Vestitor:
This relativistic argument is getting very common now. I don't accept it at all... there is still a standard of grammar and syntax considered 'correct'

In England, in the village I'm from in the north, there are many unusual constructions like e.g: Is her wentin' = Is she going. Clearly it is a malformation using 'went' outside of its correct usage., but I know it is a dialect that grew from mild illiteracy when many people were not formally schooled.

Thing is, is that the pairing of the forms 'went' and 'go' is itself, in your words, an illiteracy. Anciently, they were NOT the same verb. Some uneducated illiterate speakers melded the two verbs. 'Went' was the preterite of 'to wend,' NOT the preterite of Old English 'gān'... to go.

Somewhere during the Middle English period, some people messed it up... apparently, some continued to get it right, or as one may say, rendered the form in a literate manner; just as you did when you were younger, before you knew better.

Relativisticaly speaking, of course.

Happily one does not need to consider regional variations in Esperanto and whether a certain proportion of speakers use a particular variant in some part of the world and what legitimacy that brings to the form in question.

We can comfortably dismiss Broadribbs's 'via hararo bezonas tondiĝi'. It is not even an anglismo - it is plain wrong.

vejktoro:

Vestitor:
This relativistic argument is getting very common now. I don't accept it at all... there is still a standard of grammar and syntax considered 'correct'

In England, in the village I'm from in the north, there are many unusual constructions like e.g: Is her wentin' = Is she going. Clearly it is a malformation using 'went' outside of its correct usage., but I know it is a dialect that grew from mild illiteracy when many people were not formally schooled.

Thing is, is that the pairing of the forms 'went' and 'go' is itself, in your words, an illiteracy. Anciently, they were NOT the same verb. Some uneducated illiterate speakers melded the two verbs. 'Went' was the preterite of 'to wend,' NOT the preterite of Old English 'gān'... to go.

Somewhere during the Middle English period, some people messed it up... apparently, some continued to get it right, or as one may say, rendered the form in a literate manner; just as you did when you were younger, before you knew better.

Relativisticaly speaking, of course.

Exactly. In a way we're all speaking very, very, very incorrect Proto-Indo-European.

Every natural language is just a collection of dialects. Often one dialect gains prominence as the "standard" dialect. That doesn't mean the standard dialect is any more logical or pure — it's just the dialect that a king spoke, or a holy book was written in. Standard or non-standard, though... every natural language is born of another language having been spoken "incorrectly."

EDITED TO ADD: I am still very much a fan of being able to write and speak in the accepted standard. But anyone who has studied linguistics knows that language change is natural and "correctness" is arbitrary.

sudanglo:Happily one does not need to consider regional variations in Esperanto and whether a certain proportion of speakers use a particular variant in some part of the world and what legitimacy that brings to the form in question.

We can comfortably dismiss Broadribbs's 'via hararo bezonas tondiĝi'. It is not even an anglismo - it is plain wrong.

Is it acceptable as a humorous or poetic way to get the point across? Or is there something grammatically wrong that I'm missing? I admit that I like the color of meaning of that sentence, though that could just be me as an American reacting to a quaint Anglicism.

Maybe that's where Broadribb gets into trouble — as an American, he still hears "wants X-ing" and the "wants" unconsciously carries a shade of its primary meaning, where someone from England just hears the formation as an American would "needs X-ing." Carroll probably didn't mean to convey anything by putting those words in the Hatter's mouth, unless that's a nod to a particular region or class.

That is a potentially sad thing about translating into Esperanto. When someone is translating a novel from English to French, and there's a character with distinctive speech, the translator can choose a dialect of their own language to achieve a similar effect. Since Esperanto is for most people a second language, there's a whole layer of meaning that's lost. Imagine if every character in every book you read spoke in the same dialect. I think I would stop reading.

It's possible to mimic variance of individual interlocutors' speech in Esperanto, with some artistic license. The only difficulty is that this variety won't reflect actual dialects among Esperantophones.

For example: Use a slightly different word order, use elision occasionally, use compound words instead of their single-root synonyms, use old forms of words for archaic effect (Hhino vs Chino, elrigardi vs aspekti). The language doesn't have to be monotone, you just need to be creative.

Incidentally, some languages are highly standardised and you rarely. A good example is Russian: people from Kaliningrad will use the language about the same way as people from Vladivostok. The kind of variance that you see in (say) Texan English vs British English just isn't there on a significant scale.