- Forum >
- Topic: Esperanto >
- "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.
Thanks. I worry that English has foisted a lot of meanings onto Esperanto. In this instance, also in things like "between friends."
This particular case is the same in Bulgarian (maybe other Slavic languages too?). We can use the same word for these two meanings. So it's not necessarily an English influence.
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.
Why is jarojn in accusative? It is not in the prepositional phrase with ĉirkaŭ?
If I remember well, ĉirkaŭ is an adverb here, so it doesn't affect the accusative.
I tried to use the number as an adjective here, as I could have sworn I saw it in a solution the other day, so I said; Mia amiko estas cxirkau trideka, which was marked wrong. Can someone explain?
trideka is "thirtieth".
You may have seen such ordinal adjectives in connection with time -- estas la tria "it's three o'clock" is short for estas la tria horo "it's the third hour".
But you can't say that you are "thirtieth years old".
Oh my gosh, I can't believe I forgot that Thank you for answering! I probably did see it in a context like that and didn't quite take it in, cheers!
