13 Comments
Is sxatas used ONLY as a platonic way of saying "like"? as in non-romantic?
Or is it like in english "Does he like me? (talking to her crush or whatever)"
Both, actually, since the word for "to love" in Esperanto is "ŝategi", using "ŝati" as the root and the modifier "-eg", which makes things bigger, in this case basically saying "to like a lot", and as already seen in the course, you can "ŝati" stuff without implying romantic feelings.
It is, but "ŝategi" can be used for love, in a lesser sense, or in a greater sense than just "ŝatas". It's right in between "like" and "love". For example: "Mi ŝatas Duolingo," "Charlie Brown ŝategas la malgranda ruĝhara knabino," kaj "Mi amas mian edzinon." Hope that makes sense!
Would it be correct to compare "Ĉu" to "Do" in english? It seems to be used in a similar way, for example, "You like me?" is wrong, but "Do you like me" is correct. Is that an accurate comparison?
Yes and no. "Ĉu" introduces a yes/no question the same way the verb auxiliary does in English - so it can mean "do/did/will" but never, ever will it mean the actual verb "to do" (which is fari).
An example:
- Ĉu vi ŝatas min? - Do you like me?
- Ĉu li ŝatas min? - Does he like me?
- Ĉu vi ŝatis min? - Did you like me?
- Ĉu vi ŝatos min? - Will you like me?
This is because the "do" in English questions is considered meaningless, but it's necessary because of the syntactic structure of English. That's why you would ask "did you do it?" without meaning the verb "do" twice. Ĉu comes from the Polish polar marker czy which has the meaning of "yes/no question" while our English "do" is just kind of a sad meaningless clone...
Mi havis unu ekspliko ĉi tie, sed via estas pli bona tiel mi forviŝis la mia.
Redakti: Tre pli bona, aŭ multe pli bona?
1273
Ekspliko is a word that I barely encountered in 20 years of speaking Esperanto. Now I'm seeing it everywhere among new speakers. I wonder if it got listed in Google Translate, Tatoeba, or some other online dictionary. It's a rare word - roughly equivalent to "to explicate".
The normal word for "explanation" is klarigo.
Of course, if you were trying to say "I have one explication here", please pardon the interruption.
When I first studied Esperanto maybe 15 years ago, I remember seeing "Cxu" explained as a simple marker that you were asking about the truth of the statement that follows it, so you could always correctly translate "Cxu complete statement?" with "Is it true that complete statement?" or "Is it the case that complete statement?", and in many cases just "complete statement?" would be a more idiomatic translation.
Don't forget that this is just in beta--there's no reason that "Cxu vi amas min?" couldn't be translated as "You love me?"; there's certainly no other obvious way to translate the sentence "You love me?" from English into Esperanto than to begin it with "Cxu", there's just not a lot of flexibility in the translations accepted just yet.
(Similarly, in Esperanto there is no idiomatic need to put the different sentence parts in a particular order (within most complete clauses), but the checking apparatus isn't equipped to handle that yet either, and requires fairly English-centric word ordering. (e.g., "Vi amas min" == "Min amas vi" == "Vi min amas" == "Min vi amas") This is due to the concept within Esperanto's creation that it would be a language putting people from all kinds of language backgrounds on an even playing field; those from languages with, e.g., "subject object verb" formations can speak in the more intuitive way to them and be understood just as well by native English speakers, and vice versa.)
In English, questions are often formed just with a question mark and some switching around of words; in Esperanto, to the best of my memory, there is always going to be one of the question words in any sentence ending in a question mark--either "cxu" or one of the who/what/when words.
