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Esperanto Source Languages

av Bemused, 23 januari 2013

Meddelanden: 29

Språk: English

Bemused (Visa profilen) 23 januari 2013 04:56:06

There is a rule of Esperanto that if a word has a common meaning in a number of languages it can be used in Esperanto.
Which languages are these?

Demian (Visa profilen) 23 januari 2013 09:56:43

Bemused:There is a rule of Esperanto that if a word has a common meaning in a number of languages it can be used in Esperanto.
Which languages are these?
If you have a word with a fairly similar form and meaning in West European languages, it can be included in Esperanto.

They say a word has to be international. By "international" it usually means found in West European languages (French, English, Spanish and Portuguese).

German and Russian play a role too.

Asian, African and Native American languages don't count.

Oh yes! You can also create new words either from existing roots, or borrow new roots from mainly Latin, Greek or a handful of European languages.

sudanglo (Visa profilen) 23 januari 2013 10:02:10

As a rule of thumb you can take it that if a word has a similar form and meaning in French, German and English then it is admissible under rule 15 with appropriate Esperantigo.

An even simpler rule is that if both French and English share the word then it is probably an 'international' word.

Of course when the idea can be easily and obviously expressed in Esperanto using Esperanto's word building system then that is probably the common form rather than an international borrowing.

Chainy (Visa profilen) 23 januari 2013 17:34:22

sudanglo:An even simpler rule is that if both French and English share the word then it is probably an 'international' word.
Are you sure you don't want to narrow that down any further?! ridulo.gif

sudanglo (Visa profilen) 23 januari 2013 18:17:59

No Chainy, if English and American share the same word that doesn't mean it is international in rule 15 terms, however many words that fall in this category happen to be internationally recognizable, because so many people are learning English (not the Americans however, (smile)).

Bemused (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2013 01:22:06

Thanks everyone for your input.
Will go with English, French, and German, and ignore the Americans who pretend to speak English, but actually speak a different language by assigning different meanings to English words.

SethDamien (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2013 03:18:36

But can this rule reasonably said to be followed if the word comes from modern English, say since the widespread adoption of the Internet? Since the word will have gotten its meaning in almost all languages directly from the English meaning, I'd still say it was an English word, and not 'international' at all.

I feel similarly to words which follow the same form as English words, but are etymologically separate. A possible example is 'fadeno' which means 'thread' and has also come to mean the equivalent of the Internet-English word 'thread' as applied to a coherent topic on a forum such as this one. I'm skeptical about usage such as this, novice though I am, as I don't think Esperanto (or any language) should simply be a carbon-copy of English.

erinja (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2013 03:38:33

There is no fixed set of languages that must have a word for it to be incorporated using the 15th rule.

For me, personally, I would require that a word exist not only in multiple languages but also in multiple families for me to consider adding it. Just because a word exists, for example, in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, I wouldn't add it. It would help if the word also had a similar form in a Germanic language and a Slavic language. English and French alone wouldn't cut it for me, personally, because though English is technically Germanic, it already has a vocabulary heavily influenced by French. I would look for the word to exist a wider range of languages than that before incorporating it.

I often look at Wikipedia for such a survey. How do different languages say this word? Do the vast majority of them agree, even from different families? Are there two or three major variants, and does one seem more prevalent than others? What is the likelihood that someone would understand this word, even coming from a language background where a different word is used? And does this word have so much variance among languages that Esperanto would be better off constructing its own word with existing roots, rather than using the 15th rule? For me, there have to be a LOT of 'votes' in favor of a word, from a lot of languages, before I'll consider taking it as a loan word.

Breto (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2013 03:41:34

"Telephone", I believe, is one of those words we consider to be "international". I'm pretty sure this word is composed entirely of roots from Latin...which would be one single language. (Actually, the P-H at the beginning probably means Greek is involved, but work with me here.) That the word comes from a single language is not the point, so much as how widespread the word has become. Whether it's an English word spread by the internet, or a Latin word spread by the empire, or a Nahuatl word spread by how much everyone likes chocolate, it can be said to be international if a sufficient number of different languages have a similar word, of similar form and meaning.

That said, I often think people assume a bit much on what is and is not international. Not all languages are as borrow-happy as English, after all. It bothers me more with entirely new roots than with calques, though. German seems to get by just fine with Fernsehen for television, so why can't Esperanto have fadeno for thread? At the very least, it seems better than "thread-o".

SethDamien (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2013 03:47:37

I agree that 'thread-o' would be much worse than 'fadeno', and I'm obviously too unschooled to have a very definite opinion on the matter. I was just pointing out that one can have 'cognate idioms' as well as pure cognates across languages, and that this might also be undesireable when there is an ability to derive a sufficient 'in house' word for the desired concept.

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