"La virino kisas vin."
Translation:The woman kisses you.
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That could be if it had been: La virino kisas vin'.
(Note the final apostrophe.)
Though this replacing of -o (for a noun) or -a (for "la") with an apostrophe is usually only done in poetry or songs.
But the grammar would be wrong, since you would need the accusative here, vinon, and you can't abbreviate that to vin'.
No :) haha i automatically translated from French; i didn't mean the esperanto vinon.
Thanks for the help anyway. Are you saying <la> contracts to <l'>?
It may.
For example, the second verse of the Esperanto hymn La Espero starts Sub la sankta signo de l' espero.
I've seen it most commonly in that combination (i.e. de l'). I'm not entirely sure of the situations where this abbreviation of la is possible.
Note that, unlike French but like e.g. Greek, la remains a separate word even when abbreviated; it is not written together with the following word (de l' espero and not del espero or de l'espero).
Exactly - in everyday usage, it would stay "La Espero", just as with "la hundo, la birdo, la historio, la arto, la eseo", and so on.
I might have read this one a bit too literally and wrote "the woman kisses me". Despite the fact that it was just established that 'min' = 'me' in this situation. Whoops.
Context.
Like if someone's name is "Stu" in English -- "We are going to eat stew / We are going to eat Stu" can only be distinguished in context. Or if someone is called "Rich", then "This person is rich / Rich" sounds the same.
why vin and not vi?
Because "you" is the direct object here -- the person directly affected by the action of kissing.
So much confusion in language-learning arises because English "you" fulfils four functions (singular, subject; singular, object; plural, subject; plural, object).
Perhaps it can help if you replace "you" by some other pronoun such as "he" or "she".
"The woman kisses he."
Doesn't work, does it? You need an object pronoun: "The woman kisses him."
And for the same reason, you need La virina kisas vin. here, with object pronoun vin, not subject pronoun vi.
how do i know if it's "the woman kisses you" or "the woman is kissing you" when translating from Esperanto?
There seems to be no distinction in Esperanto, just like some other languages. You just have to understand the context.
I don't know why I sometimes misheard ni to mi. These pronouns in esperanto all sound somehow the same ending -i. Ni and mi almost sound so simmilar to me that I may have misheard it.
Also Ni and ne also made me misheard also since in the language I use to speak, i and e are actually the same except the loanwords we use from Spanish and English.