Viestejä: 39
Kieli: English
Vestitor (Näytä profiilli) 15. joulukuuta 2015 20.26.30
RiotNrrd:Something other than the robotic repetition already known. It's not as if I'm the only person in the world who thinks multiple plural adjective agreements sound odd and are clunky. It's as if it mustn't be mentioned for fear of an avalanche. Yes, yes, you've heard it all before...wonder why that is?Vestitor:Reiterating that Esperanto is not going to change isn't a very sophisticated approach to take.Since Esperanto is not going to change, what sophisticated alternative approach would you suggest?
erinja (Näytä profiilli) 15. joulukuuta 2015 22.08.04
Vestitor:I'm going to carry on doing things the official Esperanto way, but I find some of the multiple plural endings clunky.Yeah, we all have our most and least favorite parts of any language. I think the whole difficult, irregular passato remoto verb tense in Italian (widely used in the south, little used in the north) could be dropped entirely without a problem since Italian already has multiple past tenses. It would be awfully nice if English had regular spelling and if German got rid of its case system. It would be nice if every language had an equivalent of the English 's ending to show possession, because it gets quite annoying to give a whole string of "of"'s to show possession.
It's no problem to wish your least favorite part of a language would disappear, on a whimsical fantasy level. It's silly to go to online forums somehow hoping or expecting that your personal whimsical fantasy will suddenly become a reality and that the speakers of the language will say, By George, you're right, we're going to rewrite the language according to your preference! People seem to have different expectations for Esperanto than for other languages in this regard, and that's disrespectful to Esperanto.
Vestitor: Reiterating that Esperanto is not going to change isn't a very sophisticated approach to take.What's the sophisticated approach, pushing for a reform that will never happen?
Vestitor (Näytä profiilli) 15. joulukuuta 2015 22.50.04
The German case system will eventually yield to simplification (the language has already had reforms - disputed of course).
Simplification in language is something that occurs normally and it obviously reflects the tensions between everyday use and grammar fetishism.
Okay, Esperanto is a constructed language which requires everyone to be singing from the same hymn sheet, but the officialisation of national languages is no different and they change.
The semi-religious insistence that Esperanto is so bloody perfect that it has to be set in stone is silliness. With a fairly modest number of speakers Esperanto probably doesn't experience the usage simplifications that other languages have, but should the number ever skyrocket the fundamentalists will be crying into their beer because widespread usage in very diverse circumstances will change it. It's not a coincidence that people from very diverse language backgrounds question the same few grammatical points.
RiotNrrd (Näytä profiilli) 15. joulukuuta 2015 23.18.46
Vestitor:The semi-religious insistence that Esperanto is so bloody perfect that it has to be set in stone is silliness.Yes, it is. Which is why experienced Esperantists don't insist on its perfection: we know for a fact that it isn't perfect. The set-in-stoneness isn't therefore because of its "perfection". The set-in-stoneness is a conscious imposition of stability on something which is by its very nature prone to destabilization: people keep coming up with "improvements".
If we didn't draw a line in the sand somewhere and say "this is where it ends", it would never end. So that's what we did.
Don't think for a moment that Esperanto is perfect. It is not. What it is is stable, and one can make the case that for an international auxiliary language stability is more important than "perfection".
For the record, I don't like the -ajn -ajn -ajn -ojn pattern any more than you do. I just made peace with it, because it isn't going away.
Vestitor (Näytä profiilli) 15. joulukuuta 2015 23.32.12
00100100 (Näytä profiilli) 15. joulukuuta 2015 23.32.33
RiotNrrd:The set-in-stoneness is a conscious imposition of stability on something which is by its very nature prone to destabilization; people keep coming up with "improvements".Yeah, that's right. I mean, look at English. It allows things to change and that's why it has only 335 million speakers. And we can all see that Esperanto is doing much better than that...
If we didn't draw a line in the sand somewhere and say "this is where it ends", it would never end. So that's what we did.
RiotNrrd (Näytä profiilli) 15. joulukuuta 2015 23.57.09
00100100:Yeah, that's right. I mean, look at English. It allows things to change and that's why it has only 335 million speakers. And we can all see that Esperanto is doing much better than that...I cannot think of a single improvement to English that has been made in my lifetime, where the grammar or syntax was consciously changed from one form to another across the board. Especially as a result of the idea of a single individual.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is.
erinja (Näytä profiilli) 16. joulukuuta 2015 1.00.25
Vestitor:^ I'm fine with this position.This is practically everyone's position. Every experienced Esperantist can tell you certain aspects of the language they would have done differently if they wrote it. But we don't go making these changes now.
Christa627 (Näytä profiilli) 16. joulukuuta 2015 1.10.12
Vestitor:Anyone who thinks something like 'longajn radikojn' isn't an unnecessary mouthful for the majority of normal usage, and which might well sit next to other similar adjectival elements in a sentence, is just being obtuse for the sake of it.I don't see any problem with "longajn radikojn", or "miajn novajn longajn belajn ruĝajn radikojn" for that matter. Any more than I see a problem with "mis manzanas rojas pequeñas..." and the like. You can label me "obtuse" if you want, I really don't care.
00100100 (Näytä profiilli) 16. joulukuuta 2015 2.14.29
RiotNrrd:That's because your standards are wrong. English continually makes small changes that add up. To ask for English to only change the way that supports your argument is foolish.
I cannot think of a single improvement to English that has been made in my lifetime, where the grammar or syntax was consciously changed from one form to another across the board. Especially as a result of the idea of a single individual.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/51362/4-changes-eng...
http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/english-c...
RiotNrrd:I'm not entirely sure what your point is.My point is that the "final victory" ain't going to happen, because Esperanto speakers are too focused on "You can't change anything, you heretic!" and aren't focused at all on "why aren't people learning such an easy language." If beginners keep saying that they think the -n should go, that just might be a sign. It may be a sign the -n should go, it may be a sign that Esperanto should be happy to only have a tiny slice of the world's population.