I think Esperanto not being as colloquial is because Esperanto is less developed than natural languages.
It's because Esperanto is not yet a language of any country, so there is far less evolution because it is not used as much as natural languages are. Natural languages are extensively used everyday by groups in their respective places.
As we know our ancestors talked more formally than we do today. One thing is that through time languages develop a lot. Esperanto is only a century and a half years old.

whysea:

Huh. I had no idea there was collocation extraction software...I use windows so I'm going to look this up now.

I think Libera Folio (http://www.liberafolio.org/) is a good place to look for contemporary Esperanto. You'll find lots of good literature on Gutenberg but some of the older stuff contains more atypical language, imo.

You may be able to find some PDFs and articles on Ipernity:
http://www.ipernity.com/search/blog?q=esperanto&am...
http://www.ipernity.com/search/doc?q=esperanto&...

Literature collections:
http://www.esperanto.mv.ru/ESP/literaturo.html
ELibrejo: http://i-espero.info/files/elibroj/ (PDFs)

Yes, you can find programs for just about anything you can think of, within reason. I found a couple different programs for such purposes, but even if it didn't exist writing a basic program for such a task wouldn't be too difficult. Good links, thanks.

Dakila_Sidhi:I think Esperanto not being as colloquial is because Esperanto is less developed than natural languages.
It's because Esperanto is not yet a language of any country, so there is far less evolution because it is not used as much as natural languages are. Natural languages are extensively used everyday by groups in their respective places.
As we know our ancestors talked more formally than we do today. One thing is that through time languages develop a lot. Esperanto is only a century and a half years old.

I suspect that Esperanto is more colloquial than it's speakers realize. I also see many people claiming that collocations are rare in Esperanto, because of the nature of the language or some other reason, yet I don't see any proof of this, though I understand why someone might make that assumption. Nevertheless, I don't like assumptions. I see your point about the evolution of Esperanto, but I wonder how it's possible to distinguish phases of evolution until after the fact. Thanks for your input.

erinja:I've never heard of such a thing for Esperanto (or for any other language, for that matter).

I think it is less important in Esperanto than in other languages because Esperanto is more flexible; there are fewer fixed expressions that require memorization, and it is totally acceptable to come up with something on the fly (whereas if I say in English "knock against the door" rather than "knock on the door", it is totally understandable but there's something that sounds "off" about it; this kind of situation is much rarer in Esperanto).

This is probably true, but most likely only because Esperanto is still in it's infancy compared to other languages. After all, there isn't any feature in Esperanto that doesn't exist in natural languages, that I'm aware of. In fact, the agglutinative nature/characteristics of Esperanto are taken much further In some natural languages, I know some native American languages are known for such features.

Thanks for your input.

Oijos:Why the term isn't co-location?!

Based on a quick google search, it is because "co" is not a prefix in this word as far as I can tell. It comes from the Latin word "collocare" "place together".

Here's how to use google to do a quick etymology (history of the word) search.

google search page: etymology of "type_word_here"

Oijos:Why the term isn't co-location?!

Because the prefix assimilates to the following letter. the root begins with "l" so the 'N' of 'con' changed to 'l'.

I think it's important to distinguish between collocation and colloquialism.

Esperanto will surely have just as many collocations as other language, in terms of combinations of words used frequently together. This will happen in any language. However, if I understand my reading on collocation, one reason to study this aspect of a language is to say something in the most common way, so you sound natural to a native speaker and don't put things together in an unusual way. Esperanto surely has fewer cases than 'national' languages, in which this kind of thing is important. Things tend to go together logically, and 'national' languages aren't based on logic, so an Esperanto learner is more likely to 'accidentally' stumble on the most common way of saying something, than someone learning a 'national' language.

Colloquialism - there's a little in Esperanto, but very little compared to national languages.

As far as collocation, I think the Esperanto learner would do well to focus on a word frequency list (to get the most common words) and separately to focus on some 'template' sentences that have common turns of phrase. The word frequency list will get you some common vocabulary, and the 'templates' will help you put things together correctly.

For example, this construction isn't always obvious to English speakers:

I want you to [verb}, he wants them to verb}, etc. -- "Mi volas ke vi [verb]-u", "Li volas ke ili [verb]-u", etc.

This is a good example of a useful template sentence.

I would guess collocations are going to be less frequent in Esperanto, based on my understanding. There really isn't a reason to want to say something "like a native" except for the very basic expressions. Things like the difference between "fast food", "quick food", or "rapid food" don't seem to pop up in Esperanto (perhaps due to there being fewer words with exactly the same definitions).

Of the collocations there are, I feel like most are more logically constructed than in English. On the other hand, national language phrases like "burst into tears", "bomb went off", "round of applause", "committing murder", etc. have words that don't make logical sense, are arbitrarily chosen, or don't add anything to the idea being described. A literal translation would make no sense in Esperanto, where we'd use "ekploregi", "la bomba eksplodis", "aplaŭdado", "mortigi/mortigado"; all of which have more direct meaning.

The one aspect of Esperanto I feel is most similar to collocations would be the constructed words which have gained a more precise meaning, as sudanglo mentioned earlier. That and perhaps the words using "-um", whose precise definitions must be learned separately. I almost wish the "-um" words would be removed and replaced with new root words, but usually the root still gives some idea of what the word is related to (even if you don't know what it means). But I think Esperanto would be much better off without those constructed words with arbitrarily precise meanings, where new words should be used/made if less generality is required. They are inconsistent with the core values of Esperanto, IMHO.

erinja:I think it's important to distinguish between collocation and colloquialism.

Esperanto will surely have just as many collocations as other language, in terms of combinations of words used frequently together. This will happen in any language. However, if I understand my reading on collocation, one reason to study this aspect of a language is to say something in the most common way, so you sound natural to a native speaker and don't put things together in an unusual way. Esperanto surely has fewer cases than 'national' languages, in which this kind of thing is important. Things tend to go together logically, and 'national' languages aren't based on logic, so an Esperanto learner is more likely to 'accidentally' stumble on the most common way of saying something, than someone learning a 'national' language.

Colloquialism - there's a little in Esperanto, but very little compared to national languages.

As far as collocation, I think the Esperanto learner would do well to focus on a word frequency list (to get the most common words) and separately to focus on some 'template' sentences that have common turns of phrase. The word frequency list will get you some common vocabulary, and the 'templates' will help you put things together correctly.

For example, this construction isn't always obvious to English speakers:

I want you to [verb}, he wants them to verb}, etc. -- "Mi volas ke vi [verb]-u", "Li volas ke ili [verb]-u", etc.

This is a good example of a useful template sentence.

We call those "pattern drills" in the old aural-oral approach to learning languages. The method is considered passe nowadays but in a language like E-o it can be quite useful.

orthohawk:We call those "pattern drills" in the old aural-oral approach to learning languages. The method is considered passe nowadays but in a language like E-o it can be quite useful.

I think it's too easy to rattle off pattern drills automatically and mindlessly. Probably why they've become passé.