Mesaĝoj: 60
Lingvo: English
Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-26 20:51:37
I don't think there's much more push in this topic though. I can almost feel people staring nonplussed at the screen or shrugging and wondering what the devil it's all supposed to be about.
edit: with correction.
yyaann (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-26 20:52:30
nornen:What would have been a non-odd way, Zamenhof could have used for saying "ten years ago" and "after ten years"?There's probably no point in discussing this since all languages are arbitrary and are therefore bound to sound odd to some people. Esperanto uses a spatial anology for time (antaŭ/malantaŭ) which I understand is present in many languages.
However, maybe what might sound odd to some people is the word order. I admit "10 jarojn antaŭe" and "10 jarojn malantaŭe/poste" have never been a problem to me while "antaŭ 10 jaroj" definitely confused me the first time I saw it. I understood it initially as meaning "in less than 10 years", just like it would in French and I was quite surprised to learn that it didn't.
That said, as a language learner I expect languages not to conform to my expectation. It sort of comes with the territory.
nornen (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-26 21:02:26
yyaann:"10 jaroj antaŭe" and "10 jaroj malantaŭe/poste"
vestitro:Dek jaroj antaŭeJust in order to avoid that a new learner stumbles over this thread and gets the wrong idea: It should be "dek jarojn antaŭe" as it is a measurement.
yyaann (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-26 21:03:35
nornen:True. I will correct my post.yyaann:"10 jaroj antaŭe" and "10 jaroj malantaŭe/poste"vestitro:Dek jaroj antaŭeJust in order to avoid that a new learner stumbles over this thread and gets the wrong idea: It should be "dek jarojn antaŭe" as it is a measurement.
Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-26 22:23:54
yyaann:Esperanto was 'designed', so you'd think there would be a lot less that would be arbitrary. Indeed with the claim to remove irregularity, you'd expect that to be a major goal.nornen:What would have been a non-odd way, Zamenhof could have used for saying "ten years ago" and "after ten years"?There's probably no point in discussing this since all languages are arbitrary and are therefore bound to sound odd to some people.
erinja (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-27 03:25:04
No language can be perfectly intuitive to everyone.
Even the basic "mi ŝatas tion" versus "tio plaĉas al mi" - one is intuitive to English speakers, another to Spanish speakers (the lucky French, they have common models for both). Someone is going to get tripped up somewhere along the line.
As a learner, I found very few forms to be non intuitive. It did not seen especially arbitrary to me. Every language has to pick how it's going to say something and you can't expect a single language or even a single family to be that model every time. Interestingly, many people argue that Esperanto is not international enough to call itself an international language, but your argument seems to be that it's too international?
Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-27 03:39:56
rikforto (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-27 13:45:33
I think I see both sides of this. I'm a native English speaker, but I speak Spanish competently. I have found that my instincts from Spanish are a decent guide in Esperanto, inasmuch as a national language ever helps. The Slavic constructions can feel very arbitrary when I have not internalized them---the example in this thread of "Dek jarojn antaŭe" is one of the cases I thought of. And the table-words, which I'm given to understand are regularized from Slavic languages, often defy my expectations.
Still, I feel erinja is making a more "meta" argument that is also valid. There is simply no reason that Russian does not use the Romantic construction that is not basically saying that Russian does not use that construction. (We could make this more fancy by invoking historical linguistics or some weak rule, but it still comes back to the same thing: at some point, Indo-European split apart.) It is not more or less arbitrary from a global standpoint to pick idioms from one or many because they were always arbitrary.
These arguments aren't really in conflict, and that's why I think Vestitor is frustrated. It is a bit jarring if you expect something Romantic and get something Slavic---story of my life. But, the Romance languages can be a bit jarring anytime you find a new idiom, so it is not in any international sense more arbitrary to mix in Slavic idioms.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding one or both of you, but you seem to be making complimentary points. The mixing of language families is weird if you know the sources, but then again, so are the sources.
erinja (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-27 13:57:03
I just can't seem to get upset over an international language being too international. Maybe this isn't what you were arguing but in that case I'm sorry, I just don't get it. I don't see any way to be "regular" in selecting firms, other that choosing a single language as the base language and saying, right, we are building simplified X here.
bartlett22183 (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-27 20:02:37
We could program a computer to generate a completely random vocabulary, which would be completely "fair" and "unbiased" for everyone in the world, together with a completley isolating morphology and rigid syntax. Then it would be "neutral" for everybody. However, in my opinion, in the reality of today, I myself, however I might be interested theoretically in such a language, don't think it has a snowball's chance in hell of any real success. My personal -- and it is only that! -- estimate is that the only two constructed international auxiliary languages with a ghost of a chance in the real world are Esperanto and (IALA) Interlingua, with the former in the lead.