Re: Question words and word order

From: Manuel M Campagna (fa192_at_FreeNet.Carleton.CA)
Date: 03/12/05 

Date: 12 Mar 2005 21:38:51 GMT

Ruud Harmsen (realemailseesite01@rudhar.com.invalid) writes:
> 5 Mar 2005 21:37:10 -0800: "ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com"
> <ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com>: in sci.lang:
>>I know about its regularity but how expressive is Esperanto?
>>Can one distinguish between "come" and "do come" and between "be
>>prepared" and "get prepared"?
> It would surprise me if one couldn't. I think translating from English
> to Esperanto, and the difficulties that might arise while doing so,
> are no different than when translating between any pair of natural
> languages. In all cases there is often no one-to-one relationship
> between words, expressions and idioms, and grammatical devices differ
> too. As a result, translating involves understanding what the original
> author wanted to express, what are the ideas behind it, and then
> re-expressing, reformulating those ideas using words and grammar of
> the target language. These are in many cases not the trivial directly
> corresponding words. This is even true between closely related
> languages, such as English-Dutch, German-Dutch etc.
>>Can one distinguish between "come" and "do come" and
> Depends on what you mean by "come". Hard to say without context.
> English is a language that is even more ambiguous without context than
> many other languages, due to the lack of grammatical markers. E.g. tha
> fact that most word can be noun as well as verbs makes English very
> hard to translate sometimes.
> I suppose you mean "come" as an imperative, an incentive or invitation
> for someone to come, and "do come" as a more emphatic variant of that?
> Esperanto has the -u verb ending for imperatives, and -eg for
> emphasis, but when combining them -eg would refer to the root word
> meaning, not to the effect of -u. So it is not possible doing it that
> way.
> But one could probably translate "come" as "please come" and "do come"
> as "come!", or in Esperanto "bonvolu veni" and "venu".
>>between "be prepared" and "get prepared"?
> The first problem is that "be prepared" can have two meanings in
> English: 1) be willing, be kind enough to do it, or 2) be ready, have
> you preparations done.
> The trouble is I only have a Dutch-Esperanto-Dutch dictionary, so I
> must use Dutch as an intermediate language. The two meanings aren't
> very well separated in Dutch either. So I don't readily find a good
> solution for 1), but it must no doubt be there if I looked harder.
> Distinguishing "be prepared" and "get prepared" in sense 2) doesn't
> seem hard: "esti preta" and "pretighi" (or "pretigi sin"?).
>>Can one express sayings/ phrases like "be all you can be" and "every
>>fibre of my being"?
> A literal translation is certainly possible and easy. Is there an
> idiomatic meaning that I may be missing?
>>Can one express all meanings of double entendres like "get lost" and
>>"beat it"?
> Of course. But not with a single expression that covers both senses.
> But that problem exists between any pair of languages, constructed or
> natural.
>>Can one capture the essence of idioms like "come on", "come to think of
>>it" and "coming to that"?
> No doubt. I don't have the time to find a good solution, but Esperanto
> certainly has the means to express this. Again, no more difficult than
> between any other pair of languages.
>>Can one say "the whole hog", "the extra mile" and "the midnight oil" in
>>Esperanto?
> "The whole hog": I must admit I don't even know what it means.
> "The extra mile": I remember having had difficulty translating this
> into Dutch too. But I succeeded. Something like "extra inspanning"
> (extra effort) or "schepje erbovenop" (extra spoonful on top of it).
> "The midnight oil": doesn't the expression also involve the word
> "burning"? Expressing the meaning in Esperanto words is certainly
> possible. A simple method would be to take the explanation from a good
> monolingual English dictionary, and translate that directly into
> Esperanto. I don't know if Esperanto also has a more idiomatic
> expression for the idea, but it might. Esperanto does have idioms too,
> but I don't know the language well enough for that. Really mastering
> Esperanto requires study, hands-on experience and practising. Not much
> different from learning any other language really well.
> Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com/

You got the point, bud.

I translate literary works (mostly novels) into Esperanto. To find how to
express a lot of words I have to look up various dictionaries not only
several monolingual dictionaries in French, but some in English or Italian,
but bilingual dictionaries between English, French, Italian, Hungarian,
and Esperanto. But there is always a solution.

Manuel

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