"Li atendas nin."
Translation:He is waiting for us.
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"He waits on us" generally means a waiter serving you, whereas "atendas/wait for" seems to be used as simply waiting for someone, e.g. to catch up, to meet you somewhere, etc.
In English, wait isn't transitive on its own, but await is. (Note also that await is sort of old-fashioned). So you could say:
(1) He waits for us.
(2) He awaits us.
But not:
(3) *He waits us.
(4) *He awaits for us.
(I'm using the asterisks to mark sentences as ungrammatical.)
Esperanto atendi behaves just like English await--you don't need to put a preposition before the person or thing being waited for. In fact, you can't put a preposition there.
well it seems to come from, and work the same as, the word 'to attend'. The man attends his boss. Not that that is used in modern speech though
English "to wait" can be transitive if it's being used to mean a waiter doing his job I think
Yes and no. There's an expression "to wait tables", in which case "wait" seems truly transitive. So you can say "The waiter has been waiting tables for years." But in another sense of "to wait" in the restaurant-work sense, you have to ues "on", so "The waiter waited on the customers" but not "*The waiter waited the customers."
Thank you for this good answer.
But if someone answer "he waits us", even if it is not "good english" he proved that he has perfectly understood the esperanto sentence.
Could "he waits us" an "almost correct" answer insted of a "wrong one" ?
Because english is not my native language, I have more difficulties in this course with the english thant with the esperanto...
No, atendi just takes a direct object, not a prepositional phrase. And note that it can only mean to wait for--it can't be used to mean to attend (to), which would be prizorgi.
I'm not sure. It seems that"Li atendas por ni" should be acceptable, but don't take my word for it.
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If I were teaching Esperanto to English as a first language students, I would include a hyphenated -for or -to or some other preposition with a lot of Esperanto verbs. I think of "atendi" as "to wait-for". This is an interesting facet of language, sometimes a preposition (or post-position or ad-position, to get Linguistics-y) is "glommed on" to a verb. It's unexpressed and rides along for free. Where these implied and unexpressed adpositions are applied varies from language to language. To say, "He waits you" in English looks and feels wrong, so does "He is waiting you." But to say "He waits tables" is NOT wrong. It's all very idiomatic and syntactic.