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Hyperboreus:So in Esperanto -a denotes an attribute like 的 in Chinese according to your example (wo-de = mi-a). So, "The book you bought yesterday isn't bad" (你昨天买的书不错), where "you bought yesterday" is an attribute to "book" would translate as "Vi aĉetisa libro ne estas malbona."

Well, a proper Esperanto sentence is very close to that...
(La) De vi aĉetita libro ne estas malbona.

Hyperboreus:I do not know who started the myth that Eo was isolating?

I don't say that it is isolating only, it has traits of an isolating language (also isolating = has this trait among others). I write what I have read in Claude Piron's articles - he knows better. If you think otherwise, write your own article and enrich our knowledge. Your example only shows that the Chinese language is more isolating than Esperanto. And that was not the aim of my post.

Esperanto, a western language?

Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

I write what I have read in Claude Piron's articles - he knows better.

Claude Piron is completely incorrect in even proposing that Esperanto could be isolating. I could pick apart his entire essay, but I'd rather not fill up another thread with off topic posts.

razlem:

I write what I have read in Claude Piron's articles - he knows better.

Claude Piron is completely incorrect in even proposing that Esperanto could be isolating. I could pick apart his entire essay, but I'd rather not fill up another thread with off topic posts.

Please do. Then, perhaps, you'll notice finally that he did not say "Esperanto is the isolating language", but only "it has many traits of such a language which make it more familiar to Asians". This is what I was trying to point out, with minor success as it seems.

Piron's essay does seem somewhat at variance with the prevailing view that Esperanto is more of an agglutinative language than isolating, but imho he does present some valuable insights with respect to Esperanto's place in the linguistic landscape. While one may dispute that Esperanto "is basically an isolating language", as he states, it undoubtedly has traits of one.

John Well's Lingvistikaj Apekstoj de Esperanto contains the following passage (translated to English):

Wells:The enthusiasts of the nineteenth century saw the three language-groups (isolating, agglutinative, inflectional) as mutually exclusive: every language must belong to one and only one of the three types. But the facts do not support that idea. We can now see that one language can, to some degree, belong to all three groups. Isolation, agglutination, flectionality are not absolutes but rather exist on a gradient. For example English appears sometimes isolating (he will write), sometimes agglutinative (un-end-ing-ly), sometimes inflectional (took/take).

Even in Esperanto, an extremely agglutinative language, there are some elements characteristic of isolating languages; specifically, the standalone (single-morpheme) words used in analytic constructions. Those are the pronouns, the primitive adverbs (apenaŭ, ja, ĵus, tre etc), the prepositions, conjunctions, numerals and others - words consisting of a single morpheme.

I personally find the above a better explanation than Piron's "one must consider Esperanto basically non-agglutinative" and "on the intrinsic plane this has yielded the conclusion that Esperanto is basically an isolating language."

@hebda999

What could possibly be european about the esperanto grammer..?
Huh lets see here~
Eh!! For starters, it uses the correletives as relitives, which is a typical european method.. It uses the verb "est(i) awful alot just like in English, and even if Zamenhof did give a little freedom in speech, in reality the word ordering is greatly influanced by european languages..

So the so called "INTERNACIA LINGVO" just isn't that.

eitanulo:So the so called "INTERNACIA LINGVO" just isn't that.

Why can't an international language be European-based? The "internationalness" of the language follows from its use, not from its composition.

hebda999:Please do. Then, perhaps, you'll notice finally that he did not say "Esperanto is the isolating language", but only "it has many traits of such a language which make it more familiar to Asians". This is what I was trying to point out, with minor success as it seems.

But every language has isolating features. English is more isolating than Esperanto. So it must be easier for the Chinese to learn English than Esperanto, according to Piron's logic.

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