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Fermi la vortaro/Closing the Dictionary

de AllenHartwell, 2014-majo-28

Mesaĝoj: 28

Lingvo: English

AllenHartwell (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-28 13:14:06

Why do we even need new words? We have plenty of roots for all kinds of things. What we don't have a word for, we can easily create from compounding existing words. Take terpomo. We didn't have a word for potato because we didn't need it. When we did, it was simple enough to create one without needing to make up a new root from scratch. All new roots would do is make it even harder to master the vocabulary.

Fenris_kcf (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-28 16:22:39

OK, now there's no more doubt that you are nothing but a troll.

PS:
AllenHartwell:Fermi la vortaro
You even "forgot" the accusative! +5 troll points

AllenHartwell (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-28 16:37:01

Fenris_kcf:OK, now there's no more doubt that you are nothing but a troll.

PS:
AllenHartwell:Fermi la vortaro
You even "forgot" the accusative! +5 troll points
I gave an example of how this was already done. There wasn't a word for potato because the Europeans who spoke Esperanto didn't need one until potatos were brought back from the New World. Rather than making up some arbitrary new root, a compound was modeled after the French pomme de terre. It wasn't needed. There was a better way because there were already roots to express the concept. I think after over a century of constant use, we would have more than enough roots to express any concept anyone would have without having to keep tinkering with everything.

I did realize I forgot the -n afterwards. It wouldn't let me edit the title.

nornen (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-28 17:56:26

AllenHartwell:There wasn't a word for potato because the Europeans who spoke Esperanto didn't need one until potatos were brought back from the New World.
How many Esperanto speakers were there before potatoes were introduced to Europe? Just give me a rough estimate.

Eltwish (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-29 00:41:03

A language with a closed dictionary is practically synonymous with a dead language.

That said, I would agree that one should avoid introducing new roots without first attempting to express the concept with the existing Esperanto wordstock and morphology, and that a limited ability to do so is not an excuse for a wholesale annexation of Greek.

RiotNrrd (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-29 02:21:17

There are far, far more official roots today than there were a century ago. The majority of currently official Esperanto roots were neologisms at first. It isn't going to stop. Roots are going to continue to be added to the language as new devices are invented, new scientific discoveries are made, etc.

In general the Esperanto community is pretty good about trying to build things out of existing roots first. But sometimes that leads to twelve-syllable monstrosities that a much shorter neologism can take care of. This becomes especially attractive if the particular neologism is already pretty widely understood internationally. It's a last resort - or should be - but it shouldn't be written off. Especially because it never will be. There will be a lot more official roots in the 2114 dictionaries than there are in ours today.

There's theoretical purity, and then there's real-world practicality. Go with practicality. It'll never be more than an approximation of the theory, but it's a heck of a lot easier to work with. And practicality IS the original driver for Esperanto, after all. The language is something you use, not something you display on a pedestal.

Rejsi (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-29 02:30:00

I mean, we can't go adding new roots all willy-nilly, but I think they are a definite necessity in terms of new technologies/discoveries and technical terminologies.

For example, at one point in time, we thought the atom was the smallest division of matter. Then we discovered electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. Now we have crazy things like quarks and muons. There isn't a good way to just describe these in Esperanto with current roots. You have to make up new ones.

Edit: Oops. Just realized RiotNrrd said the same thing.

Eltwish (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-29 02:50:30

Certainly, I entirely agree. My complaint is more against those cases like aŭtodidakta, where any of memlerna, memlernanta, meminstrua etc. are entirely suitable. But I use hospitalo instead of malsanulejo so who am I to judge.

kaŝperanto (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-29 15:12:43

AllenHartwell:
Fenris_kcf:OK, now there's no more doubt that you are nothing but a troll.

PS:
AllenHartwell:Fermi la vortaro
You even "forgot" the accusative! +5 troll points
I gave an example of how this was already done. There wasn't a word for potato because the Europeans who spoke Esperanto didn't need one until potatos were brought back from the New World. Rather than making up some arbitrary new root, a compound was modeled after the French pomme de terre. It wasn't needed. There was a better way because there were already roots to express the concept. I think after over a century of constant use, we would have more than enough roots to express any concept anyone would have without having to keep tinkering with everything.

I did realize I forgot the -n afterwards. It wouldn't let me edit the title.
Potatoes were in Europe well before the 1800s, kamarado. There were certainly no Esperantists around to be making new words. I realize that you may have meant to say that they took the same approach to potato as the French, but it comes across as you implying that potatoes were brought from the new world when Esperanto existed.

About the actual subject, I can agree and disagree. Maybe we should close the dictionary to new roots and allow only new constructions, but a better approach would allow for some new roots to be adopted if the need arises. Esperanto is entirely different from a natural language in its word construction capabilities, so a closed dictionary in the sense I described would not necessarily be the death of the language.

Kirilo81 (Montri la profilon) 2014-majo-29 19:14:48

Closing the word stock of Esperanto would be kontraŭfundamenta, as new internationalisms keep appearing, and according to §15 of the Fundamento Gramatiko an internationalism is automatically part of the Esperanto lexicon, as soon as it is adopted to the orthography (and of course the grammatical system) of the language.

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