Forigite

"orthohawk skribis:"I was told once by a linguistics professor (PhD in Linguistics; how he managed that without knowing the following fact is beyond me) that Esperanto couldn't be a "real" language because "real" languages don't put the plural marker before the case marker."

So German is not a real language?

And Persian too?

Noun+plurar marker(hâ)+blank space+case marker(râ).

Bemused:Apologies for going off topic.
Does anyone know if there is/has been any attempt to develop a "Regular English", as in English with irregularities removed?

I once goed an entire day speaking as if every verb beed regular. I doed the same with nouns. You shalled have seed the looks I getted from other persons. Apparently it bes rather dangerous for childs and small animals.

orthohawk:

Bemused:Apologies for going off topic.
Does anyone know if there is/has been any attempt to develop a "Regular English", as in English with irregularities removed?

I once goed an entire day speaking as if every verb beed regular. I doed the same with nouns. You shalled have seed the looks I getted from other persons. Apparently it bes rather dangerous for childs and small animals.

Amusing! I love being in touch with people who can manage things like you did ("regularizing" verbs and nouns in english). Also, I admire people who can make abstractions about something as abstract as languages

I wish I could write in Esperanto as correctly (bad!) as I do in english. I'll have to persevere...

(Amuza! Mi amas esti en kontakto kun homoj kiu povas fari tion kiel vi. Ankaŭ, mi admiras homoj kiu povas abstrakti de tio tiel abstrakta kiel lingvoj
Mi deziras mi povus skribi en Esperanto tiel bone (malbona!) kiel mi skribas en Angla... Mi devos persisti)

BTW, is there another word for "people" in E-o different from "homoj". I don't want to know what will happen when feminists find this out, which of course must've happened long ago by now LOL

nachole_o:I don't want to know what will happen when feminists find this out, which of course must've happened long ago by now LOL

Uhm, why? Homo is clearly gender-neutral.

I'm sorry that I need to write this.

But why in the world pops each month atleast thousands threads up about the regularity of
Esperanto, about is it gender neutral? Too eurocentric? Hell whatever else, always
each time the same old totally boring topics.

In short if you have a problem with Esperanto how it is at the moment, then go to
a natural language or another planned language of your choice.

Esperanto won't change into your viewpoint of a perfect language. As this perfectionism is always
the viewpoint of a specific group of people ( you and your perception of reality and
those who you can bring after years of work on your side ). Also perfectionism as
it is a noble goal, doesn't reflect anything in reality nothing I am aware of is
"perfect". Perfectionism is also some kind of avoiding the criticism of people,
as the thinking-error is, that when something is perfect, then nobody would
complain about it. But as nothing in this world is perfect, people will always
attack each other based on their flawed perception of reality, that something
needs to be perfect to be good. Learning how to actually defend yourself against
the destructive opinions, neglect and hate of others is actually more interesting
than perfectionism about how Esperanto should be.

So my long rambling about Esperanto is just about, stop with brawling about what
could be better and start using it for what it is supposed to be:

1. A tool for international communication
2. For the idealistic ones (if Esperanto isn't thought solely as a language but as a movement and
thought about making the world a better place): help to prevent internationally misunderstandings

darkweasel:

nachole_o:I don't want to know what will happen when feminists find this out, which of course must've happened long ago by now LOL

Uhm, why? Homo is clearly gender-neutral.

I guess it doesn't help that many dictionaries list "man" as the English translation. That's the "member of the human species" definition of man, but I guess some people don't pick up on that. Revo also has "viro" as an equivalent, which is possibly misleading.

The tendency to assume the masculinity of "homo" is something I've noticed with quite a few speakers. Perhaps this is one of those words that sort of sits in the middle between complete gender-neutrality, and words like "patro", "filo" etc at the opposite end.

orthohawk:
I once goed an entire day speaking as if every verb beed regular. I doed the same with nouns. You shalled have seed the looks I getted from other persons. Apparently it bes rather dangerous for childs and small animals.

I've entertained the thought of picking a day and speaking Pig Latin to everyone I encounter. Never did it, though.

Hyperboreus:

Kirilo81:
Another problem: How do you derive possessive pronouns from this kind of pronominal system? You would need a proper suffix.

Remark: The pronouns in -o are not inanimate, they're not marked for this distinction at all, but they are used for inanimates as these lack a proper pronoun.

Use the same -a ending for possessive pronouns:
mua
vua
ĝua, ĝoa
muja
vuja
ĝuja, ĝoja

OK, you got a inflection morpheme before a derivational morpheme (e.g. in muja, mujaj, mujan, mujajn), but who cares? It is a conlang after all.
Or just don't use any morpheme at all and just use the unaltered pronoun as an adjunct to a DP in order to express possession. Works fine in a lot of languages.

Yes, but it should fit to the overall system, and something like muja is totally alien to Esperanto (single exception: vivui, which is a loan translation from Polish wiwatować).
And even worse, this solution would break the anaolgy to the pronouns, where you don't find *kiuja etc., so linguotechnologically it is inferior to the current system, as it makes you suppose a regularity where there finally is no.

This reminds me that Volapük has the same problem, namely it has ob - obs, but the genitive and the possessive are oba/obik - obsa/obsik (cf. regular declension men, mena → mens, menas; → menik), so there is some irregularity in this.

This is a general problem for agglutinative languages, IIRC in Turkish the expressions "his houses" and "their house" are the same, as there is only one plural marker.

tommjames:I guess it doesn't help that many dictionaries list "man" as the English translation. That's the "member of the human species" definition of man, but I guess some people don't pick up on that. Revo also has "viro" as an equivalent, which is possibly misleading.

The Lernu dictionary also contained the word 'man' as a translation of 'homo'. At first I edited this to the following:

homo = human being, man (in the sense of "a human being of either sex" ), person

However, it just seems confusing and not really necessary to enter 'man' in there. How about just translating it as such:

homo = human being, person

At the moment, the latter translation is in the dictionary, but we can always reenter 'man' if anyone thinks it's necessary.