11 Comments
Why "Here's the lunch!" and "Here is lunch!" are accepted, but not "here is the lunch" ? English is not my first language.
99
'Here's the lunch!' should not really be accepted as it is not really said in English. 'Lunch' doesn't need an article unless you want to talk about a very specific lunch; 'Here's the lunch that she was eating' or 'The lunch you are eating is mine!'. Otherwise, it's just 'lunch'; 'I'm eating lunch. Lunch is my favorite meal.' Other meals work the same way. So it's also 'Here's breakfast, dinner, supper, tea, or dessert'.
That, and the Esperanto sentence doesn't have 'la' so it shouldn't have a 'the' in the translation either, but others have already pointed that out.
Unue, "Here is the lunch." estas malpli natura ol Here's lunch.".
Due, "Here is the lunch" estus skribita, kiel "Jen la tagmanĝo.".
Here is the lunch would be "Jen la tagmanĝo" whereas Here is lunch is simply "Jen tagmanĝo." There is no "la" in the sentence, which means "the" in English.
- 2011
That's bad reasoning. Different languages have different rules. Just because an article is needed in one language does not mean it's needed in the equivalent sentence in another language. English accounts for only a small part of Esperanto's base, and it wasn't one of the languages Zamenhof personally spoke well, so we can't assume a relation between English article use and Esperanto article use.
The real answer to Cocio_16's question is that in English, we do not typically say "the lunch". It's just not idiomatic.
I translated "Here is THE lunch", and I was mistaken because there is no "la" in the Esperanto sentence. I can see the message "There is no 'la' in the Esperanto sentence, thus this is incorrect", but the green part below reads "Almost correct! Here is the lunch! Another correct solution: Here is lunch!". It means it counts as correct, but it should be incorrect.
I see somebody else has pointed this out about two months ago, but it wasn't solved yet, so I've reported it and I'm also writing here, hoping some Esperanto moderator reads it :)
I hope this helps!
- 2011
I agree with you. It does vary from language to language how the definite article is used, so the literal word-for-word translation isn't always appropriate. I would translate it as "Here's lunch" just because for the most part, it's idiomatic in English to say "Here's lunch" rather than "Here's the lunch" (unless the complete sentence is something along the lines of "Here's the lunch you requested").
Exactly! The problem is, my sentence was in fact incorrect in English, and the black label on my translation said so, but the sentence is actually marked as "almost correct", as though it were a correct translation with typos in it. It should be marked as incorrect, which is very likely what they first meant to do :)
- 2011
If I'm not mistaken, Esperanto is still in beta, so that could be a wrinkle the team hasn't ironed out yet. You say you've reported it, so now we just wait to see if they address it.
