erinja:...And even though you can't 'un-say' a word, duh, you're a beginner, anyone at all would forgive you if you said "Kio vi... oops Kion vi..." I feel like you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself to get everything perfect on the first try, and it's stressing you out. Relax.

OK, bit more time to write now... Had to be in the office today, but its lunch time.

Yes, most people seem to be at least moderately tolerant of someone struggling with language.

This kio/kion thing has, however, really shook my foundations about how I think I am being uderstood, even in English, by other people.

It seems that others regard what/who as a pronoun - which I simply don't. If you think of it as a pronoun, and you have a language that has an accusative case, then I can understand why people want to hear the accusative ending to the word. Completely understandable.

But a simple interrogative sentence in Enlgish, e.g. "Who are you chasing", I conceptualise as: Query about a person, you are chasing [blank], where [blank] is an unstated pronoun refering back to the interrogative.

The fact that even English speakers regard "who" as a pronoun in its own right has really thrown me. Right or wrong, I just find it weird.

It got me doubly annoyed when I found that E-o definitely took this (pronoun interrogrative) view. Without the pronoun interpretation of what exactly a word like "kio" is when used as an interrogative, a language, any language in fact, can function adequately. So it seemed particularly annoying to me.

(English) dictionary writers it seems to me, dont even agree on this. In some, many, you find words such as "why", "who" etc listed as "pronoun", or "interrogrative adverb". Others say "interrog". I've even looked up these up long before this problem came up. The dictionaries that say "pronoun" (or indeed any kind of noun, adjective or adverb) I just threw to one side thinking, "Grammarians, nutters".

It really didn't dawn on me that some real people, other than university linguistic professors, actually think of these words really and truly as a pronoun. It is genuinely quite a shock.

Esperanto speakers, with the exception of a very few jerks, are famously forgiving or beginner errors, and helpfully encouraging no matter how much you butcher the sentence you're trying to get out.
et. I promise.

Frankly that is one of the attractions of this whole group of people. On many forums that I have been a member of, a discussion that got as heated as this one would have resulted in a total flame war. The temperature didn't get as hot here

Nick

nw2394:
It seems that others regard what/who as a pronoun - which I simply don't. If you think of it as a pronoun, and you have a language that has an accusative case, then I can understand why people want to hear the accusative ending to the word. Completely understandable.

But "what" is a pronoun even in English. It substitutes for actual nouns, which is the very definition of a pronoun. That it's an interrogative pronoun simply narrows down what sort of pronoun it is. And of course, "what" and "which" also function as *relative* pronouns!

And I should remind you that English *does* have an accusative case, but only for personal pronouns. "Him I like" instead of "I like him" is acceptable (if slightly ethnic) English.

Remember that "kiu" is strictly speaking an interrogative adjective that modifies a noun either explicitly mentioned or assumed to be a person. It is capable of functioning as a pronoun because, like other Esperanto adjectives, it can be used without its modified noun.

The bad news is, "kies" is also an interrogative adjective that can function as an interrogative pronoun. "Kies vi vidis"=Whose (something or other) did you see? But "kies" accepts no grammatical endings. Compare,

"Kiun libron vi prenis?"
"Kies libron vi prenis?"

There's an example of an Esperanto grammatical irregularity.

The fact that even English speakers regard "who" as a pronoun in its own right has really thrown me. Right or wrong, I just find it weird.

Interrogative pronouns

It really didn't dawn on me that some real people, other than university linguistic professors, actually think of these words really and truly as a pronoun. It is genuinely quite a shock.

There's really no other way to classify them. Mere "interrogative" is too vague.

As you see with "kies", Esperanto has some quirks where the rules break down. And even though *almost* every Esperanto verb is defined in such a way as to be strictly transitive or intransitive, there are a handful of exceptions to that principle too. One noteworthy one is "fumi."

T0dd:There's really no other way to classify them. Mere "interrogative" is too vague.

With respect my friend, I am not sure you're thinking about it as deeply as I have had to. In the case where these words are used in an interrogative fashion, there genuinely is another way of parsing a sentence that does not require one to think of them as pronouns. Please re-read the bit in my previous post about how I conceptualise "Who are you chasing". It is perfectly workable (at least in English), to regard an interrogative as just that and that alone.

(But, I fully accept, if literally eveyone in the E-o world is going to take the pronoun oriented view and have an accusative as well, then it no longer works in that situation).

As you see with "kies", Esperanto has some quirks where the rules break down. And even though *almost* every Esperanto verb is defined in such a way as to be strictly transitive or intransitive, there are a handful of exceptions to that principle too. One noteworthy one is "fumi."

OK, I'll be on the lookout for fumi.

And I am aware that kies = de kiu, but does not quite work in E-o quite like the possesive pronouns (where mia = de mi).

I can deal with that as an exception. While I don't like exceptions, I can respect things if someone says it is an exception. (The kio/kiu question has been such a problem for me because I have a rule that works for me, and others seem to have a different rule).

Thanks

Nick

nw2394:
With respect my friend, I am not sure you're thinking about it as deeply as I have had to. In the case where these words are used in an interrogative fashion, there genuinely is another way of parsing a sentence that does not require one to think of them as pronouns. Please re-read the bit in my previous post about how I conceptualise "Who are you chasing". It is perfectly workable (at least in English), to regard an interrogative as just that and that alone.

You wrote:

But a simple interrogative sentence in Enlgish, e.g. "Who are you chasing", I conceptualise as: Query about a person, you are chasing [blank], where [blank] is an unstated pronoun refering back to the interrogative.

Given a generic query of the form "You are chasing [blank]" if we are told only that [blank] is a pronoun, we don't have enough information to resolve the sentence back to the "Who are you chasing" template.

It could be "You are chasing him?" since him is a pronoun and it's a query. This is why you need an *interrogative pronoun* to make sense of it, and not just the fact that it's a query with an unstated and unclassified pronoun. Put the wrong sort of pronoun in there and you have a different query.

I am sorry. I can't explain it to you further. I am not getting through.

Nick

nw2394:It seems that others regard what/who as a pronoun - which I simply don't. If you think of it as a pronoun, and you have a language that has an accusative case, then I can understand why people want to hear the accusative ending to the word. Completely understandable.

So don't regard it as a pronoun. Really. Who really cares how other English speakers want to view kiu/kio? They can regard it as the a verb for all I care. I personally just think of it as a "tabelvorto", or as a correlative if I absolutely must think of it using an English word. If it doesn't work out for your own personal understanding to think of it as a pronoun, then at a certain point there's no point in trying to wrap your brain around it. We're all different, and each person needs to work out their own individual system to explain to his or herself how to use a particular point of grammar. The point is - maybe some people call it a pronoun because it helps them understand how to use it, because in some (but not all) aspects kiu/kio acts like a pronoun. Evidently this explanation doesn't work for you. It's all well and good to listen to everyone's explanation for something but at a certain point, if someone's explanation is confusing you more than it's helping, in my opinion, it's time to thank them for their efforts, and pursue another line of explanations.

In any case, the PMEG gives examples of three different ways that the KI- tabelvortoj are used - as 'question words', as correlatives, and as exclamations. In the case of 'question words' (note that I'm not referring to them as interrogatives, because I think 'interrogative' at this point has hurt more than it has helped in your understanding). The PMEG says "A question KI- word represents information that one is looking for"

So just as someone was saying a bunch of messages back - the ki- word substitutes for the information you're looking for, so if the word you're looking for has -n, then the ki- word also has -n. Regarding pronouns - the furthest Bertilo is willing to go in the PMEG is to call words like kio and kiu "pronomecaj" - pronoun-ish. Not definitively pronouns, but in several (but again, not all) respects, behaving somewhat like pronouns. He makes this claim because these words can act to replace not only single nouns (or "O-words", rather than nouns in his text), but also "whole O-word phrases". So it sounds to me like the whole basis for comparing them to pronouns at all, according to Bertilo, is that they can substitute for phrases. I don't think this is what was springing to your mind when people were comparing kiu/kio to pronouns of any sort, further illustrating the dangers of describing Esperanto grammar using English grammatical terminology.

erinja:So don't regard it as a pronoun. Really. Who really cares how other English speakers want to view kiu/kio?

Thanks

Nick

erinja:Regarding pronouns - the furthest Bertilo is willing to go in the PMEG is to call words like kio and kiu "pronomecaj" - pronoun-ish. Not definitively pronouns, but in several (but again, not all) respects, behaving somewhat like pronouns. He makes this claim because these words can act to replace not only single nouns (or "O-words", rather than nouns in his text), but also "whole O-word phrases". So it sounds to me like the whole basis for comparing them to pronouns at all, according to Bertilo, is that they can substitute for phrases.

And of course, this is precisely what pronouns do as well. If I say "I saw him," then "him" can substitute for "the man who shot the intruder" (a phrase) as well as it can substitute for a specific name. I'm not as relativistic about these things. If something functions as a pronoun, then it is one. In this case, failing to see that these words function as pronouns is causing actual confusion.

I don't think this is what was springing to your mind when people were comparing kiu/kio to pronouns of any sort, further illustrating the dangers of describing Esperanto grammar using English grammatical terminology.

The functional category of pronoun is hardly specific to English. I believe you'd be hard pressed to find any language that doesn't have pronouns. Of course, pronouns are handled differently in different languages, just as one would expect.

Well, regardless of who says what about pronouns and pronounish words, I finally woke up this morning with this whole thing straight in my head. So I'm happy.

What does it for me is to think of kiu and kiun as marginally different words. Kiu is not just "who", but "who (causatively)... rest of question" and kiun is also not just "who", but "who is on the receiving end of... rest of question".

Thinking of it that way stops me having to think about a dreaded forward reference to a verb I haven't had to think about yet. Whereas kiun, regarded in the above light, pretty much forces the choice of a transitive verb.

It means I can maintain my sequential line of thought without having to think of too many things at once.

Well, it makes me happy anyway

Also as regards the kio versus kiu question it makes it clearer for me to think of kiu to specifically mean simply "which one (where one can be a person or a thing". As such it can represent an English "who, which or sometimes even what". And if you can't easily phrase what you want to say in English in terms of which *one*, then kio is appropriate instead.

And the pluralisation of some of these words is only equivalent to English saying "that" or "those". It is just that E-o does it with more of these correlative type words than English does.

So thanks to all those who have tried to help me with this. I think I finally got it.

Nick

T0dd:
The functional category of pronoun is hardly specific to English. I believe you'd be hard pressed to find any language that doesn't have pronouns. Of course, pronouns are handled differently in different languages, just as one would expect.

Part of the confusion here may be that the Esperanto community itself can't agree on exactly what to call a pronoun. Below is my translation of vortaro.org's definition of "pronomo"; note that I'm a mechanical engineer and not a linguist, so my terminology is most probably off, and is somewhat reflective of Esperanto's word-building aspects rather than official linguistic usage:

Pronomo:

1. A special word serving to replace a name, that is a noun or adjective pronoun; personal pronouns mi, ĝi, ŝi, ili; possessive pronouns mia, ĝiaj etc, demonstrative pronouns tio, ĉi tiuj, tian, etc are also pronouns.

Note: This interpretation of the notion is classical and was held in the Russian and Eastern European schools. It is partly owing to the fact that in some language (and also in Esperanto) there are words that combine the functions of the adjective- and noun-functioning pronouns: iu, kiu, unu, etc. Zamenhof used the word 'pronomo' thus: "the following nine words (ia, ial, iam, ie, iel, ies, io, iom, iu), we advise that you learn well, because using them you can make for yourself a large series of pronouns and adverbs. " The classical grammars treated the pronouns as a separate manner of speaker - that is a confusing manner of thinking. They tried to rationalize it in two ways: by limiting the concept of the noun-functioning pronouns, that is the manner of the western grammatical schools, of PV, PAG, and PIV (under heading "pronomo"); or the opposite way, to generalize the concept while acknowledging that it has to do with another (pragmatic) dimension, and to extend the concept so that it covers all table words (also the adverbs, and more generally - also the pronoun-related verbs). In the modern science of linguistics, all three schools are represented.

2. A word replacing a noun that is understood.

Note: According to this school (subscribed to by the PV, PIV, and PAG), the "possessive pronouns" are not pronouns, however the term remains there.

3. A word from a closed lexical-semantic group of role words used in speaking situations, receiving their meaning relative to the speakers (personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns), or to the context (referring to something already mentioned: ĝi, tiu, tie), or to the grammatical role in the sentence (sia, mem, kiun), logical quantities

Note: According to this definition, many, but not all, pronouns are tabelvortoj
[all notes by Sergio Pokrovskij; this text was taken from the "pronomo" definition at vortaro.org]