"Mi subite sciis, ke mi amas ŝin."
Translation:I suddenly knew that I loved her.
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Why isn't it "amis"? Is this a mistake? If not, I would like to know why—someone please explain this!
In indirect speech, the tense is the one that would have been used in direct speech, and this is the same rule.
Yesterday you suddenly realised: "I love her!". "Love" is in the present, so it stays in that tense even when you report that thought: "Yesterday I suddenly realised that I loved her".
If the sentence had been "Mi subite eksciis, ke mi amis ŝin", it would mean: I suddenly realised that I had loved her. The thought you suddenly had would have been "Mi amis ŝin!".
Oh, so that's how the past perfect is done in Esperanto? Thanks! I had no idea. :D
Well, the -is form could be past simple, present perfect, or past perfect.
Esperanto does have an explicit past perfect (pluperfect) form: "estis ...-inta". For example, "Mi estis leginta la libron" (I had read the book).
But those compound tenses tend not to get used that much.
In "Mi subite eksciis, ke mi amis ŝin", it just gets interpreted as past perfect in English because you are talking about something that was in the past from a viewpoint in the past (which we use past perfect for).
You could even do future from the point of view of the future that way :) English doesn't even have a separate tense for that. ("Tomorrow I will realise that I will love her in in the future"?)
Hmm… interesting. I'll research this a bit more later. Thanks for the explanations. :D
It's from the Slavic languages, the part that Russians do not need to learn :) Pardonu ;) Your flags suggest that you might need it later in the courses of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian :)
Is 'sciis' correct here? Shouldn't it be 'eksciis'? It looks like an Anglicism right now to me.
So, are we to understand that this is an example of a difference between Esperanto and English? The example being that the first part occurred in the past hence, Esperanto casts the second part into a present tense in contrast to English which casts it into the past tense?
Strange, because "I suddenly knew [came to realize] that I love her" sounds OK to me.
"Koni" is like "be acquainted with, know someone as a person, be familiar with" (French connaître).
Here, you need "have knowledge of, realise".
The verb "koni", which means "to know" in the sense of "to be acquainted with" is used in speaking of persons, languages, places, etc. "Koni" always has a direct object. It is never followed by "ke", "ĉu", "kiu", or any other interrogative word. "Scii" means "to know" in the sense of "to be aware," "to have knowledge." It is not used in speaking of persons.
[Footnote: "Koni" is equivalent to German "kennen", French "connaitre", Spanish "conocer", while "scii" is equivalent to German "wissen", French "savoir", Spanish "saber".]
From http://a-complete-grammar-of-esperanto.t.ebooks2ebooks.com/49.html
While there is some overlap in where you can use them, in general you use scii for facts, and koni for people, objects, places, etc.
That would make more logical sense in the sentence, but I think is not a good translation of the sentence as it stands. It would translate "realised" with "eksciis" rather than merely "sciis", i.e. "began to know" = "realised".
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Maaan, can you level the audio files before uploading them? Some are so quiet and some are so loud, I cannot listen to music while doing the exercises. Is the guy whispering in this one?
