Naava wrote:To my ears this sounds like something bad has happened at the school and that's why you need to bring your kids home.
I don't know if that's just me and my connotations though. The more I think about it, the more confused I get.
I haven't studied Estonian long enough to say anything for sure about
lapsi/lapsed, but if it's anything like in Finnish I'd say:
I think it should be
ma pean lapsed koolist koju tooma if you mean that you're going to take them home now.
Ma pean lapsi koolist koju tooma sounds like you have many kids and their school day ends at different hours, so that you need to go to the school again and again and again. Or maybe that you're taking someone else's kids to their homes? Like a taxi driver or something?
Of course you could use partitive with
koolist koju tooma, but then I'd use some other verb than
pidama:
ma olen lapsi koolist koju toomas* (I'm right now in the car with the kids, coming home),
ma hakkasin lapsi koolist koju tooma** (I've started to take them home, someone else did it before)
ma sõitsin oma lapsi koolist koju tooma (I went to take the kids home) and so on.
Also btw, these don't sound odd to me at all.
All that makes sense. Thanks!
Naava wrote:I don't know what it is with that
pean koju tooma that makes me think "what happened??".
Maybe because it's something you are saying you
have to do it, so you are wondering "why does that have to be done? Has something happened?" Your other examples don't say you
have to do it. And our other sentences that say you
have to mostly use
käima, which is used for repetitive actions, so instead of sounding like "something has happened and I must go get them!", with
käima it sounds more like something you do all the time.
Naava wrote:* I think this is possible in Estonian, too, but I can't check it with Google because it just gives me results with "Toomas". Thanks, Google.
** And this one just gave me results with the Finnish verb hakata, to beat something / to beat someone up. Just what I wanted to have in my search history!
LOL! What on earth have you been doing to the poor children? And who is this Toomas guy who is picking your kids up from school?
kloie wrote:What's the difference between mäletama,meeles pidama,meenutama,mitte unustama?.
Quite similar to the differences between these English translations:
mäletama = to remember, to preserve in memory
meeles pidama = to remember, to keep in mind, to keep in your thoughts
mitte unustama = to remember, to not forget
meenutama = to bring to mind, to remind you of something, to think back on, look back on
So
mäletama,
meeles pidama and
mitte unustama can be used as synonyms in some situations, but have slightly different shades of meaning, just as the meanings other than "to remember" do in English.
Meenutama to me seems to be more different from the others. It seems more focused on the past (dealing with things you already have in your memory) while the other three can be future-oriented. In other words, in addition to talking about your memories of the past, you can use
mäletama,
meeles pidama and
mitte unustama when talking about things that happen today, that you want to remember for the future; I think you wouldn't normally use
meenutama that way.*
* Maybe you would use
meenutama to talk about the future in the sense of "now every time I see him, it's going to make me think of what you just said about him" or something like that... but
meenutama is about something triggering a memory that already exists (whether the "trigger" is something involuntary or your actively trying to think back on the past), not about the act of committing it to memory or keeping it there.