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- "Ŝi volas scii, ĉu mi parolas…
"Ŝi volas scii, ĉu mi parolas Esperanton."
Translation:She wants to know whether I speak Esperanto.
24 Comments
Is it just me or is scii rather hard to pronounce? "Stsii" feels awkward for me at first.
This is a really good video. I've seen it a couple of days ago and know I truly enjoy saying Scii!
I've heard a few people suggest "nest see" - including at least one well-known Esperanto teacher from the UK. I try to discourage that approach. When I teach online, I can immediately tell those who are falling into this trap from those who have learned the correct way to pronounce "c".
The fact is, the T and S in "nest see" are pronounced differently from the T and S in "bits".
It's for this very reason that I made this video.
There are other languages with built-in rules to prevent the existance of such consonant clusters!
Esperanto needs that fix.
You may be surprised to learn that the "sc" cluster in Esperanto is intentional. Esperanto has been in regular use for over 130 years. Nobody is going to roll out a "fix" on it.
In a similar way that Esperanto improved on things, other toungues have indeed proposed great fixes for this.
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It's intentional? Can I have that story, Tomaso?
Also: I was thinking for a while about simplifying "scias" to "cias", but I won't actually do it.
I think what I meant, basically, was that Esperanto had a strong Slavic influence, especially in the beginning, and it probably didn't even occur to Zamenhof that some people would find SC difficult. I also think that we need to avoid jumping to conclusions about what we think is easy, and whether that would be easy for people with a different background from our own.
and yet, the language you're speaking is not one of them. posts, casts, forests, toasts, costs, ghosts, beasts, hosts, cysts, breasts, fists, heists, yeasts, jousts, masts, nests, pests, quests, wrists, zests and last (but not least) of all, lists. yes, they're all plural, but the cluster also occurs in words like 'east side' and 'west side'. i often wonder why english didn't add a vowel in the middle.
just so you know, the 'sc' in english words that come from latin were originally pronounced (in latin) as 'sk'.
Does anyone else really want a slow speech on these. I listened to this repeatedly and still couldn't tell what followed cxu... mi?, li?, ni? I was pretty sure it wasn't 'vi' but that was it. sighs
I don't agree that a slow option is a good thing - but I feel your pain on the words like mi, ni, li, vi... I get them wrong often enough on Duolingo and I've been speaking Esperanto for decades. I don't know if it's the little speakers on my laptop, or whether the next wave of recordings needs to pay more attention to this. In the meanwhile, kuragxon amiko.
I think this is the a flaw of Esperanto by design (and for me the most annoying one)..Since verbs are not conjugated, the information on the subject relies solely on the pronoun (if pronouns are used) and the sound of l, m, n, and v are actually relatively similar. The speaker as well as the listener have to take utmost care to differentiate between li, ni, mi, and vi. Maybe its better to use ri (ĝi/li) more often..;) But still vi, ni, and mi sound quite similar.
I found the word "whether" used earlier, whereas there was no more than one choice. Is this use of "whether" correct?
FINALLY! "Match the pairs" questions always pair "ĉu" with "whether" but it has never been used once, until now. I am genuinely happy to know it can actually mean "whether".
I am a native speaker of the American Midwest dialect of English (the dialect and accent favored for Television news programs in the USA). I cannot recall ever using the word "whether" by itself. It is always part of the phrase "whether or not" in my speech and writing; and as near as I can recall of all the English speakers in my area of the country.
Translating the Esperanto into the sentence without the "or not" is quite unnatural sounding to me.
