"Bone, mi purigos ĝin mem."
Translation:Okay, I will clean it myself.
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Why is "bone" used here?
In English, if you said, "Well, I will clean it myself," the term "well" is an interjection -- not an adverb, as "bone" is.
1351
Bone is an interjection used to express a nonenthusiastic aggreement, like English okay, Polish dobrze and Russian хорошо – all four of these (including okay) are also adverbs, which literally mean well in the literal sense.
Well used as an interjection in spoken English has a different role, it introduces a minor disaggreement or something contrary to expectations, similar to Polish cóż, Russian ну or Esperanto nu.
For centuries i had been trying to understand what "nu" means, thank you, kind person
I can't give you a grammatical explanation but I've heard it quite a bit.
German also uses "Gut" in this sense: "Gut, ich werde es selber sauber machen". (French, on the other hand, uses the adjective form, I believe: "Bon, je le ferai moi-même."
Perhaps a good reason would be that Esperanto adjectives are used only in relation to nouns but adverbs in relation to phrases and sentences (e.g. "Kuri estas bone", to run is good, where "kuri" is not a noun), and here it applies to the situation as a whole rather than to a particular noun.
- 516
This smacks of English (or as mizinamo points out) German sneaking into Esperanto to me also. I could see a non-English Esperantist reading this as I will clean it well myself. As in "I will do a good job of cleaning it, myself." And with the Bone put first to put extra emphasis on the fact that I am, myself, going to do a particularly good job of cleaning it.
The "well" doesn't necessarily put that emphasis. It's more like "pues" in Spanish, where it's used emphatically to begin a statement. It's also like saying "I will clean it myself, then." It's just put at the beginning.
- 1730
In Spanish a good translation could be "Bueno, lo limpiaré yo mismo." Where it would fit perfectly.
If "fine" and "okay" are acceptable as English translations of "bone", why is "all right" rejected?
The emphatic use of "mem" should be. But it may also be an adverb meaning "without the help of another." (PMEG 14.3.13)
I think so too. Maybe they're just making it easier for English speakers? Not a good tactic if that's the case though.
"Okay" is the most-recognized word in the world, though. Wouldn't it make sense to have an "Okaj" here, or something of the sort?
Several reasons. "Ok" in Esperanto means eight, and "aj" is the ending for a plural adjective. And adverb is needed here (see Vylah's comment). So it would have to be "oke", but that Esperanto word already means "eighthly".
Hmm..."Oko"? (Esperanto O + K letters.)
Although that would be 8 + noun, which wouldn't work.
Precisely. As in "There is an eight (a figure eight) on that sheet of paper."
...and anyway, "oko" doesn't really sound enough like "O.K." to make it recognisable to people who know "O.K." from English.
o kej might work (two words to give stress on the kej part, as with ha lo! and hu ra!).
No - "itself" as an object referring to the same thing as the subject would be sin mem, as in ĝi detruas sin mem "It is destroying itself".
But couldn't ĝin mem be an emphatic way to say "it"? Can't the object of the sentence be emphasized with "mem"?
It would be incorrect, because the Esperanto word for "to clean" is "purigi". "Lavi" is a specific sort of cleaning - washing. (You don't was leather shoes, wooden furniture, or woollen carpets to clean them, for instance).
Maybe it's just me, but he really sounds like he's saying "porigos" not "purigos" in this recording.