Kwekubo:Here's the intro page.

Thanks, but that is an intro page. It has no "next" button or any means of navigation to any material. Not that I can see anyway. Perhaps I am going blind.

It has a link to a Russian site, but я говарю по Русский язык очень плохо (I speak the Russian language very bad - should be "badly" I guess and probably at least one incorrect grammatical case, but I did decline the verb correctly I think. However my memory of that language is a bit thin now).

Nick

Ah, I see the problem; the course is still under development, so it hasn't been fully incorporated into the "Library" section yet (I had to log out of my translator account to check this). I'll try a couple of direct links to the stories available so far:

Karlo

Pippi Longstocking

It has the standard tiny arrow leading you to the next site. Or if you look at the title of the page, it says "Franko" (the large green title letters) and underneith "Introduction" "Pipi Ŝtrumpolonga" and "Karlo". The latter two are what you should click on to get to the texts.

Regarding words you find difficult, I would encourage you to post to the English language forum when you don't understand something. I think that people are generally happy to help. My understanding of the situation was that the problem wasn't that you happened to pick Novico Dektri's word, but the perceived tone with which you asked your question. I think if you had worded your question as something like "I'm really having trouble understanding constructions like 'gramatikscion plifleksebligxi'", without further comment about the construction's legibility etc, that no one would have had a problem with you asking about it - including Novico Dektri.

Regarding people being willing to learn a language like Esperanto, whose speakers sometimes speak in a way not easily understandable to beginners - this is true with any language, isn't it? At this point in history, many people regard English as being the international language. Millions of people all over the world study English, not because they are interested in it as a language (and not because it's easy, because it isn't), but because it is a useful language to know. I think these people would have difficulty understanding the slangy English found on blogs etc. So why do they learn it? They can still understand English used in a more formal setting (newspapers, books). Plus, if they need to use English in person, the English speaker talking to them would instantly understand that this is a person with limited English capability, and adjust their speech accordingly. I think it happens the same way in the Esperanto world. I don't think you've attended an Esperanto event yet, have you? In my experience, when there is a beginner present, people will go out of their way to help that person understand. It doesn't mean that the entire group's conversation will be free of the interesting constructions that Esperanto speakers like to use. It means that when speaking directly to the beginner, people will use easier language. People will try to help the beginner understand by distilling the gist of the conversation into easier language, so the beginner doesn't feel completely left out.

Esperanto was designed as a compromise between ease and flexibility. It could have been designed far to be far easier to learn than it actually is, but this would have made it less flexible and expressive. Zamenhof wanted us to be able to express the whole range of human experience, including having literature, including songs, including community. I don't personally see Esperanto splitting off into dialects, or changing drastically, simply because the community is largely linked by the written word, and when people try to go too far with the changes, there tends to be a backlash against it (how successful have the riistoj been? Google riismo.) Plus the Esperanto speaking community has a lot of people who never do become fluent, who stay involved with Esperanto but never immerse themselves in it long enough to get fluent, just perpetually dabble. I have found that people fluent enough to come up with difficult to understand constructions are a minority in the community.

In addition these complicated constructions are not really a new thing. I have recently been reading an Esperanto translation of "Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The translator's note at the beginning of the text is dated 1938. I do not find the language used in the dialogue of the book, or in the prose, to be appreciably different from today's usage. The page where I currently have my bookmark contains the words "sengxena", "forlasitaj", "civitlimo", "alproksimigxi", "samspeculoj", and "seniluziigos". Flipping through a little, I find "vizagxesprimo", "servsoldato", "pormomente", "batalsxirata", "aeresploranta", "rekonsciigxante", etc. So while Novico Dektri's use of two compound constructions in a row, full of prefixes/suffixes may be somewhat unusual, the words themselves are nothing new. I think if you look through Esperanto poetry you will find far more of these constructions than most of us would ever consider using in our lifetimes!

In any case, give yourself a break! You've only been studying for a couple of months! If in a year's time you still have so much trouble understanding these constructions, and you've been continuously spending this much time with Esperanto, *then* it's time to worry about it; not now, I think.

Kwekubo:Ah, I see the problem; the course is still under development...

Thanks Kwekubo.

Nick

erinja:It has the standard tiny arrow leading you to the next site.

It might do for you as a member of the team. I do not get a next button, nor any large green title. Kwekubo has provided a couple of more direct links into the material, however.

Regarding words you find difficult, I would encourage you to post to the English language forum when you don't understand something. I think that people are generally happy to help. My understanding of the situation was that the problem wasn't that you happened to pick Novico Dektri's word, but the perceived tone with which you asked your question. I think if you had worded your question as something like "I'm really having trouble understanding constructions like 'gramatikscion plifleksebligxi'", without further comment about the construction's legibility etc, that no one would have had a problem with you asking about it - including Novico Dektri.

Forgive me, but I was not trying to have a go at N.D. I was (and am) having a real big dig about the frequency of these artificial constructions in general.

I am, frankly, quite appalled at this community for justifying these phrases all in one word things. You (collectively) do not seem to see a problem and Piron even defends this "evolution" as a good thing.

(I might add that Hungarian, so I am told, does this concatenation of semantemes thing a lot. It is widely regarded as one of the most difficult languages anyone can possibly learn with school children (so I am told by a Hungarian) still having difficulty in speaking at age 7. Do you really want E-o to be like Hungarian?????!!!!!)

You seem to have lost sight of the fact that this is intended to be an easy to learn IAL (and was so intended by the language's creator).

The comparison with English is not valid. English is not an IAL. It is being forced on the world as if it were an IAL, but it simply isn't and doesn't even have the required ethos (unnecessarily huge vocabulary, tolerance of irregular verbs, terrible spelling, lingering use of the accusative and dative cases despite the fact that these are not really necessary in the modern language, somewhat irregular genitive case and was never constructed to be an IAL in the first place etc).

I am sorry, very sorry in fact, if I seem to be at war. Maybe others don't have these problems.

Or.... maybe many others do not even get to my limited level of fluency before giving up....

Or maybe others simply don't object as loudly as I do, but accept the increasing difficulty as "normal". Politicians generally reckon that for every letter they get there are many other people with the same views who simply don't bother to write.

I don't know. I know that I find them difficult and even your own vortaro program cannot so much as parse many of them. So, it not just my problem. It is yours too.

Nick

Piron is quite right to defend this aspect of the language, its expressive power. It's one of the things that keeps people interested, beyond the point of being able to read and write and speak simple sentences. The language has a very high "ceiling" that allows people to do creative things with it. If it weren't so, I'm sure it would have failed to flourish.

You will, of course, run into bad Esperanto and awkward constructions, as you will in any other language you study. And yes, some people will speak in long complex sentences that are barely comprehensible--as they do in every other language. A pedant is a pedant in any language.

Shocking as it may be, some "established" compounds are indeed virtually idiomatic, in that their meaning would be hard to guess. "Eldoni" for "publish" is a good example. I'm happy to see other terms taking its place, but it's still out there. But as a general thing, the Esperanto speech community has tended to exert a self-correcting effect, and the wilder forms either don't get picked up or get dropped. But it takes time, because it's a living language.

The extensive and creative use of adverbs in Esperanto is just how the language, *in actual international use* has evolved. This is because as speakers increase their understanding of the language, their appreciation of its creative use also increases.

nw2394:
It might do for you as a member of the team. I do not get a next button, nor any large green title. Kwekubo has provided a couple of more direct links into the material, however.

I'll have to look into that. Those texts have been around forever. I remember doing those English translations more than a year ago, possibly even two years ago; probably someone forgot to change the permissions to make them visible to everyone.

Forgive me, but I was not trying to have a go at N.D. I was (and am) having a real big dig about the frequency of these artificial constructions in general.

I know that it wasn't meant to be personal, but it came off sounding that way.

I am, frankly, quite appalled at this community for justifying these phrases all in one word things. You (collectively) do not seem to see a problem and Piron even defends this "evolution" as a good thing.

Esperanto is a democratic language. If you don't like these sorts of words, then feel free not to use them! You can certainly express yourself without these constructions, though not as succinctly. I think Piron's point was not "Let's make things difficult for beginners just because we can" but "Natural languages evolve to suit the needs of their speakers and Esperanto also evolves"

(I might add that Hungarian, so I am told, does this concatenation of semantemes thing a lot. It is widely regarded as one of the most difficult languages anyone can possibly learn with school children

I believe you, but Hungarian certainly isn't the only language that does it, although most languages do it on a more limited scale. German does it, English (carwash, hairnet, etc), tons of language. I regard it as something to make it easier for the learner not to have to learn extra roots. I can look at an Italian word like "asciugamano" and understand it based on its roots ("dries hand" = handtowel!) and not have to memorize a separate word. I can look at "portacandela" and know that it means "candleholder" ("carries candle"). Or let's combine lots of these for a nice long word - portasciugamano - handtowelrack (yep, it's a valid Italian word)

My point is that to a beginning Italian speaker, "portasciugamano" is not likely to be a clearer word than "zxyzylo", but once they have learned some Italian, and learned that Italian tends to start off words with porta- if it's a holder of any type, and learned the verb "asciugare" and the noun "mano", they are likely to be able to guess that portasciugamano describes some sort of holder for something that dries your hands. I suspect that it would take a learner of Italian more than 2 months to have this derivation become clear.

Esperanto does this, only more so.

You seem to have lost sight of the fact that this is intended to be an easy to learn IAL (and was so intended by the language's creator).

I think you're being unnecessarily hard on the language. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you've only been studying for a couple months. I would hardly expect someone who had been studying *any* language for a couple of months to find the meanings of all compound words to be instantly clear.

Or maybe others simply don't object as loudly as I do, but accept the increasing difficulty as "normal". Politicians generally reckon that for every letter they get there are many other people with the same views who simply don't bother to write.

I don't doubt that there are others who share your views. I'm not sure what you mean by the increasing difficulty - are you referring to how the language becomes more difficult the more you get into it, or to the language becoming more difficult to learn, the longer it exists?

I do think you have an idealized version of how the language was spoken, even by Zamenhof. I found in his writings the word "diverslingveco" - surely he could have said this with multiple words? "Multepeza", "kiamaniere", "elpensadi", "ellernadi", "alradikiĝi", "sensukiĝi".

I don't know. I know that I find them difficult and even your own vortaro program cannot so much as parse many of them. So, it not just my problem. It is yours too.

This is a programming error in the dictionary's word parser. If you input a completely nonsensical compound word like eksmalsenciĝado, it parses out just fine. We currently have someone working on a fix to the parser, because although the user can't see it, the word parser functions somewhat independently from the dictionary itself, so that new words added to the dictionary don't get parsed as they should; the parser works off its own internal dictionary.

So, it not just my problem. It is yours too.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't seem to have the problems nor the negative attitude that you do. Neither does anyone with whom I speak.

Look, on the one hand Esperanto is supposed to be an IAL. Therefore it must be as easy as it is reasonably possible to make a language.

On the other hand words are being bandied about that are not in a dictionary, indeed cannot be in a dictionary because they are coined on the spot and which the bespoke Esperanto word parsing program on this site cannot make head nor tail of.

Someone has got to be pulling someone's leg.

To defend this as "expressive" is a sick joke. Expressive for the expressor maybe, not necessarily for the recipient.

I will not further argue the point. Anyone who thinks these "word" formations are a good idea and at the same time pretends that Esperanto is a serious contender as an IAL is plain bonkers. I mean, for God's sake - a language whose words are not in dictionaries being used in negotiations by the UN or EU - the notion is ridiculous.

Nick

Let's not go insulting people or their work...

One decent point that I've seen made before is that Esperantists could do with sticking more hyphens in their words, particularly when dealing with learners. Would pli-fleks-ebl-iĝi (or even just pli-fleksebliĝi) sit better with you?

waxle:Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't seem to have the problems nor the negative attitude that you do. Neither does anyone with whom I speak.

Furthermore, my "attitude" as you put it is in favour of making the language plain.

If you think that is negative then you have your head where the sun doesn't shine pal.

Nick