26 Comments
I interpreted this sentence as "How many soups do you have?" - meaning if I'm at a restaurant and I'm curious how many varieties of soups they have or something along those lines. Is that not a valid interpretation of this sentence? If not, how would I say that?
Yes, yours is not a valid interpretation of this sentence. You would say your interpretation as "Kiom da tipoj de supo vi havas?".
I wonder the same thing but maybe the correct translation of "how many soups do you have?" is "Kiom da supoj vi havas?"
Yes, it seems to work that way. Even a quantity of 1 is still a quantity; as it's not possession or a property, only da seems correct here.
In this case, you are not counting the soup---you are counting the container which holds the soup. :)
Here, "soup" is an uncountable object---what do it mean to have one soup? Three soups? 19.21 soups? We measure soup by its container, but then we are counting containers which happen to be filled with soup---we are not counting the actual soup itself! This is the same for anything that takes a measure word (for example, how much rice vs. how many grains of rice; I have three sticks of chalk (how many, countable), not three chalks (how much, uncountable); etc.). I hope that helped!
But Kiryo---from a quick Google search, I don't think Esperanto makes this distinction, but it would be nice if someone could answer this definitively.
In this sentence, it translates to "How much soup do you have?" One question I have is about the "do" in the sentence, is that not explicitly written in Esperanto? I don't see a word that directly correlates with the English translation.
The 'do' is really something that belongs to English, rather than Esperanto (or any other language really).
Try looking up things on 'Do-support'. Most languages just invert the subject and verb, but English does this weird little thing with the verb 'to do' to assist in forming questions.
this is preserved somewhat in british varieties of english: "have you an apple" vs "do you have an apple"
This is very much an english thing. The closest thing in esperanto is "cxu", which is only to signal a question that wants a "jes aux ne" answer.
depends. for example: cxu vi havas du knabojn? Cxu would be do, but is only used for yes/no questions
I wrote "How much soup are you having?", which was marked wrong.
Can "havas" mean "have" in the sense of consumption (of food or drink) as well as possession?
"Kiom da supo vi konsumas?" would be "how much soup are you having?" "Havi" is only used for ownership to my knowledge, with "konsumi" being consume.
That's not really a problem with Esperanto, but English as "to have is overloaded. (Is "to overload" used in the context of spoken languages? In programming, it means to give multiple meanings to one symbol.)
I think that is because the course mainly uses American English and not British English, which is the variant that typically uses your take on the sentence.
