"Mi kontrolu la vortojn sur tiu paĝo."
Translation:Let me check the words on that page.
13 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
If it helps to remember the correct meaning of this “false friend”, English received the cognate in one rarely-used sense of the word “controller”—spelled “comptroller” in government contexts, but confusingly still pronounced the same as “controller”—and a controller/comptroller checks and verifies accounts, but doesn’t “control” them. Most large cities and some federal departments in the US have comptrollers, as do many other anglophone countries’ ministries.
It’s why we use the stand-in causative verb “let” to translate it. “Let me…”, “allow me to…”, “permit me to…”, or (in question form) “shall I…?” all turn an Esperanto “volitive” “pronoun + verb + -u” into something that works in English grammar without changing the meaning much. English imperatives, like English infinitives, cannot take a subject. (Esperanto imperatives can, so we use “let’s” et al., and so can Esperanto infinitives—those can tend to confuse us into doing an ‘-on, kiu -[aiou]s’ when you just need ‘-o -i’, sometimes with an initial ke.)