- Forum >
- Topic: Esperanto >
- "La gepatroj de mia edzo esta…
"La gepatroj de mia edzo estas miaj bogepatroj."
Translation:The parents of my husband are my parents-in-law.
24 Comments
According to Wiktionary the suffix bo- comes from French beau- which is used to indicate a male relation by marriage (as in beau-père, beau-frère, or beau-fils). It is used in Esperanto regardless of gender.
It's been a long time since I took French. I'd forgotten that! Thanks for connecting the dots!
Do you need to be married to have "bogepatroj" or can my "bogepatroj" also be "la gepatroj de mia koramik(in)o"?
I'm not even really sure in English. I suspect, these days when people might intentionally cohabitate for decades without marrying, the line is if you feel like family. The parents of a person you've been seeing for a month probably aren't, but your kid's other grandparents probably are (or were).
Well, I think the point is the "law" part. They wouldn't be your parents-in-law if you aren't legally united, right? I don't entirely know how partnership works, though, and I'm sure that you could call them that if you're comfortable.
The only reason I ask, is that in other languages (or at least in Danish) the word that translate to "X-in-law" can also be used for a relation to a girlfriend or boyfriend. For example, my Danish girlfriend's mother will refer to me as her "svigersøn" which has the best translation as "son-in-law", but has a wider meaning of "the boyfriend of my son/daughter". So I was just wondering what the Esperanto usage of the word is
That's an interesting point from a Swedish perspective, considering that we have certain not-as-strong-as-for-married-but-still rights for "not married, but living together as if married"-relations.
(some links: Swedish Wikipedia; English Wikipedia)
Not morpheme-for-morpheme, no. But usage-wise that is how it translates into English.
1449
You're right. And all that means is that the problem is in the English translation, not in the choice of words in Esperanto.
There is no problem with the translation. Two languages can have two different terms for the same thing. That's part of what makes them different languages. Of course we would translate their term (bopatro) into our equivalent term (father-in-law). That's how translation works.
- 1449
I didn't say the English translation was bad. What I said is that stating there is "law" in "parents-in-law" is completely irrelevant because the question was about "bogepatroj", not about "parents-in-law".
So, as I said, if there is a problem in the choice of words (and I didn't say there is one), it is not in the sentence in Esperanto but in the translation in English.
the question was about "bogepatroj", not about "parents-in-law".
The question is about "what word or phrase is used in this language to refer to the parents of your spouse". It's about "if we were to draw up a family tree, what word or phrase is used in this language to refer to how you are related to these people".
In English, that is "parents-in-law". In Esperanto, that is "bogepatroj".
Indeed, hence this translation into English is less that ideal. However, I don't think English has anything closer, thus you'll probably have to make do with this one.
Now, if English had borrowed a word for this from French, like it did for niece, nephew e.a., there might have been "beau parents" instead. "Beau" would, of course, be written "bo" instead in Esperanto, much like "parents" would be "gepatroj".
But as is it is, English is forced to use a translation that put more emphasis on law then the original does.
Mia Bopraduongepatrojn my great step-parents in law. In German one can theoretically make a word that takes an hour to say but in practice words are never that long. In Esperanto the game is see how many affixes you can put on to the word. Can any one add to Bopraduongepatrojn?
Last time oi translated edzo as usband it said i was wrong and shoukd be spouse. This time i did spouse and it said it shoukd be husband.
- 1449
In the corpus at tekstaro.com, you can find both. 10 occurences of bogepatroj and 2 of gebopatroj. Interesting enough, the text containing those 2 (a translation by Zamenhof) also contains 2 of bogepatroj.
We normally say "in-laws" to refer to both genders at once. I've never heard anyone use the term "parents-in-law."
If the correction algorithm rejects "in-laws", feel free to flag it and report "My answer should be accepted."
