"Ni ne havas meblojn. Ni sidas kaj kuŝas sur la planko."
Translation:We do not have any pieces of furniture. We sit and lie down on the floor.
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Etymology seekers -- German for furniture is Möbel. The ö is between an "oh" and "ey".
All of these derive from Latin ‘mobile’ (same meaning as the English word), as opposed to the building and grounds, which in some languages are called words derived from ‘immobile’.
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Zamenhof spoke fluent German (and Russian and Polish, and probably Yiddish since it's the language his mother spoke to him in; and, well, later Esperanto) ☺
His father was a teacher of German and French. Ludoviko said he read French well, but spoke it baddly (though with such a humble man, I wonder what he called "bad").
He had good or very good notions of a dozen languages.
He explicitely chose roots which existed in as many languages as possible ☺
sfuspvwf npj
meblo - for one item. In Russian we have a very similar word мебель . But мебель is for meblaro -- furniture
"Another translation: down We do not have any pieces of furniture. We sit and lie on the floor." I think that suggested translation is inherently flawed.
I don't know if it matters if you put the "down" option with "sit down" or "lie down"...
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I think the translation is very clumsy and certainly doesn't sound natural to me. I'd never say pieces of furniture for example, it sounds weird. As for having to but sit down or lie down, that again is a matter of style. Down adds nothing to the sentence and indeed, many think these redundant words are stylistically bad. In other words, the sentence should be accepted with or without down and with or without "pieces of" before furniture. Duo does this sort of thing far too often and in confuses learners.
Yes, I agree the translation could be simpler. The translation could very well be: "We don't have furniture. We sit and lie on the floor." I think the course creators are trying to get over the idea that the word "meblo" in Esperanto refers to an individual item of furniture, while in English it's a collective noun.
'Etaĝo' is floor in the sense of 'level'. Like in "...The third floor the four-storey building."
Is there a reason there's "planko" for floors in this lesson but also "etagxo" for floor? Does "etagxo" mean "levels", for example: there's 136 "etagxoj" in a skyscraper but they each have their own "planko"?
Thanks! Going to reply to this post, I suddenly realized this question has already been answered....oops. I had tried to see if it was, but there was too many comments so I gave up and asked anyways. Mdr! (multa da ridoj)
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Do we have to translate mebloj/n as pieces of furniture? Saying: We do not have any pieces of furniture, seems strange in English. I think people would simply say: We do not have any furniture. I have checked and discovered both mebloj and meblaro can be used for furniture.
planko - the the part of a room that's under the carpet.
etaĝo - the part of a building where everything is on the same level. A 10-story building has 9 or 10 of them, depending on how you count.
Okay, I answered this three times:
"We do not have furniture. We are sitting and lying on the floor" and "We do not have pieces of furniture. We are sitting and lying on the floor" and "We do not have any pieces of furniture. We are sitting and lying on the floor"
The answer given was "We do not have any pieces of furniture. We sit and lie down on the floor."
Is it really dinging me because I used the progressive tense in the English translation?