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- "La kato kuŝas sub la litotuk…
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We have a family joke where we say "grated cheese" for cheddar or mozzarella and "GRATED cheese" for parmesan (or parmesan/romano). This goes back to a friend for whom "grated cheese" ONLY meant grated parmesan. At one point he had to clarify that he really meant GRATED cheese (i.e. parmesan) and not just any cheese that had been grated.
I too "normally say ‘sheet, but sometimes ‘bed sheet’ for clarity." But I suppose we could just say something like:
- What are you buying at the store?
- Sheets?
- You mean plywood?
- No SHEET sheets.
Seriously, I would say "bedsheets" - but I could imagine something like "no, sheets for my bed."
The Esperanto verb kuŝi is equivalent to the English verb "to lie", as in "to recline in a horizontal position". This is not to be confused with the English verb "to lay", which refers to the transitive action of putting something down (e.g. "He lays his phone down on the counter")
Note also that, to add to the confusion, the English verb "to lie" conjugated into past tense, is "lay" (E.g. "Yesterday, he lay in bed sick").
A few example sentences of the correct usage of the verbs in English:
→ "As soon as I get home, I am laying my phone on my table to charge and I am lying down to take a nap."
→ "My cat didn't want to be held, so I laid her on the floor."
→ "Last night I lay awake for a long time."
I hope this helps!
The confusion between the two meanings of ‘lay’ is not a coincidence. It used to be productive in Germanic to reinterpret the past tense of a strong (irregular) intransitive verb as the present tense of a new (and weak) transitive verb, with a meeting like that of the Esperanto suffix ‘igi’. That is, ‘lie’ (with past tense ‘lay’) became ‘lay’ (with past tense ‘layed’, spelt ‘laid’) by the same sort of regular process as ‘kuŝi’ becomes ‘kuŝigi’.
The first one sounds weird; native speakers would actually say, "As soon as I get home, I lay my phone on my table to charge and I lie down to take a nap."
When asked, "What are you doing?" would be when one might reply with "I am lying down to take a nap."
Perhaps I didn't word it in the best way (I am a native English-speaker :)), I meant it in the sense of "As soon as... I will lay my phone" or "I am going to lay my phone..." Sorry for the confusion! Perhaps the way I worded it is more midwestern-American... I'm not sure
They sound like different meanings to me (also Midwestern American). Shieldgenerator7's sentence describes a habitual practice, while thefifthjudge's sentence describes one day's plans.
