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- "Cafés are large, because wom…
"Cafés are large, because women drink coffee."
Translation:Kafejoj estas grandaj, ĉar virinoj trinkas kafon.
45 Comments
It's hard to argue with that logic, well, because there is none to argue with.
I don't know if that is wrong ironically, a typo or not knowing the grammar, but for the last two, logical
1329
Nothing to be ashamed of. Let me tell you, I've often come into these threads knowing exactly what I wanted to say, only to discover that someone else said it first. :/
I interpreted it as saying cafes are large to accommodate the number of women who patronize cafes, and the amount of time they spend there.
I think what this means is that women tend to talk forever... so the cafe must be large enough to accommodate more customers...
(let me try to say above in Esperanto with the help of a dictionary) Mi opinias ke ĉi tio estas ĉar virinoj parolas eterne... pro tio la kafejoj devas esti grandaj por akcepti pli da klientoj
Only a tiny bit of sexism here, cxu ne? It's actually nice to see that everybody here thinks this sentence is ridiculous (because it is)!
- 11
how come kafon isn't kafojn? Or do nouns not agree? Or are all these women drinking one coffee!?
- 1329
If the point was that many different kinds of coffee are consumed, then kafoj could be used.
I think "coffee" here is uncountable/mass noun. Certainly nouns do not agree, only adjectives with the nouns they refer to.
Just here to point out the English isn't correct. You don't put a comma brefore a subordinate conjunction.
Well, it might make a tiny bit more sense if you consider the other exercise question "Women like big cafés."
Because adjectives must agree in number and declension with the nouns they modify, and "grandaj" modifies "kafejoj".
I try to not read anything into these sentences. They're just vehicles for grammar and vocabulary.
But I like to think of this one as "a lot of women will spend a lot of time there, so they need to be large to accommodate the numbers". It makes me sad that some people jump right to "women are fat".
So... I think the problem is my brain thinks that cafes are the 'subject' of the sentence, and this sentence maker thinks instead it is coffee? shouldn't the N be applied to the coffee and its adjective? Falling at the end of the sentence isn't enough to make something a subject is it?
Cafés are large, because women drink coffee.
What we have here is really two sentences glued together with the subordinating conjunction "because". The verbs in each sentence illustrate the two basic categories of verbs: active verbs and stative verbs.
Active verbs are verbs of action. Something is being done. They can be further sub-divided into transitive verbs and intransitive verbs.
Transitive verbs are verbs that carry their action along to something. These are the verbs that can be transformed into the passive voice. They take direct objects, which are noun phrases that receive the action of the verb. The grammatical form of a direct object is the accusative, which Esperanto marks with -n.
Women drink coffee / Virinoj trinkas kafon
Here, "coffee/kafon" is the direct object of "drink/trinkas". What is drunk? Coffee is drunk.
Intransitive verbs are verbs that keep the action to themselves. They do not have direct objects because there is nothing to receive the action. "He sleeps / Li dormas" is a good example of an intransitive verb.
Stative verbs, or verbs of state, serve to describe the subject. The grammatical form of a subject is the nominative, which in most languages is unmarked. Stative verbs take what's called a subject complement, which is a noun phrase or an adjective phrase that describes the subject. In most languages, the subject complement is almost always in the nominative.
Cafés are large / Kafejoj estas grandaj
Because Esperanto is a language that has some amount of agreement, we can see that the lone adjective in the predicate, "grandaj", refers back to "kafejoj" to describe it, because both are plural.
I hope that answers your question. "Large/grandaj" is the only adjective in this sentence, and it modifies "cafés/kafejoj". There is no adjective that goes with "coffee/kafon".
