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- "My friend is about thirty."
"My friend is about thirty."
Translation:Mia amiko havas ĉirkaŭ tridek jarojn.
11 Comments
It has two meanings.
One is to do with numbers and means "around, approximately, about", and the other is to do with locations and means "around, surrounding".
(The second meaning can take either nominative for location or accusative for movement.)
So, just like English "around" has both meanings -- she can be around thirty years old, or there can be a garden around the house, or you can run around the school.
Could well be - as French no doubt did before.
However, PIV lists both of those meanings and PIV is, if anything, French-influenced rather than English-influenced.
However, it has multiple citations from Zamenhof for both meanings, so I think that this particular dual meaning is very old.
On another thread, though, I saw the allegation that today's meaning of voli is being changed through influence of languas such as English, encroaching on territory that "should" belong to deziri.