Berichten: 40
Taal: English
webgovernor (Profiel tonen) 1 november 2008 19:15:04
dwarf:There it is! I knew it was just a matter of time.
You don't need to apologize in advance for all the "supposed" umbrage your post might give to some high-hat bozo.
(http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=boz... definition 1.3)
I can see where "na" would break the rule 14, but I can also see where dwarf has a logical point. However, wouldn't breaking one rule, without rule revision, lead to the potential breaking of more rules?
@Miland, I do not know why I haven't considered "al" before. It seems that "towards/to" would definitely clarify the context sufficiently. "Je" however, seems to be a "placeholder", containing "upon/at/by/on" as meanings. I will consider using "al." Do you know how the community on a whole feels about this?
@Osxo-Jabe, Do you mind if I ask why you've chosen "Je" in place of "al"? Is it rule 14?
I do greatly appreciate the way you guys have avoided sounding offensive, had I encountered dwarf's post earlier, I probably wouldn't have listened to the valid points that many of you presented, and I may be attempting to learn a different language. Thanks.
I would also like to recant some of my previous comments, my lack of knowledge was probably my largest reason for despising the -n ending. Now I see many more reasons for it to exist.
~Aaron
Miland (Profiel tonen) 1 november 2008 19:16:06
Oŝo-Jabe:'na' as an adjective..The problem with the 'adjectival' argument is that n in itself is not a meaningful verbal root in the way that the affixes can be. n does not have a meaning but rather a function - to indicate the object of action or substitute for a preposition. Even PIV does not have na. We might not expect a dictionary to have all the big words, of course, but we might expect it to have the legitimate small ones.
Webgovernor: The use of al to indicate an object is just a point of Esperanto grammar. I'll give you detailed references if you want, but I wouldn't worry about it for now.
RiotNrrd (Profiel tonen) 1 november 2008 20:14:22
webgovernor:I do not know why I haven't considered "al" before.... Do you know how the community on a whole feels about this?As Miland says, it's just a part of normal Esperanto grammar. The rule is that "al" can ALWAYS be used in place of the accusative.
You will frequently see it used in the form
Subject verb al mi.
instead of
Subject verb min.
In fact, I have read in at least a couple of places that "al mi" instead of "min" is the preferred method of expression. I don't know to what extent this is agreed upon. But you will certainly see it a lot.
Using "al" in front of a name is just an extension of this idea.
webgovernor (Profiel tonen) 1 november 2008 20:32:20
Thanks again for the clarification RiotNrrd!
dwarf (Profiel tonen) 1 november 2008 20:34:52
what I meant was that were is no good reason to be overly apologetic for that is just a waste of words.
Just get to the point.
RiotNrrd (Profiel tonen) 1 november 2008 21:00:46
webgovernor:Since "al" already exists, then why do people use the "na" preposition?Ya got me. Incomplete understanding of the rules? A desire to be different? The impulse to "improve" the language where an improvement isn't warranted? I don't know.
Very, very, few people use "na". You can read eventeo.net, Libera Folio, China Radio International, Le Monde Diplomatique, etc. (all of which produce a large quantity of articles in Esperanto) and never see "na" used once. It simply isn't necessary.
trojo (Profiel tonen) 4 november 2008 14:51:42
I am tempted to assume that much of the community would despise a fixed word structure, and a removal of the "-n" ending, but would this really be difficult to re-learn? How long would it take to get the hang of it?Well, keep in mind that a rigid word order would include questions and relative clauses. Strict SVO order would preclude phrasings like Kiun la hundo mordis? ("Whom did the dog bite?"), because that isn't SVO. Relative clauses would be even more confusing -- normally a relative pronoun is put at the beginning of a relative phrase (without regard to whether it is the subject or not), but with strict SVO that wouldn't be allowed either. La viro, kiun la hundo mordis, estas mia amiko ("the man that the dog bit is my friend"). It would be really confusing to reorder the relative clause in that sentence ("kiun la hundo mordis") to SVO.
So my answer is, a strict word order would probably be harder than you think.
Some artificial languages have experimented with rigid word order. I know Toki Pona has strict SVO order, even for questions, and simply doesn't allow relative clauses at all. Personally I think that would make it really hard to express a nuanced or complex idea, but of course that is part of the philosophy of Toki Pona, that complexity is always bad.
RiotNrrd (Profiel tonen) 6 november 2008 02:50:25
trojo:Some artificial languages have experimented with rigid word order. I know Toki Pona has strict SVO order...For word-order rigidity, I don't think any language, natural or constructed, can even come close to lojban.
In lojban, words are similar to mathematical (or logical) functions, of the form
x1 word x2 x3...
where the x's represent other words or clauses. In the above example, x1 might represent the subject, x2 the direct object, x3 where the activity of the word is taking place, etc. These positional relationships are PART of the definitions of the words, and are fixed in place. Because of this, and because every word has these types of position-based definitions, even terms like "verb" or "noun" don't really apply to lojban words, and lojban has had to coin an entirely new grammatical vocabulary to describe its rules.
There are methods of rearranging the order of the x's (for emphasis or whatever), but they require additional grammatical markers that themselves have a fixed position (and whose sole job is to describe the altered position of the x's within the sentence).
As you might expect, the grammar of lojban does not lend itself to being written on a single sheet of paper. It's an interesting language, but nowhere NEAR as easy as much of the lojban literature claims.
webgovernor (Profiel tonen) 6 november 2008 03:03:22
Originally I was going to go with Lojban instead of Esperanto, but you're right, it's not as easy as many pages dictate that it is. Also, seeing that Schwarzenegger took a pages width to write in Logban and that punctuation is pronounced, I was thoroughly turned off. I love their syntax and YACC proven unambiguity, but the learning curve makes it unplausable as an international auxiliary language.
Don't get me wrong, I think Lojban is an excellent replacement language, but I feel it might be too difficult to learn for many people. It lacks the ease of learning that people desire, this ease is almost essential for an IAL to succeed.
RiotNrrd (Profiel tonen) 6 november 2008 03:58:02
webgovernor:Originally I was going to go with Lojban instead of Esperanto...I started with lojban. I bought the big red book (The Complete Lojban Language). I printed out what dictionaries I could find, I studied the "Introduction to Lojban" book (which I also had to print out).
I then, one night, thought "ok, I've been studying this for a couple of weeks - let's see what I can write."
I spent FOUR HOURS trying to figure out how to say "I live in a blue house". I never succeeded. The next day I started learning Esperanto. By the end of the first day, I had no trouble writing "Mi loĝas en blua domo."
I still look at my lojban material once in a while, but mostly just as a curiosity. I have no illusions that I will ever learn it, as Esperanto serves my purposes MUCH better.