"Good morning, how are you?"
Translation:Bonan matenon, kiel vi fartas?
24 Comments
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It's VERY lazy. Generally only used when non-Esperantist English speakers are listening in, because it stops them laughing when they hear the 'false friend'
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- 1851
Probably because it's not the same idiom as it is in English.
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Just curious -- would "kiel fartas vin" not be acceptable? Is "vi" not a direct object in this case?
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It's not a direct object. A direct object is the one receiving the action (i.e. in "Mi amas vin", "vin" receives the action "amas" given by the subject "mi"). But "vi" here is the subject and is the one that does or experiences the action, so it can't be in the accusative case.
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- 1851
Beyond what crimson_seraph said, "farti" is a stative verb and stative verbs don't have direct objects. Instead, they take subject complements.
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Sometimes, I wish whoever created the Esperanto language would have picked a different word besides fartas. For obvious reasons, it just sounds weird.
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- 1851
Zamenhof didn't speak English, so this never would have occurred to him.
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I suppose that makes sense. It still just sounds weird, though.
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- 1851
Zamenhof took it from the German fahrt, which means "journey". It's cognate with the English "fare".
Of course, there is a natural language where "fart" means something else.
https://inktank.fi/10-english-words-mean-something-else-languages/
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ĉu estas sounds reasonable for how are you and was one of the suggestions, would that be correct, it was marked wrong :-(
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- 1851
You're applying English rules and idoms here. Besides, "cxu" is only for yes-no questions, and the question word here is "kiel". "Cxu estas vi?" is simply "Are you?"
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Actually I was trying to mimic spanish not english. Cxu estas seems like Como estas , but you are right i was being just lazy because it had less words xD.
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- 1851
Well, Spanish conjugates verbs to all of the persons, so "estás" in Spanish only goes with "tú". Esperanto only has one conjugation per tense, so "cxu estas" is not a complete sentence. We don't know if that's meant to be "Is...?" or "Are...?" or even "Am...?"
