"Mi kontrolu la vortojn sur tiu paĝo."
Translation:Let me check the words on that page.
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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.
To create the "let me" meaning. -u ending signifies imperative (do, come, check..).
There's no imperative for the first person in English, or is there? To command oneself to do something doesn't make much sense. Does it?
You are right. I don't know much about the English grammar, but in some some languages it is called the volitive. In esperanto -u ending is used to indicate a command when used for non-first-person people, but it becomes the indicator of volitive mood when used for I and we.
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.)
Yes there is, and this is it. You may be more familiar with the plural form, which is usually ‘let's’, which distinguishes it from ‘let us’. The same construction even works in the third person, in mathematics when you say ‘Let x be a number’, and in politics when you say ‘Let them eat cake’.
You can certainly say to yourself "Just do it!" or "Jump!" Exactly as one would order others.
No—those are still normal second-person imperatives. “C’mon, jump, you lazy git!”, not “jump, me/I lazy git!”. Our inner voice is talking “to ourselves”, with our inner voice being the first person, commanding ourselves, the second.
The voice speaks a bit too quickly here. It's hard to tell what's being said.
I have written: "Let me verify the words on that page." Submitted for acceptation. Ni vidu kiun okazos.
