Chainy: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

Yup, that seems like a good idea to me.

Forigite

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.

Sorry, I guess this had to do with some kind of interference... somehow I associate "homo" with "hombre" in spanish, althoug they have nothing in common, actually. Maybe because of the first three letters make me think that the two words are related.
You just reminded me something I already knew: Viro as "man".

Any way, I stand corrected, thanks.

Forigite

Hyperboreus:"Linguotechnology" seems to be a bit of an odd word, as I only got one hit in google, and that hit stated "The terms synthetic philology, synthesizing linguistics, linguotechnology are no longer in use in linguistics, but the underlying concept continues to develop and ..."

I coined the word ad hoc, as I didn't know better (as I said, I don't feel capable to discuss this stuff in English). I meant "from the point of view of designing a planned language in an optimal way".

I've always been curious about the -aŭ words. Why those particular words? They are irregular in the sense that they don't conform to the part of speech marking rules of Esperanto--at least not entirely. POS endings can be added to them. It's not clear to me what Zamenhof hoped to achieve by putting them into Esperanto.

That said, I'm glad he did. I've always liked them, and find that they add a note of elegance, at least to my ear.

I'm sure something has been written about this somewhere.

T0dd:I've always been curious about the -aŭ words. Why those particular words? They are irregular in the sense that they don't conform to the part of speech marking rules of Esperanto--at least not entirely. POS endings can be added to them. It's not clear to me what Zamenhof hoped to achieve by putting them into Esperanto.

That said, I'm glad he did. I've always liked them, and find that they add a note of elegance, at least to my ear.

I'm sure something has been written about this somewhere.

Claus Günkel, 1996, „Adiaŭ, naŭ ĵaŭdaj fraŭlinoj!” (pri la etimologio de la finaĵo –aŭ) en: Literatura Foiro 27/162

IIRC, according to Günkel Zamenhof took some original adverbs as they were: quasi, ancora, balde*, addio and added -u as a "neutral" ending; the resulting *kvaziŭ, ankoraŭ, baldeŭ, adioŭ for euphonic reasons were changed to end in -aŭ, as in ĵaŭdo < *ĵeŭdo < French jeudi.

*19-th century form; in modern German it's bald

Kirilo81:
Claus Günkel, 1996, „Adiaŭ, naŭ ĵaŭdaj fraŭlinoj!” (pri la etimologio de la finaĵo –aŭ) en: Literatura Foiro 27/162

IIRC, according to Günkel Zamenhof took some original adverbs as they were: quasi, ancora, balde*, addio and added -u as a "neutral" ending; the resulting *kvaziŭ, ankoraŭ, baldeŭ, adioŭ for euphonic reasons were changed to end in -aŭ, as in ĵaŭdo < *ĵeŭdo < French jeudi.

*19-th century form; in modern German it's bald

Thank you, that's very interesting. Some of these words, such as kvazaŭ, are grammatically amorphous, and it could be a burden for the user to have to figure out just how it's being used in a given case. The neutral ending allows this problem to be bypassed. Others, however, such as apenaŭ, baldaŭ, and ankoraŭ seem to function strictly as adverbs. If they were "apene", "balde", and "ankore", they would appear to be derived adverbs, which they aren't.

Hodiaŭ, hieraŭ, and morgaŭ are interesting cases. They function in much the same way as the days of the week, lundo, mardo, etc. We use -N to say "on Monday" or "on Tuesday"-- lundon, mardon. Or we use je-- je lundo, je mardo. If the Esperanto words were hodio, hiero, and morgo, we would no doubt do the same with them. Alternatively, Z. might have used -AŬ for all of them: lundaŭ, mardaŭ, etc. I wonder if he considered either possibility.

I'd like to insert a few bits into this interesting thread. Firstly, as has already been said more than once, the problem with having "regular" personal pronouns at the same time as the derivation of possessive adjectives, is that you get the plural suffix wedged in the middle (e.g. "obsik" in Volapük, and "ilia" in Ido) and this to almost everyone's eyes is ugly. I think the best approach is to have semi-regular pronouns, such as Esperanto does.

Secondly, regarding the order of the plural and accusative suffixes, aesthetically pleasing as Esperanto's paradigm is, we run into the problem of words of unknown number having their brackets within-word, e.g. "hundo(j)n" as opposed to "dogi(s)" in Volapük. I think this is something that we as Esperantists have to just grin and bear.

Lastly, just a trivial comment to correct a mistake from earlier. Arie de Jong's proposed (but later ignored) inclusive first-person-plural pronoun was "ogs" not "ods". And the singular form of this pronoun, by the way, means "you or I", which I think is a nice little innovation.

Roberto12:Lastly, just a trivial comment to correct a mistake from earlier. Arie de Jong's proposed (but later ignored) inclusive first-person-plural pronoun was "ogs" not "ods". And the singular form of this pronoun, by the way, means "you or I", which I think is a nice little innovation.

Oh, thanks for this correction, I mixed it with the reciprocative.
I fully agree also with the other thoughts you wrote.