Worry about + phrase
ca, kivuye
Ubutumwa 77
ururimi: English
Chainy (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 14 Ruhuhuma 2012 01:18:13
EldanarLambetur:Apologies for the massive mind dump!Makes me wonder what happened to Ceigered...
RiotNrrd (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 14 Ruhuhuma 2012 04:54:11
sudanglo (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 14 Ruhuhuma 2012 11:26:19
If, in the case of 75% of the speakers of some natural language, you saw certain 'grammatical errors', then it becomes difficult to argue that these 'grammatical errors' are not part of the language' - in English now, which is correct, 10 items or less, or 10 items or fewer.
Now, most of the speakers of Esperanto are learners with different degrees of competence. But there is no tendency for their 'errors' to become part of the language.
It doesn't matter how many times these speakers forget the accusative, or in the past have forgotten it, the language is not going to make the accusative optional (proper names excepted).
EldanarLambetur (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 15 Ruhuhuma 2012 18:11:10
That's indeed why I don't feel too worried about there being a fair amount of Esperanto speakers with a good few misunderstandings of the grammar - I'm just happy they've taken up Esperanto! Because I know that the grammar is a great deal harder to alter than English's.
Hyperboreus (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 15 Ruhuhuma 2012 22:21:28
Hyperboreus (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 15 Ruhuhuma 2012 22:38:22
sudanglo (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 15 Ruhuhuma 2012 23:35:58
A human language is a living organismBalderdash! Esperanto is a human language but has no resemblance to a biological organism - this is a false analogy. Nor is Esperanto a doctrine.
Furthermore, there really is no point in exposing young children to Esperanto.
Esperanto's purpose is to be a language that adults can quickly learn for the purposes of international communication, and as such it falls into a different category to the natural languages.
In the unlikely event of there arising a significant number of denaskuloj and that they showed signs of evolving the language in a higgledy-piggledy manner, in the fashion that natural languages develop, then this trend would have to be resisted not from any doctrinal reasons but out of sheer common sense.
It would undermine the usefulness of Esperanto and remove one of its important characteristics that no one group of speakers should be in a privileged position with special authority over the language, as native speakers of natural languages have in relation to foreign learners. (This is a quite separate point to it being easier for Europeans than Orientals.)
sudanglo (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 15 Ruhuhuma 2012 23:51:38
No matter which language, there is no better way to learn it than as a baby.That might be true of natural languages, but where is the hard evidence that denaskuloj of Esperanto speak the language better than spertuloj who learnt it in adulthood.
I've spoken to denaskuloj and spertuloj. You can't immediately tell them apart. Actually some denaskuloj have poor accents and poor grammar (apparently).
I am afraid, Hyperboreus, that you are making the linguists' mistake and not recognizing that Esperanto IS different.
sudanglo (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 15 Ruhuhuma 2012 23:54:36
Esperanto by design must not (evolve)Not true! The language has evolved BUT without losing its underlying regularity.
In the case of natural languages the speakers of those languages are not motivated to conserve regularity or to inhibit the adoption of opaque idiomatic usage.
Quite the reverse in the Esperanto speaking community. Sociological fact!
And what makes the accumulation of ever-increasing amounts of historical baggage 'benign' linguistic evolution. Just exactly what is benign about this process
pdenisowski (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 15 Ruhuhuma 2012 23:56:42
Hyperboreus:Exactely the same process is happening to German nowadays. (Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod. Very nice pun.)Don't know if you've seen them, but Bastien Sick has written a series of books with this title (Folge 1-4). I've read the first three and they're an EXCELLENT (and very amusing) description of how the German language is changing over time.
Amike,
Paul