Meir
lai2le as in kafei laile. What does the le character mean and what is its pinyin? When handing something over, such as when someone orders a coffee and their coffee is brought to them, my book uses the expression kafei lai le. It doesn't translate the parts of lai le or give the pinyin tones. When I looked up the character lai in my dictionary I found it listed as "comes; arrives" so that "Kafei laile" would seem to literally mean "Here comes the coffee". I would understand that if it only said "Kafei lai" but what does the le mean? I couldn't find it in my dictionary or nciku.com but it looks exactly like the last character in taihaole ( a word I only saw in my book translated as great or super but I couldn't find in the dictionary). So in short, what is the pinyin for laile and what does le itself mean in the phrase and by itself?
1 ott 2009 21:12
Risposte · 2
"le" just indicate "past tense" without any substantive meaning le usually follows a verb to express the action(of the verb) has (been) done. ka1 fei1 lai 2 le (untoned) simply equal "here you go"
2 ottobre 2009
Hello Meir, 咖啡来了 Yes it means " here comes the coffee" It is lai2 ( second tone) le ( 5th or no tone) 了here is used as a modal particle intensifying the preceding clause or it is used as completed action maker. It is difficult to translate that word in English ,because it doesn't have any equivalent . Many Chinese would tell you " it has no meaning ". Yet in Chinese you will have noticed that those particles are used many times as question tags or auxiliary particles and do add a certain emphasis to the sentence that couldn't be literally translated in English.
1 ottobre 2009
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