Kalantir:

UUano:
There is no verb in this rendering, which might be the source of confusion.

Apparently I'm still having difficulty with the idea of pleasant used as a verb. Typically when I try to think of the verb form I try to add -ing to the end of the English word. When that makes a fake word like "pleasanting" I start to get confused (I'm hating English more and more as time goes on...)

There's another confusion. "Pleasant" would be plezura, not plaĉa (which means "pleasing"). It's subtle, but "pleasant" and "pleasing" aren't quite interchangeable - so when I see plaĉas I think "pleases" instead of "*pleasants". Thus, somero plaĉas al mi means "summer pleases [is pleasing to] me".

It took a while for me to get used to adjectives and other parts of speech being used as verbs...but now I find it convenient and rather poetic.

Don't hate English...it's a wonderful[ly complex] language!

UUano:Don't hate English...it's a wonderful[ly complex] language!

I would argue that it is unnecessarily complex and inconsistent. To each his own I guess...

Kalantir:To each his own I guess...

Agreed!

Kalantir:Cool! Does the flexible sentence structure ever make it hard for people with different native languages to understand each other?

No

First - although beginners find grammatical markers like -n to be difficult, they enable you to scramble the sentence to some degree, while still making the meaning of each word clear.

Second - word order hardly varies by native language. Esperanto has a relatively standard word order that people use, regardless of native language. Technically one of the reasons for Esperanto's flexible order is that people can use an order that is comfortable to them, based on native language. But in practice, this isn't true. It would only be a beginner whose word order would be heavily influenced by their native language. Experienced speakers all speak with a very similar order. This order is very similar (but not identical) to the word order used in English. And as I mentioned, people do vary their order to make something sound nice or alter emphasis, and they are understood perfectly well.

erinja:

Kalantir:Cool! Does the flexible sentence structure ever make it hard for people with different native languages to understand each other?

No

First - although beginners find grammatical markers like -n to be difficult, they enable you to scramble the sentence to some degree, while still making the meaning of each word clear.

Second - word order hardly varies by native language. Esperanto has a relatively standard word order that people use, regardless of native language. Technically one of the reasons for Esperanto's flexible order is that people can use an order that is comfortable to them, based on native language. But in practice, this isn't true. It would only be a beginner whose word order would be heavily influenced by their native language. Experienced speakers all speak with a very similar order. This order is very similar (but not identical) to the word order used in English. And as I mentioned, people do vary their order to make something sound nice or alter emphasis, and they are understood perfectly well.

I find this intriging. Do you know why the word order seems be similar to English? You might expect something else as the early speakers, I understand, were like from Russia, France, Poland, and other Cental and East European places. Unless perhaps the word order in the languages from those places was similar to English.

cFlat7:Unless perhaps the word order in the languages from those places was similar to English.

I don’t know about Slavic languages, but in French it generally is.

Is the normal order in Esperanto that close to English's usual order?

Mi ne profunde studis la aferon - I haven't in great depth studied the question???

Esperanto estas lingvo internacia - Esperanto is a language international???

Pri tio vi certe malpravas - About that you certainly are wrong???

Be fair, sudanglo. Most people would say "internacia lingvo" and not "lingvo internacia". And I would say that most Esperantists would say "Vi certe malpravas pri tio" as the standard order. In my opinion, putting "pri tio" at the beginning of the sentence would qualify as a modified word order, in order to add emphasis.

For that matter, if you said "I haven't deeply studied the matter", that would be fine. (and deeply is a perfectly good translation for profunde)

At any rate I said similar to English's word order, not "identical".

I haven't studied the matter in detail. But I've seen a lot of beginners' Esperanto in the lessons I've corrected.

Many beginners who have studied another language seem to assume automatically that Esperanto's word order must be like that other language's order. They start putting all of their adjectives after the nouns (if they've studied Spanish) or all their verbs at the end of the sentence (if they've studied German). Telling them that Esperanto's basic word order is more similar to that of English can lift a great burden from their shoulders.

Esperanto's standard word order is subject-verb-object, like English. And adjectives are normally put before the noun, also like English. Though English can have a relatively rigid word order, adverbs can float with relative freedom. "I went quickly to the store" and "I quickly went to the store" are both correct.

cFlat7:I find this intriging. Do you know why the word order seems be similar to English? You might expect something else as the early speakers, I understand, were like from Russia, France, Poland, and other Cental and East European places. Unless perhaps the word order in the languages from those places was similar to English.

Their "default" word order is the same as English's from what I've seen.

Some notes though:
- Romance languages are semi SOV unlike English's basic SVO/VS(V2)O orders, although French has the whole VS(V2)O order happening too in questions sometimes I think?

- Russian, Polish etc never seemed to have a set word order, but often I hear "just put it in the same order as you do in English and you'll be fine". Earlier on the basic word order would have been SOV but back then so was Old English's

- German which I suspect must have been spoken by many Europeans at this time, has the infamous SVO(V2) order with subsequent verbs going at the end of the phrase, but otherwise is just like English.

So I guess in Zamenhoff's eyes it would have been easiest to go with something similar to English's SVO, since it's sorta the neutralist option in this sort of diverse climate

ceigered:although French has the whole VS(V2)O order happening too in questions sometimes I think?

Sure, the most famous example being voulez-vous coucher avec moi?.