"Mi ŝatas fruktojn pli ol fromaĝon."
Translation:I like fruits more than cheese.
25 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Why does fruit need to be plural? And if it does, why not cheese as well? (ie I like fruits more than cheeses)
I would ask why "vegetables" can be plural but fruit can't be plural when they are plural?
Sometimes, but it depends on how you use fruit and how you are trying to articulate a concept.
The dictionaty says "Eat plenty of fruit!" as an example. Yet, I know teachers who say "Eat plenty of fruits!" when teaching nutrition. I do not think they are grammatically wrong.
I also do not believe they are using the plural form interchangeably. They are using the plural to exemplify that you should eat many and various types of fruit, but certainly not only one type.
Shakespeare wrote in Edward the III "Quartered in colors, seeming sundry fruits," This line was not intended to rhyme. Again, I think fruits exemplifies different types
866
Most native English speakers do not use them interchangeably. Most treat fruit as a mass noun but a minority treat it as a count noun.
Because frukto is not a collective name like fruit, i think. More like the italian frutto, which is only about one single piece of fruit
To be fair, Frukto can also be that class of objects known in English as Fruit. When we are discussing particular such objects it will often become plural.
- 866
Frukto is an Esperanto word and follows Esperanto rules in which it is normal to pluralize it. Fruit is an English word and it follows English rules in which it is not normal to pluralize it.
In Norwegian the word is frukt (hmm sounds familiar) and often shows the plural in the adjective, but not the noun. Jeg vil ha noen frukt (I will have some fruit) [Mi havos iom da frukto.] Hesten spist alle frukt (The horse ate all of the fruit)[La ĉevalo manĝis ĉio da frukto] but Jeg har tre frukter (I have three fruits)[Mi havas tri fruktojn]
So there are other languages which treat the concept "fruit" in well ordered but unexpected ways.
My two bites
- 866
"Fruit" doesn't or at least should "need to be" plural. A small minority of native English speakers do pluralize fruit, something I only learned when this came up in another Duolingo course. Most native English speakers use it as an uncountable noun / mass noun but sometimes we use it as a countable noun only when talking about different kinds of fruit.
So 'frukto' can't be used in an uncountable or collective sense in Esperanto as 'fruit' is in English (but 'vegetable' is not). Why is that wrong? Is there some way to form an equivalent uncountable noun?
I think it is because the verb and subject are just hidden. Mi ŝatas fruktojn pli ol mi ŝatas formaĝon Or something like this
Fromaĝojn
Otherwise you are generally correct. The subject in both phrases is Mi. Likewise the verb is ŝatas.
Wait, why fromaĝojn and not fromaĝon? I think that cheese here is meant more as a collective name of all the cheese in general. Also because duolingo says that the translation is fromaĝon
I'll allow myself to be wrong here, but Cheese can be a class of food, until it is cut up and put on a coterie dish. This is discussed at length in another discussion, but the outcome was that you generally serve multiple cheeses, often a few from non bovine origins, and therefore, served cheese becomes plural. Also, custom.
And someone will someday make the "Cheeses saves" joke.
Yeah, indeed, in such a sentence, i would use fromaĝon more as a class of food than in other ways
