Novico Dektri: You know what I'm really confused about? In my esperanto dictionary I bought, it said that "I am speaking Esperanto" is "Mi parolas Esperante"? But I don't understand. Why would Esperanto have an 'e' on the end? Wouldn't it be "Esperanton" instead? Also, I get very confused about word order. If anyone can explain the whole "Esperante" thing to me, I would be very appreciative.

Benjamin

It's actually a Russianism. Zamenhof's native language was Russian and thus Esperanto has a lot of Russian/Slavic syntax in it. Re: esperante: In Russian one says "Ja govorju po-russki" where "po-russki" in Esperanto would be directly translated as "ruse." Another Russianism in the language is "ne X-ante" to mean "without X-ing": "without telling mom where I was going I left the house" Ne dirante al Panjo kien mi iris, mi elighis el la domo." It confused me to no end till I studied Russian in the military.

T0dd:Although I'm not a huge fan of Ido, I do like the Ido suffix -ez, meaning language, which enables the formation of language names readily: anglezo, francezo ktp. In Esperanto, it seems we end up talking about language quite often, and it makes sense to have a handy suffix.

Indeed, some have tried to import -ez into Esperanto, apparently without much success. Out of curiosity, I googled "anglezo" and found this interesting web site: Anglezo kaj Esperanto. It's interesting in that it's written in NHA, the unofficial "Nova HelpAlfabeto", and, of course, it features the word "anglezo"!

Ho ve! That helpalfabeto looks like it's designed to help English and French speakers and confuse the rest of the world. It makes Esperanto look sort of "ido-ish". Actually part of the reason I learned Esperanto was that I thought the word "kaj" looked cool, but I guess I probably wouldn't have thought it was cool if it were written "kay".

I don't really see the need for an -ez- suffix though. "Anglezo" doesn't even take fewer syllables to say than "la angla".

This is not quite true. The -o ending is used for languages that don't have an ethnic or national group associated with them. Practically speaking, most other constructed languages use the -o ending (Volapuko, Ido). For something like Klingon - even though it's constructed, it has an ethnic group associated with it (albeit a group that doesn't really exist), so it's "la klingona". Some people hold the opinion that some dead languages should get the -o ending too - so "latino" and "sanskrito". But some other people prefer to use "la latina" and "la sanskrita", since these languages once had ethnic groups associated with them, even though they no longer do.

AGGH! My fiance, who doesn't speak Esperanto, just read this, and asked how would you refer to someone who speaks D'ni(for those of you who don't know, D'ni is the people, and the language, used in the Myst exploration games).

As the construction of the name (D'ni)wouldn't work at all in Esperanto, this is what I've come up with:

dinio-a D'ni person (ethnically D'ni)
ex. Atrus (a major character in the games) estas dinio. (Atrus is D'ni)

dinie-the D'ni language
ex. Atrus lernis la lingvon dinie de lia avino, Tiana (Atrus learned the D'ni language from his grandmother, T'iana)

I think I've just discovered a new way to be a geek...discussing a language from a computer game in Esperanto.

Take that, Klingonistas!

Shawna

Shawna:
AGGH! My fiance, who doesn't speak Esperanto, just read this, and asked how would you refer to someone who speaks D'ni(for those of you who don't know, D'ni is the people, and the language, used in the Myst exploration games).

As the construction of the name (D'ni)wouldn't work at all in Esperanto, this is what I've come up with:

dinio-a D'ni person (ethnically D'ni)
ex. Atrus (a major character in the games) estas dinio. (Atrus is D'ni)

dinie-the D'ni language
ex. Atrus lernis la lingvon dinie de lia avino, Tiana (Atrus learned the D'ni language from his grandmother, T'iana)

I think I've just discovered a new way to be a geek...discussing a language from a computer game in Esperanto.

Take that, Klingonistas!

Shawna

"dinie" would mean "in D'ni". So "Mi parolas dinie" would be "I am speaking in D'ni"

If you wanted to talk about the language itself, that would be "la dinia". So "Atrus lernis la dinian de sia avino, Tiana"