kaŝperanto:Your English is quite good, and the only thing that could be seen as rude to me is your usage of "dear English speakers". Often times that phrase would be sarcastically used with the intent to offend the other group/person.

For natives speakers their language marks their identity. For non-native speakers some foreign language is used like neutral communication tool. Same situation for dialects.

kaŝperanto:But this is a general problem that I definitely agree with, and as a non-native speaker you certainly have made and will continue to make these types of blunders.

I don't think that there excists some general problem. Some have sense of humour, interprete much sense into spoken language sound characteristics, others don't feel concerned about these issues. I remember that I once bought bread at some bakery, which was run by german native with very strong arabic accent, netherless correct Standard German. Arabic accent could sound 'barking' rude to accent free grown up Germans. But someones has to distinct between intention and representation which of course will need some 'Freigeist' (libertine) to 'get it humorously'. So, I only have to backpedalling shortly, then I will get it: 'ah, okay, no offense involved'. So, in my opinion, its not necessary to make it more difficult than it is.

kaŝperanto:In his case it was his inflection/pronunciation, but in more cases non-natives use phrases that seem very rude.

I know that situation from non-native perspektive. Abroad, being German native I often felt annoyed of word hull communication culture. I prefer direkt conversation. Thats me, like being German native, probably regionally flavoured. I'm not proud about, its just how it is.

robbkvasnak:Uff, yeah! That discussion about Eastern Europe when you are on the outside looking in makes you feel totally alienated - it has become such a "good cop, bad cop" thing and there are no free donuts to be had let alone dunked.

Heh. I don't even read that stuff...

robbkvasnak: ...it would be less irritating for all to try to discombobulate their verbal fangles and foppishness.

What language are you speaking? lol.

nornen:Sorry for that. But what are we supposed to do if most threads are started in the English forum? I would prefer to discuss this in Esperanto, too, but we are stuck here with English.

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(And if I come off as rude or curt, please believe me that this isn't my intention.)

I also don't think Robb was referring to you. Your English is good; I didn't even know you were non-native until you said so, and that is always a good sign! I am an active user of lang-8.com, a language practicing site where people post things in a language they are learning, and then people who speak that language correct the entries. So, I see a lot of non-native English; sometimes there are just little errors like missing indefinite articles, but sometimes I can't figure out what in the world they're talking about. I always feel bad when I try to make corrections, but have to say at some points that I don't know what they're saying, because not being understood can be very discouraging, and I don't want to discourage anyone. But your English is not like that, I understand you just fine.

kaŝperanto:I would never have guessed there was any ambiguity in "Estas tre baza scienco", but your guess of "It can be proven by very basic scientific studies" is closest to what I meant. I would liken my expression to "It is common sense", but with the added force that it is supported by simple/fundamental scientific evidence.

Thank you very much for your answer. Maybe I can explain how my lack of understanding arose: I was reading your post fluently without the need to translate Eo first to Spanish in order to get the meaning. Then I stumble over this sentence. I didn't get the meaning so I tried translating it, which yielded: "Es una ciencia muy básica". I still didn't understand what you meant. Next I switched code to German and got "Es ist eine grundlegende Wissenschaft" which didn't work either.

Thanks to your explanation I now understand something along the line of "Estas/ekzistas tre bazaj scienciaj pruvoj, ke" which I hope is the intended meaning.

Let's make the thought experiment the other way around. In Spanish I would have said something like "Requiere (de) poca ciencia ligar el porcentage....", which translates to "Necesas malgranda scienco por ligi...". Would this be readily understood from an English point of view?

I also think that the high impact of one's own linguistic background was doubtlessly proven by sudanglo: He couldn't even imagine that the whole expression "It is basic science" could cause problems, but instead picked out the word "baza". Which shows that "Estas baza scienco" is unambiguously and readily understood by him without any danger of misinterpretation.

I also think that the high impact of one's own linguistic background was doubtlessly proven by sudanglo: He couldn't even imagine that the whole expression "It is basic science" could cause problems

I am not going to defend KaŝEsperanto's original formulation. No doubt he could have put it more elegantly or explicitly.

But seriously, Nornen, do you really have such difficulty in understanding sentences like

1+1=2. Tio estas tre baza aritmetiko.

La planedoj moviĝas en elipsaj orbitoj ĉirkaŭ la suno. Tio estas baza astronomio.

We are not dealing here with a mother tongue intrusion in 'Estas baza scienco, ligi ..', but rather a loose way of talking. Any lack of clarity in the literal translation really comes from a similar lack of clarity in English, which would have been better expressed by something like 'it requires only basic science to establish a link between .. '.

'It is basic science to ' is not a fixed expression in English.

There is a difference between expressing an idea badly (which can happen in any language) and incomprehensibly transposing an idiom or structure from one language into another.

For example: You will have to make do on 10 dollars a day - Vi devos fari faron sur 10 dolaroj tage.

sudanglo:But seriously, Nornen, do you really have such difficulty in understanding sentences like [...]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I have the impression that you have doubts about the veracity of my earlier post. If I hadn't had difficulties with this sentence, I wouldn't have chosen it as an example. Neither is it my intention to make a point where there is none, but to show that expressions which are 100% clear in one language, can be troublesome in another language, if writer and reader don't share the same original language.

I made a small experiment at the office. I have three employees, whose English level is more or less like mine (two of them have lived in the US) and who are Spanish native speakers. I asked each of them to please translate kaŝperanto's quote to Spanish:

kaŝperanto:It is very basic science to link the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere to the heating of the whole earth.

The results were the following:

K:Es ciencia muy básica el conectar el porcentaje de CO2 en la atmósfera con el calentamiento de toda la tierra.

W:Es una ciencia muy basica (sic!) el conectar el porcentaje de Dioxido (sic!) de Carbono (CO2) en la atmosfera (sic!) con el calentamiento de toda la tierra.

R:Es ciencia muy básica el vincular el porcentaje de CO2 en la atmósfera al calentamiento global.

It is immediately obvious that “It is basic science” has been translate each time verbatim. Once with the indefinite article, and twice without. Asking the translators to rephrase the text in their own words, all answered something like “Well, the more CO2 you have, the warmer the climate gets.” omitting completely the “basic science” part.
As a second step I showed the translations to two other employees (Spanish native speakers, only very basic English knowledge). I asked them to explain to me what the text said. The answer of N was: “¿De qué ciencia están hablando? (Which science are they talking about?)” and the answer of L was: “Es muy necesario conectar [...]”, which has nothing to do with the intended meaning of kaŝperanto.

I interpret this as follows: The three translators chose to translate the passage verbatim, because they weren't sure what it meant. The resulting Spanish could not be understood.

We always have to be very careful when translating modisms, metonymies or metaphors to another language (including Esperanto). However, the problem is not only this, but the basic problem is to spot whether a given expression is indeed a modism, a metonymy or a metaphor. If I read correctly sudanglo's answer, I believe that for him (sudanglo, please correct me and pardon the conjecture) “it is basic science” is not a modism and should be easily understood even if translated. He doubts my lack of understanding.

[tbc]

[cnt'd]

A very similar thing happened to me some 20 years ago, when Spanish became my active language. At the beginning I used “en mis ojos” in Spanish in order to express “to my eye” (translated from German “in meinen Augen” ). Later I was asked what the hell “en mis ojos” is supposed to mean, and I learned that the people who heard me saying this, generally interpreted it as “in my sight (i.e. right in front of me)” and not “in my opinión”. I then started to use the correct “a mi parecer” (lit: to my seeming).
The point is, I failed to spot that “in meinen Augen” was idiomatic, because I thought that it was obvious and easy to understand that this was the same as “in my opinion”. My error was to take shit for granted.

Returning to the original argument: Everybody of us, no matter which might be our vernacular language, will translate expression to Esperanto without noticing that these expressions might be difficult to understand for others. Hence two Americans speaking Esperanto will have few problems understanding each other, because they intuitively can interpret these expressions. The same holds for two Russians. The problem arises when one is American and the other is Russian. This has nothing to do with the conjecture that “other speakers are not using Esperanto properly”. I believe this is due to the fact that, no matter how hard we try, our Esperanto will always have a certain national “tint” (pragmatics fail me again), almost invisible to Esperanto speakers of our own language, but maybe troublesome to Esperanto speakers from somewhere else [1].

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P.S.: The experiment was carried out from English to Spanish and not from Esperanto to Spanish. I think this changes the results only marginally. If "it is basic science" in English, where it is correct, pragmatic and idiomatic, is hard to understand for a non-native speaker, the Esperanto version "Es baza scienco" should be so even more.

[1] This is not limited to phrases, but also to Esperanto roots: For example, from a German point of view, "elteni" and "elŝalti" are parseable and easily derived: el-teni = aus-halten (out-hold = stand); el-ŝalti = aus-schalten (out-switch = turn off). We can be happy that we have "ĉesi" instead of "*suraŭdi" (auf-hören = on-hear = stop).

@nornen

Those are interesting results, nornen. The only question I would have is to whether or not the native speakers were able to guess the intended meaning as you did (both of your guesses were correct). More importantly, the issue would be whether someone with sufficient Esperanto skills would recognize the intended meaning of those words (as you did). I may be wrong, but I doubt anyone would be completely clueless about that phrase. Many times I have seen unusal phrases from non-English-speaking Esperantists that I can still understand, but only because I have the proper mindset to interpret them, and they just "make sense" in general. Nobody doubts that you had questions, but I would doubt you if you claimed to have no idea what I meant.

I see my phrase similarly to "Saluton!", where a lot of the actual sentence is implied, and is commonly understood by all Esperantists. Only, in this case, "It is basic science to..." is a shortening of the valid interpretations you made that is common in English. This form is somewhat common: "It is basic courtesy to...", "It is common sense to...", etc. I could always say exactly what I mean, but it is unnecessary and requires more words.

You are totally correct that Esperantists with the same native language will understand each other better and possibly miss incorrect uses and/or non-neutral phrases in their speech. But I do believe that sufficient fluency erases all but the most subtle of these peculiarities. As has been mentioned, most of us Lernu! users are new to Esperanto and are bound to make mistakes.

@kaŝperanto

The three translators were unsure about the meaning (hence the verbatim translation), but two correctly guessed something like "you don't need to be a scientist to understand this". One thought he was reading the definition of a new science (hence he put the "una" in Spanish).

So, two translators indeed guessed more or less right, but they emphasized that they were guessing. The third translator didn't get the meaning.

The two girls who read the verbatim translation, both guessed wrong. N matched "es una ciencia muy básica" to the syntactically very close, but semantically orthogonal "es (toda) una ciencia" (es toda una cienca = it is a total science = only a rocket scientist understands this). L interpreted it as "es muy necesario" = "it is very necessary". I now cannot tell how she arrived at this conclusion.

Especially N's interpretation is troublesome. As she couldn't understand the phrase, she searched her Spanish dictionary (in her head), to a phrase that more or less matched the one she was reading. This could have worked. It didn't and she came up with the exact opposite.

Although both girls were presented with unidiomatic Spanish (albeit written by Spanish native-speakers), I think the same would have happened with Esperanto, because when you don't understand a sentence, you try to render it in your own language. At least I do this.

Also, this little "experiment" doesn't prove anything: two small a sample size, no control group, no controlled conditions, etc, etc.

@nornen

Thanks for the clarification. I could see a link between "basic" and "basically" (or "just" ) leading her to an opposite interpretation ("It is just science" ). I am still fascinated that "Estas baza ____-o" would be so ambiguous. Are there no similar phrases in Spanish? What about "Estas baza kapablo veturigi auxton"? Is this something to do with the use of "scienco" or with the phrase in general?

What about "Veturigi auxton estas baza kapablo"? Does the word order matter here? If so then the translation is at fault, because as far as I'm aware the two sentences have the same meaning.

@kasperanto

Now you got me really intrigued with this issue.

I don't think that the word “science” is the problem, but the construction “Estas baza X'o”. As far as I know, this construction simply doesn't exist in Spanish. For instance “It is basic courtesy” translates [1] to “es de buena educación”. Please note that in English there is a nominal phrase, while in Spanish there is a prepositional phrase.

(The next few paragraphs are pure conjectures and most probably complete bullshit.)

I think the problem arises from a completely different direction: the structure of nominal phrases in English and in Spanish.

In English noun phrases can be modified by another noun, and the head stands at the end: port authority, summer vacations, police agent. In Spanish, this construction is very rare (hombre lobo = werewolf, mono araña = spider monkey) and more importantly it is not productive. The modifying part must be either an adjective (autoridad portuaria, agente policial) or a prepositional phrase (vacaciones de verano, agente de policía). [2]

Now sentences like “A estas B” fall more or less into three groups: Either one part is the definition of the other (1); or one part is a subset of the other (2); or one part is a quality, an attribute of the other (3).

(1) Mia nomo estas Nornen.
(2) Kolombo estas birdo.
(3) Esperanto estas facila.

[tbc]