gender of nouns, adjectives, numbers and everything else. I would just like to see some thoughts on this. Shalom, Yehoshua. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 14 of 162 07 November 2008 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Don't mean to be a jackass native English speaker, but I do (and I'm not a linguist). :-P 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 15 of 162 07 November 2008 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
My thought on this is simple: it'll be introduced to the extent necessary to do the translations, optionally with a footnote about some of the complexities. It's extremely introductory, and explicitly isn't meant to cover anywhere near all the grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 162 07 November 2008 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Another possibility could be "I'm doing well" (it gets around the fuzziness whether one should or should not use a "true" adverb (i.e. "well") or let the adjective "good" do double duty as an unadulterated adverb as in "I feel good"). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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