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I quit

de goliath07, 21 novembre 2012

Messages : 119

Langue: English

erinja (Voir le profil) 25 novembre 2012 17:59:26

I see inherency of root type as something that is natural to languages. Words have a natural grammatical value in English as well (sometimes more than one natural grammatical value, like in Esperanto), and this affects the word building you can do with the word. For example, "warm" is an adjective root, if you will. To make it a noun we say "warmth" or "warmness". You can't make the noun back into an adjective - "warmthy"? So it's clear that the noun is based on the adjective and not vice versa.

I think that human brains are organized to think of some words as "thing", some words as "actions", and some words as "descriptors". Different languages, however, make slightly different choices, for a given word, on whether to classify it as a thing, an action, or a description. This is where the difficulty comes in when learning a foreign language. Another language's choice might not be the same as your language's choice, particularly when the word has multiple native classes in your language. The English word "regret" can be a noun root or a verb root (a regret, to regret). We add a suffix to the root to make it an adjective 'regretful'.

The difference between English and Esperanto is that English word building is *so* irregular that there's almost no point in trying to do it.

I think that if the 'native root' aspect of language were taken away from Esperanto, it would become quite difficult and unnatural.

I would much rather memorize a few native word classes by rote. You have to do it with other languages anyway. You feel joy and you feel happy - but joy is a noun and happy is an adjective. Someone might be angry that they have to memorize that joy is a noun and happy is an adjective in order to use them correctly.

erinja (Voir le profil) 25 novembre 2012 18:08:50

goliath07:I don't want to discourage anyone from learning it, it's a fun language if it works for you. I just can no longer justify the time.
This is why you were accused of trolling.

When I am no longer interested in doing something, I stop doing it.

I don't post to a forum of that thing and give all the reasons why I don't want to do it anymore.

What did you hope to accomplish with that?

darkweasel (Voir le profil) 25 novembre 2012 18:33:37

erinja:
goliath07:I don't want to discourage anyone from learning it, it's a fun language if it works for you. I just can no longer justify the time.
This is why you were accused of trolling.

When I am no longer interested in doing something, I stop doing it.

I don't post to a forum of that thing and give all the reasons why I don't want to do it anymore.
... especially, no offense intended, if I'm somebody with <10 posts on that forum where people probably wouldn't have noticed anyway.

sudanglo (Voir le profil) 25 novembre 2012 20:40:37

It seems to me quite plausible Erinja, that the basic parts of speech (grammatical classes) are just abstractions of semantic notions - thing, action, quality - and that they are universal.

And you don't even have to change languages to see how the same idea can be conceived of as one part of speech or another. Eg Heat (thing) hot/warm (quality).

My favourite current example of how word-building in Esperanto reduces the learning load is the following:

rapido - speed; rapida - fast; rapidi - hurry; rapide - quickly.

And of course in addition to learning four separate words the student of English has to learn that speed can also be a verb, as hurry can also be a noun. But to fast is something quite different, and to quick is a no-no. Fast can be adjective and adverb (don't drive so fast), but quick can only be an adjective.

The Esperanto system seems child's play by comparison.

sudanglo (Voir le profil) 25 novembre 2012 21:00:45

Maybe, Goliath, you are overlooking the fact that in Esperanto (because the language is far less bound to standard ways of saying things) there is considerable flexibility in sentence construction.

If you find it easier to use a structure like 'I first became an Esperantist in 2001' you can say 'Mi unue fariĝis Esperantisto en 2001'.

If you don't like 'Vidite man-en-mana kun ŝi, li devis edzinigi ŝin', you can reformulate that as Ĉar oni vidis lin, dum ili promenis man-en-mane, li estis devigata fariĝi ŝia edzo - or in some other way.

burungmarah (Voir le profil) 26 novembre 2012 09:39:26

Let me try to understand this:

pura [adj] means "clean" and pur- is the stem

Let's convert this to three forms of verbs:

puri = to be clean
purigi = to make clean
puriĝi = to become clean (dynamic compared to puri)

Am I right?

And one tip for Goliath07, how about learning Asian languages like Japanese, Korean or even Malay for a change? The root forms of Japanese and Korean verbs and adjectives all have the same suffix: -u for the former, -da for the latter. Even when inflected into continuous or past tense they all follow the same pattern; in Japanese, it's all -mashita, and as for Korean, it's all -sseumnida. Easy, huh?

Even easier, in Malay words don't conjugate with tense; we just put an adverb before the verb, i.e. telah (past), akan[/] (future).

The biggest problem faced by Asian learners of English, especially East Asians, is that before they began to pick up the language, they expect a rather 'regular' grammar like theirs. And they have to go through hundreds of past tense forms that don't follow the same pattern as the rest on top of a crazy spelling system.

hebda999 (Voir le profil) 26 novembre 2012 10:12:34

burungmarah:The biggest problem faced by Asian learners of English, especially East Asians, is that before they began to pick up the language, they expect a rather 'regular' grammar like theirs. And they have to go through hundreds of past tense forms that don't follow the same pattern as the rest on top of a crazy spelling system.
That is why English is English in spite of what they intend to make of it. And English spelling system is not crazy - it is just irregular and hardly phonetic.

tommjames (Voir le profil) 26 novembre 2012 11:32:04

burungmarah:puri = to be clean
purigi = to make clean
puriĝi = to become clean (dynamic compared to puri)

Am I right?
Yes.

AnFu (Voir le profil) 26 novembre 2012 14:44:18

hebda999:
burungmarah:The biggest problem faced by Asian learners of English, especially East Asians, is that before they began to pick up the language, they expect a rather 'regular' grammar like theirs. And they have to go through hundreds of past tense forms that don't follow the same pattern as the rest on top of a crazy spelling system.
That is why English is English in spite of what they intend to make of it. And English spelling system is not crazy - it is just irregular and hardly phonetic.
Nah, English spelling is totally crazy.

Bemused (Voir le profil) 26 novembre 2012 15:19:44

English "spelling" is totally regular once you realise that words are actually ideograms that happen to be composed from letters of the latin alphabet.
The difficulty that people have comes from the mistaken idea that there is some correlation between sound and letter.

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