"La besto trinkas akvon."
Translation:The animal is drinking water.
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That's interesting, I haven't thought of it that way. How I remember it is, besto=best friend, an animal can be a person's best friend. Similar to, "a dog is a man's best friend." It may sound complicated, but it works for me haha.
is it me or is the esperanto course less forgiving for typos? i'm very bad at typing so i wrote "the animal drinks watwe" which is a very simple typo, but i was marked incorrect
It could be just you, but maybe not. My sense, though, is that typo forgiveness is not something that the individual courses have control over. It's part of the behind-the-scenes workings of the Duolingo system, so I would expect it to be equally forgiving in all courses. I also know that the course authors occasionally add common typos as correct answers to reduce frustration.
The question came up about the difference between "beast" and "besto." See my longer comment in this thread.
The question came up about the difference between "beast" and "besto." See my longer comment in this thread.
The sentence given is the best translation.
- "La besto trinkas akvon."
- Translation:The animal is drinking water.
Does besto exclude humans? Can it be translated "beast"?
Here's a bit that I wrote for another thread. The link is hidden in this very discussion.
The definitions that I found for "beast" are:
- an animal, especially a large or dangerous four-footed one.
- a domestic animal, especially a bovine farm animal.
- (archaic) an animal as opposed to a human.
So, the meaning of "beast" really depends on context. It's like when Yukon Cornelius said "Open up. Isn't a fit night out for man nor beast. Here's the man. And here's the beast." He was playing on the third and first definitions of beast. (Large and dangerous, anyway - two out of three ain't bad.)
The same thing goes for "animal." In some contexts it means non-human members of the animal kingdom. In other contexts it includes humans. So, when answering the question, we're trying to go from one context dependent word into another. Yukon Cornelius could have easily said that the night wasn't fit for "human or animal", in which case beast and animal mean about the same thing. If I were to say, however, that John is a beast, or my friend's dirt bike is a beast, I'm not saying that they are members of the animal kingdom.
"Beast" is best translated by the word bestio or bruto.
I would would say that "animal" is the better translation because "animal" has two meanings. One is basically any living thing which is not microscopic, a fungus, or a plant. That is, any member of the animal kingdom is an animal. For this we say animalo in Esperanto. The second meaning of "animal" means "not human." For this we say besto in Esperanto.