Nah, we're not deprived and there's no problem (but there is still the tiny niggling asymmetry of not having an opposite of ek).

Can you elaborate on it-ism versus at-ism? Are you saying that (for example) mi estas skribinta means "I stopped writing" rather than "I have written"?

Roberto12:Nah, we're not deprived and there's no problem (but there is still the tiny niggling asymmetry of not having an opposite of ek).

Perhaps Esperanto is not meant to be symmetrical. Many things are easier to learn and understand if we don't try to squeeze them into a pattern of symmetry, because our relation to our environment is quite asymmetric. Perhaps.

Roberto12:
Can you elaborate on it-ism versus at-ism? Are you saying that (for example) mi estas skribinta means "I stopped writing" rather than "I have written"?

Probably not, because these things are completely unrelated.

Forigite

I understand now. Thanks Hyper.

The ata/ita dispute, as I recall it, was really over the misuse of phrases of the form estis X-ata by certain eminentuloj who should have known better, and who were, as I recall it, speakers whose mother tongue belonged to a certain group of related NW-European languages (German, Danish, Swedish etc).

Example: la kongreso estis malfermata de la Prezidanto instead of estis malfermita.

Nowadays it is only of historic interest. I can't recall seeing any atismoj in recent publications

That was the prime focus, and though the discussions may have wandered into discussing -inta that wasn't the issue.

Mostly 'I have written' is expressed in Esperanto with the simple form Mi skribis, which can also serve for I wrote (or even I was writing). In practice this doesn't seem to present a problem.

The real difference in English between I have written and I wrote is not so much finished action as finished time. If there is a gap between the time the speaker has in mind and the present then usually 'I have X-ed' is wrong. I believe there are some arguable exceptions or borderline cases.

You can see this by the strangeness of 'I have written 3 letters yesterday'.

Also, if you ask yourself what is the difference between 'Have you seen Susan?' and 'Did you see Susan?' in terms of what the speaker is thinking, or in terms of the situations where one form is used in preference to the other, then you begin to grasp the difference.