1. Forum
  2. >
  3. Topic: Esperanto
  4. >
  5. "Ili renkontas lin."

"Ili renkontas lin."

Translation:They meet him.

June 15, 2015



alternative translation: "They encounter him." ?


I think so. I'd report it if it doesn't take.

Assuming wiktionary is correct: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/renkonti#Esperanto


Does this mean that they are meeting him for the first time, or that they are simply meeting up?


Someone may know better, but I've always seen it as the latter when used.


I think the jealousy from earlier got too much... I'm sending my hitmen in.


I think these must be the brothers of the girl he's been kissing, and they are about to have a friendly chat with him.


Not "They met him" then?


Met would be past tense, so ili renkontis lin.


Is it wrong to assume that whenever "him" is used in English, in Esperanto it will be the accusative lin?


Lin is only used when it's the direct object. With linking verbs or after prepositions you use the nominative.


Why not "renkontras"?


It's not a word.


Bit of a gangster situation here.


If Esperanto is supposed to be easy, why it have "accusative case"? I mean, why not "he" instead of "her"? What is the difficult? In portuguese we don't have it and there's no problem for us. What a pain! PS: Sorry my bad english.


It's suppose to be a world language and not every language has a Subject-Verb-Object word order. Irish, for example, uses a VSO order. By allowing for a change in the word order, people that think in a different language can still be understood by anyone. So this sentence can be written as:

Ili renkontas lin.

Renkontas lin ili.

Lin renkontas ili.

Renkontas ili lin.

Ili lin renkontas.

Lin ili renkontas.

and they all mean the same thing. This might seem hard to learn, but not everyone in the world thinks in the same word order as you might. So it would be hard for them. There's really no possible way to make a language that would be easy for everyone due to how different various languages are around the world. This probably also explains why it's mostly spoken in countries where everyone already recognizes most of the words anyway.


With that case, it makes identifying the direct object easier regardless of where it's located. On top of that it's literally just adding an "n" to the word so once you realize what it is and how to do it, there is no memorizing tons of exceptions to this rule. Take English for example, you learn one rule only to find that there are tons of exceptions.

I think it might've been used to allow more play in sentence structure, or the creators of the language used it in their native languages and found it useful. Either way, it's part of Esperanto now.

Learn Esperanto in just 5 minutes a day. For free.