80 Comments
Couldn't kafejo be café (which has been refused) in this context? I don't see any difference with cafe (accepted) and it is moreover in the hints.
To be blunt, in English, 'café' is correct and 'cafe' is for people who are lazy to put an accent on the letter 'e'.
I am from the United States and, therefore, use the US English standard setting for keyboards. With that setting, you can't type diacritics without using an Alt key code.
http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/accents/codealt.html
One might ask, "Why is that?"
The answer is "Because 'é' is not a letter in the English alphabet."
The other option to type 'é' is to change to keyboard setting to US International so that foreign letters can be typed more easily.
http://www.studyspanish.com/accents/typing.htm
Again 'é' is NOT a letter in the English alphabet.
"Cafe" isn't the lazy-man's spelling; it's the English spelling of the French "café" (and the French spelling gets used somewhat often, but it is still the French spelling; not English).
One tiny remark: é is not a letter (in itself, distinct from e) in French alphabet neither. The French alphabet has the same 26 letters as the English alphabet.
Some vocals can be accentuated but they keep being the same letter, just accentuated.
721
Nice answer! You tell 'em!
Now, about typing diacritics: if you use a Mac there are some really easy key combinations using the command key: anyone interested? Google it.
- 721
You are right desivy. I slipped on that one because I myself use the Spanish keyboard which gives acute and grave accents using the [ and ] keys then you just type in the wanted vowel. The keyboard selection on a Mac is right on top, next to the day and time.
I would think that the use of the English alphabet and the primary English spelling for words wouldn't be in dispute
Oracle3927
The "primary" spelling seems to not be so clear. Different dictionaries give different "primary" and "variant" forms.
Cambridge (American English) Dictionaries (online), for example, gives café as "primary" and cafe only as a variant.
Good point for distinction between words there miacomet.
Of course, English being what it is, there's also the option to use the synonym CV (short for Curriculum Vitae) for the latter in most contexts, which seems to be the word almost everyone here uses when applying for jobs.
There are a couple of minimal pairs, like resume and résumé, but unless you're the New Yorker, they're rarely used.
- Clara_2134: Traditionally, it doesn't. However, being a little old-fashioned, I still use borrowed diacritics (from French, German or Spanish) in words such as naïve, daïs, skïng (where a diphthong is involved) and others like fiancé(e) and débâcle, though I rarely use these words. Still, there are many more examples. The é in café is automatically inserted in Duolingo, unless overridden.
True! The save goes for the word "naive" in English, which you occasionally see spelled as "naïve". Usually by someone who is pretentious.
Hi LiitleCatz. I always spell this word as naïve as it makes it two syllables, as in the name Zoë. Otherwise, the word spells as 'nive' or the name as Zoh.
Naive would be pronounced more like nave than nive, and anyway, both of those words are foreign in origin
Café would be pronounced "ka-FAY" as it should be, while "cafe" would be pronounced "Kayf" according to the way final E works in English. Words where E works differently are supposed to be written with accents particularly if they are foreign. For another example: Naïve (with the 2 dots over the I) is pronounced "na-YEEV" but often spelled as Naive, which would be pronounced "Nayv" according to general English spelling. However there usually is no difference and "Cafe" will be read correctly by most. Generally speaking, it all depends on the writer to choose whether to preserve accent marks in foreign words.
We have no easy way to make accents in an English keyboard, and those words are both French, which uses the accents there often. With this in mind, we can assume the spellings with the accents are French spellings, and, since English officially has no accents, we must say that the correct spellings are naive and cafe, but should be pronounced as they were meant. The French say 'le email' occasionally, and pronounce it like we English speakers do, and it came from another language, and that pronunciation is even rather odd for the French, so why shouldn't we say cafe just like them, even when spelling it correctly for English?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/café Oh, you will have to type the e with the accent back in as the link stopped there.
N.B.: [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/café](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/café) gives http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/café and the link will work. ;)
Thank you! I so appreciate that. I have wanted to know how to do that for a very long time.
According to the top of this page, the expected/default/best answer for this exercise is the one without accent.
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But the answer without accent is also accepted.
(2015/06/13)
Yes, it is borrowed from French and gets written with the French spelling quite often, but that's because the French word is being used. That does NOT make it the correct English spelling.
I can easily throw the word "mañana" into an English sentence (since it's common enough for a fair number of English speakers to grasp the meaning), and I can even find "mañana" in the online Oxford dictionary, but that does NOT mean that "mañana" is an English word or that an 'n' with a tilde ('ñ') is a part of English spelling.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/ma%C3%B1ana
NOTE: If you even look at the url for the entry on "mañana", the 'ñ' had to be replaced with code, because 'ñ' is not in the English alphabet.
- 155
If you do not consider loanwords which kept their original spelling proper English words, the English language has very few words.
Considering that very little of it actually comes from Old English and modern English is what it is because of ridiculous amounts of influence, I can't agree more with you,
Most of those use the letters a-z however.
Cafe is a correct word, with or without a dash (that is not part of our language).
Then you think in your head "French word" when it's used (atleast I do).
I agree with most of what you've written, but I couldn't resist the urge to point out the reason the URL doesn't use the accented character has very little to nothing to do with English.
It's actually because the character is a Unicode character outside of the ASCII character set. ASCII characters are the first 128 (from 0 to 127) in the Unicode set. A lot of things related to displaying characters in programming need different ways of representing characters beyond the standard ASCII character set. The UTF-8 encoding scheme is what gave the result you see in the URL.
Sorry I can't reply to your comment directly, Oracle.
I didn't disagree with the fact that the English alphabet doesn't have diacritical marks naturally (although I am unsure of whether diaeresis counts as its purpose is to mark a vowel sound as separate from a preceding vowel sound to avoid a diphthong). It's why I italicized for emphasis certain words in "very little to nothing to do with English". As it stands, nothing is incorrect, but I still believe it has very little to do with English.
I merely wanted to correct your assumption that the reason the eñe wasn't directly put into the URL had more to do with English than with programming (your statement: "because 'ñ' is not in the English alphabet" is where I took issue). If I remember correctly, most letters with diacritical marks take up 2+ bytes of memory. The ASCII set is comprised of characters that only take up 1 byte of memory. It is more likely that this is the reason there are no letters with diacritics in the ASCII set.
I do recognize that only the English alphabet was used because that's what programming languages used, but that certainly doesn't mean there weren't programmers of other nationalities as well. When it became important to be able type in other languages is when programmers had to come up with a system of representing the extra characters that existed in other languages. Unicode was that system.
Just to be perfectly clear, because I know how things can get jumbled and misconstrued in internet discussions, I never disagreed with what you said about accented letters in the English alphabet.
"...and that's how a conversation on the spelling of 'cafe' turned into 'the history of computer encoding'..."
;-)
We're obviously not in any disagreement regarding the lack of diacritics in English at this point... :-D
...but I do think that you may be "putting the cart before the horse" as far as ASCII and Unicode. It's not simply a matter of the number of bits/bytes, but why they appeared in that order over time.
ASCII - the AMERICAN Standard Code for Information Interchange - was originally designed for encoding English. That's why the first 128 characters are directly related to English orthography syntax, and only contain the English alphabet. Over time, the need to establish a more universal encoding system became necessary in order to address non-English characters, and thus Unicode (developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard) was developed as an EXTENSION of ASCII.
Given that it extended ASCII, the first first portion of Unicode still only addresses English characters, so pointing out that 'ñ' is outside of that character set (the first 128) inherently implies that it's not a part of the English alphabet.
That's what I was getting at when I emphasized that "the 'ñ' had to be replaced with code, because 'ñ' is not in the English alphabet."
EDIT: Allow me to rephrase:
Cafe is a valid word, with OR without a dash (that is not part of our language).
Then you think in your head "French word" when it's used (atleast I do).
You should not think "lazy" when it is omitted, because it is the English-ization of the word.
- 155
Isn't that what you (could) think in your head for a third of the words in the English language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin
In particular only for those which disobey normal English rules - such as ballet (for the silent 't').
The C is pronounced like a Ts. Like in Bits. So Esperanto spells Cafe like Kafejo. Also, all Nouns end with an o.
Yes, throwing the prefix "mal-" in front of a work in Esperanto is like putting the prefex "in-" or "un-" in front of a word in English. It DOES reverse the meaning the whatever follows in the rest of the word.
So, yes "malbela" means "ugly".
But are there some adjectives for which that doesn't work? For instance, you would never say "ungood" (unless you're a character in 1984) in English. Does that happen in Esperanto, or is the mal- prefix rule always followed?
I don't know Esperanto well enough to tell you that, but as it is a constructed language, I would bet against it unless it is seeing major linguistic change among its speakers over the past century (which I think would if at all be limited, as it was standardized at the time it was created). Generally when a word can't have a rule applied to it, like un-, it's because it's being lexically blocked by another word (ungood vs. bad). I think in this artificial environment such processes would be less likely to happen, though I'm sure you and I will find out soon as we keep going. :) (If you can't tell, I'm a linguist/nerd.)
A cafe in a bad park? Well, I ain't gonna get my caffeine hit there that's for sure.
Sorry if someone has asked this before, but what on earth is a "bad park"? Or aren't we using real, natural language here?
We have a bad park a few blocks away. Scary park, people doing drugs in that park , not a safe park. a bad park.
Esperanto is most closely tied to the romance language, so ¨en¨ is the same as it would be in spanish or french, meaning ¨in¨ or ¨on¨.
Is en ever translated as 'at'? I feel like in English we tend to use 'in' and 'at' in the same context.
In Esperanto - to my understanding - no, "en" is never used as "at". "En" literally refers to being within/inside.
Better translations for "at" would be:
po - by; at, at the rate of
apud - beside, next to
je - upon, at, by, on
ĉe - at, beside, with
...none of which quite fit the sentence, since it's referring to the cafe being inside of the park.
I agree with you, though. In English, we would might say that "the cafe is at the park" and most people would understand the same as being "the cafe is in the park".
"at the park" is now accepted as a translation for "en la parko". thanks, Lupo and Oracle!
Learning about "kafejo" (kaf -> kafejo) why "parko" and not "parkejo"? It is also a place.
by the way cafeteria is marked as wrong...
I believe the ending -ejo is when you take a regular noun and make it become a type of place. A park is already a place, and didn't come from another word.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
My mother language is not English, but even so I don't see the sense in several sentences translated to English. Anybody really says "The cafe is in the bad park"?
One possible context: You have a reception in a park and a waiter brought the coffee in another park of the city. ;)
The thing is that at the beginning of the tree:
- the sentences can only use the vocabulary introduced up to now
- the course want to make you review as often as possible the voc learned before, so use it as sson as it's possible.
I was thinking the same. In what context would someone say "the café is in the bad park"!? Shouldn't "malbona" be translated as "wrong" (considering it makes more sense and it's one of the "mal-" prefix meaning in several languages) instead of "bad" (that also means "evil")?
What's so bad about that park? Is it the park where all the serial killers hide out at night, waiting for their next victim to come by on a midnight stroll?
Shouldn't "The cafe is in a bad park" be accepted as a solution? Or should the original Esperanto be reworded to translate out to this phrase? It seems like a far more natural thing to say.
Does "parko" mean a national or state park with wilderness? What about an amusement park?
OMG, it seems the poor 'é' has started a war between English and French speakers over here...
"Malbona"? Is this what influenced George Orwell's "doubleplusungood" with the "ungood" part?
15/03/2017, 22:42
The sentences could be more elaborate. For me, the phrases are strange.
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Why do you nee estas in this sentence? The cafe in the bad park. Why is estas in there? help please
