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- "La blua flago havas unu kolo…
49 Comments
Half of the American state flags are like that. A seal plus a blue background. Boring, unimaginative, seriously lacking any cultural significance, deprived of any creativity, and just plain repetitive and idiotic. At least Delaware uses light blue, Nevada puts their seal in the corner, Alaska doesn't use a seal, and Washington state uses green.
Best flags: Hawaii, Alaska, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, California, Colorado, Georgia, and any other flag that doesn't use the same pattern
I would have expected this to be "unun koloron" as "unu" appears to be an attibute of "koloron". So there is only case agreement with ajectives and nouns and numbers don't count?
342
Cardinal numbers don't inflect at all Esperanto (since they don't have any common ending). However, ordinal numbers (number + -a) inflect like adjectives (a-vortoj) and adverbial numbers (like number + -e) inflect like adverbs (e-vortoj, so barely inflect at all).
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For the somewhat-grammatically-challenged, could you provide some examples of ordinal and adverbial numbers? In particular, how they differ from cardinal numbers?
I think I could have understood your explanation a few years ago, but at the moment they're all just numbers to me. o.O
cardinal = one, two, three 1,2,3__ ordinal= first, second, third, 1st, 2nd, 3rd__adverbial = once, twice, three times(or thrice)
Im on my cell for this one and haven't read the notes: do they explain the seemingly out of the blue 'U' ending for "unu" and "du"?
- 342
There are no grammatical endings in unu and du and the fact that their last letters happen to be the same (as each other and as the ending of imperative mood) is just accidental.
Other numerals are tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok, naŭ (3–9), nul (0), dek (10), cent (100) and mil (1000).
Well.. For being otherwise very structured and systematic this just seems wrong to me.. Can't imagine how an ending for numerals would have been hard.. :(
- 342
None of the languages which Zamenhof knew and upon which he based Esperanto has any regular grammatical ending nor deeper structure regarding numerals. Notice that using any fixed grammatical ending would require making the numerals twice as long (two syllables instead of one) or distort heavily their sound (now recognisably cognating with Latin and its descendant languages).
- 342
In Esperanto every letter is always pronounced and always in the same way. :) The speaker doesn't pronounce unu very clearly and I admit that the second u happened to be very short, but it is audible there and definitely should be. :D
- 342
Esperanto “unu” is not really equivalent to English indefinite article “a(n)”. If you'd like to say “The blue flag has a colour”, you'd probably go with “La blua flago havas koloron”.
if you say something has 'a colour' it must have at least one colour, but it could also have millions more! that is why saying 'one colour' is important :)
- 342
Quite a major one: “unu” is a numeral which means “one” in English, and “uni” doesn't exist. :D
For clarity sake, if the sentence was: The blue flag is one color. Then it would be: "La blua flago estas unu koloro." Not "koloron," jes?
- 342
Not quite. You're right that nominal predicates (e.g. with the verb esti) are constructed in Esperanto with the nominative case (without the -n ending).
However, in this case, that's not the literal meaning of your sentence in English. You don't want to say that “the flag is a colour”, so the literal translation (using esti) won't work this way.
You have either to go back and use the verb havi or reanalyse the English usage of “one colour” not as a noun phrase, but as a adjectival phrase (so as a description, as in “That's a one colour flag.”), and thus say La blua flago estas unukolora (without the -n ending, as you've wanted).
- 342
There’s all the difference. ;) Oni is a pronoun and unu is a numeral.
Could you describe what similarities do you see? Maybe then I could explain it better.
Is there a usage difference between the "unu" and "ono" words for one, or am I just misremembering vocabulary? Like is the former a numerical value and the latter a pronoun as in "one might take the advise of another underadvisement"?
- 342
So, there are three different things.
The word unu is a numeral meaning “one”. The third-person indefinite pronoun “one” (like in English “One does not simply walk into Mordor.”) is in Esperanto oni. There’s also the word on·o (“fraction”), which is a noun created with the suffix -on- like in the words du·on·o (“half”) or kvar·on·hor·o (“quarter-hour, 15 minutes”).
