nw2394:

T0dd:You claim that Piron's arguments are weak, but you haven't actually mentioned his arguments, let alone refuted them. You simply reproduced a nice bit of poetry that uses only a few compounds.

If you want a link, here it is:

http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/evolu...

Ah, I wasn't in need of a link to Piron's writings, with which I'm already familiar. Your claim was that "Piron's arguments don't withstand analysis." Nothing you've written thus far establishes that.

Your argument about expressiveness only makes sense to me from the point of view of the expressor. That, frankly, is irrelevant, if the recipient of the communication cannot make head nor tail of it.

The trouble is that you are appointing yourself, after a few months of study, arbiter of what is and is not expressive and/or clear. You may want to claim "Anything in Esperanto that is not clear to me, Nick, after a few months of study demonstrates fundamental flaws in the development of the language." Certainly you can claim such a thing, but why should anyone believe it?

You seem to be so hung up on this expressiveness thing that you cannot understand that it obfuscates things for me, at least.

Oh I understand that perfectly well. Some of the things that frustrate you (though not the creative use of compounds) have frustrated me as well. But "productive compounding", as it is sometimes called, is not a recent addition to the language. It was a design feature from the start, in the very heart of the Fundamento. It's not my personal hang-up; it's a big part of what the language is all about. It's a *core feature* of it. Learning to produce and interpret compounds is a bigger part of Esperanto than it is of many other (but by no means all) languages, *by design*.

And you yourself, listed several E-o compounds, such as publish, which are a long way from obvious.

Indeed. I'm the last person to argue that Esperanto is without flaws. There are a few compounds that Zamenhof himself put into circulation that are quasi-idiomatic and would, in my view, be best left behind. "Eldoni" is one. I believe Z used it, and it's still used, but "aperigi" is becoming more common. Another is "aliĝi", meaning to join (a group or organization). Gradually that one is being supplanted by the more comprehensible "membriĝi" and "aniĝi". There are also cases of roots in the Fundamento that have been replaced by more streamlined versions. "Evolucii" (in Fundamento) is pretty much gone, with the simpler "evolui" taking its place. These things don't happen overnight, but they happen. But the main point is that the existence of a few ill-chosen compounds doesn't invalidate the whole idea.

And, I still maintain that that phrase about fear is hard to understand. It was not clear to me and only context eventually got it for me. And that remains so even with explanation from you.

Specifically what is hard to understand about it? Your problem apparently resulted from not knowing exactly what the verb "timi" means. If that verb is understood, there is no ambiguity.

If a communication is not clear to the recipient of a communication, then it is not clear and the originator has not communicated. Fact, no matter how you want to wriggle with arguments to the contrary or how it is nice to be "expressive". You have epxressed precisely nothing if the recipient cannot understand.

You are partly right and partly wrong.

If a communication is not clear to its recipient, it may yet be clear, because lack of clarity is not the only possible explanation of the recipient's failure to understand. You may take the clearest sample of English or any other language, and there will be some beginners in that language who will misunderstand parts of it. This doesn't show that the sample wasn't clear.

It's true, however, that when this happens communication hasn't taken place. It's not true that this demonstrates the communicator's lack of clarity.

I don't see why my idea that words should be in dictionaries is in the slightest bit weird. I take it for granted in English.

No one said it's weird. It's just not feasible, nor particularly useful, for a highly agglutinating language like Esperanto.

In English, we often do compounding by using nouns in apposition, just as Esperanto does. Over time, the more common forms lose the space between words (which doesn't exist in the spoken language anyway). Gradually "bird house" became "birdhouse". This amounted to a spelling change, nothing more. In terms of how it is said, nothing changed at all.

Tomorrow you could say to your neighbor, "I'm going to dig a dogpool in my backyard." If that's weird, it's because people don't often dig pools for their dogs, but your neighbor would know exactly what you mean by that compound. You won't find it in any dictionary.

It comes down to this: If you can find the components (the roots) in a dictionary, and you understand the principles of compounding, then you simply don't need a dictionary to understand compounds, with a few unfortunate exceptions, which I already mentioned. The ones you've mentioned, such as "plifleksebliĝi" and "malkontentigi" are not exceptions. Their meaning is just what an understanding of their elements would lead you to expect. That's how it is for the vast majority of compounds. Indeed, if it weren't so, people wouldn't use them. Most people don't set out to be misunderstood.

In Esperanto, I take it for granted that every second word I cannot find in the vortaro here isn't in the Reta Vortaro either!!!!! That is not acceptable.

On the contrary, it's admirable! It shows that Esperanto uses a large number of words for which dictionary entries are superfluous.

It is plain lazy speech that shows that the speakers, instead of using the words that do exist, can't be bothered to learn them and want to get away with approximations based on a bunch of simplistic word fragments. Yuck.

No, these *are* the words that exist. Yes, in some cases there is a root that functions as a synonym for some compound, but often there is not. And as we've discussed elsewhere in this forum, those who come to Esperanto from non-European languages complain (justly, in my opinion) about the introduction of more roots to learn, when compounds do the job perfectly well.

Defending this as expressive is obscene.

Nick

Not at all! This is the heart of Esperanto and it deserves to be explained and defended against misunderstandings.

Just a couple of other points that I forgot to include:

"Nuntempemimaligxtrekontentintas"

I realize you're just being petulant here, but the trouble with this "compound" is that it violates the rules of Esperanto word-formation. You see, it's not the case that "anything goes."

As far as being able to read Zamenhof's writings more easily than some posts here... I'd reserve judgment for a while. I've found some of Z's writings pretty challenging. I'm on a mailing list that's used by a number of Akademio members, and some of their messages are pretty daunting, in terms of academic density, but others give me no trouble at all. That's just the way it goes. From my point of view, it's not the compounds that cause trouble, it's long syntactically convoluted sentences--same as in any language, I guess.

La plej malfacila parto de Esperanta lernado al mi estas ke mi konstante bezonas klarigi kio Esperanto estas al aliaj homoj. XS

The hardest part of learning Esperanto for me is that i constantly need to explain what Esperanto is to other people. XS

T0dd:Ah, I wasn't in need of a link to Piron's writings, with which I'm already familiar. Your claim was that "Piron's arguments don't withstand analysis." Nothing you've written thus far establishes that.

Well, it is sad. As far as I am concerned, I've completely destroyed your arguments. This situation appears to me as if I've caught the E-o community having bought a pig and when someone proves that the emperor has no clothes, you still insist on believing to the contrary.

It is very sad. I asked my wife about the fact that quite a lot of terms that are in common use do not appear in dictionaries. Her immediate reaction was that is wrong.

I asked her about long compound words. Her immediate reaction to that was that it is like German and she finds that feature unattractive.

Consequently, I am quite sure that I am not the only person who feels this way.

I guess you should all carry on in your happy circumstances talking to yourselves. I do not wish to continue studying a minority language where not only do words not appear in dictionaries, but the community that uses that language cannot really see why this would be a problem.

Goodbye and happy wearing nothing.

Nick

I'd just like to thank everyone for not breaking it to Nick that the word "is" isn't found in most English dictionaries. He might have to stop speaking English! Not to mention how irregular grammatical forms of most verbs don't have a separate dictionary listing for most language dictionaries, so we must all protect him from this knowledge, so that he doesn't have to spend the rest of his life in utter silence.

Well, sometimes learning new things requires opening oneself up to ways of thinking other than those we are comfortable with. Some can do so, some cannot. Nick has found that Esperanto requires a mode of thinking he isn't comfortable with, and that's perfectly alright.

His decision to drop the language is probably an appropriate one for him, as there is no sense in learning something that involves having a daily conniption. As a boss of mine frequently said (in general - not directly to me, thankfully) "If you don't enjoy whatever you are doing, then you really ought to look into doing something else." Nick was clearly not enjoying Esperanto, and so letting go of it is probably a good choice of action.

In my own case, I've corresponded with a number of people across the globe, using only Esperanto, and I've had very little difficulty having conversations really no different than those I'd have in English (other than the language used, of course). My own experience with Esperanto has been fully positive, and I do feel bad that Nick was unable to discover the same positive aspects that I have been able to over the last year or so. My thought is that he was probably looking for something in Esperanto that is different from what I am looking for in an auxiliary language, thus explaining the rather striking differences between our experiences.

I truly am sorry that his experiences with the language have left such a sour taste in his mouth, but I do hope he finds something more to his liking to take its place.

I think that consciously or unconsciously, Nick was expecting Esperanto to be easy, which it isn't - it's only easiER than some other languages. I ask myself what we could have done as a forum community, or what the site could have done, to smooth his path. Every language has a large percentage of its words that don't appear in dictionaries (otherwise dictionaries would contain every possible grammatical form of every verb, right?), most languages contain compound words. I'm not sure if the language he's looking for exists, but if it does - I agree with you, RiotNrrd, I hope he finds it.

Nick had just one "argument" and that was: If, after a few months of study there is something about Esperanto that gives me trouble, then that is a serious defect in the language. Everything came down to that.

As for the idea that every compound word should be findable in a dictionary, if that idea had any merit at all it would amount to a case against Esperanto dictionaries, no more.

What bothers me about this is not simply that Nick has given up. I understand that Esperanto is not everybody's cup of tea, and I can relate to his frustration at not finding things just the way he'd like them to be. I've been there. What bothers me is that he will undoubtedly communicate his distorted and rancorous view of the language to anyone else he might meet who might express an interest.

It's interesting that just about every IAL project that I've seen has productive compounding as a design feature, for the obvious reason that it reduces the memorization burden of having a non-compound root for every occasion. Volapuk, Ido, Novial, Interlingua, lojban... I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one that doesn't.

I also worry that he'll present a distorted version of Esperanto to the outside. I noticed the wording he used when he spoke to his wife - "A language that has words that aren't even in the dictionary". It is somewhat misleading, as if we intentionally don't list words like "cat" and "house" in the dictionary. "Making huge compound words", like German - when in fact Esperanto's compound words seldom have more than two roots, and are not usually very long.

But I don't think we could have done anything to improve his view of it, short of lying and pretending we agree with him that the word building is a flaw rather than an asset (and that it is a new thing, rather than built in).

Perhaps if Esperanto speakers had the practice of using separating written words, mal/san/ul/ejo, or mal-san-ul-ejo, he would have been less upset by it. But Esperanto speakers get over the need for that relatively quickly, though not within the couple of months that Nick seemed to hope for.

Interesting too that he compared Esperanto unfavorably to Novial, saying that Novial looked much easier - this could be expected, since Novial's grammar is heavily based on English.

I still don't get the "I should understand every possible nuance of the language in 2 months" attitude. That's an irrational viewpoint. Learning any language is hard and takes time. Mastering a language, even Esperanto, can take a lifetime.

That's what Nick never seemed to be willing to hear. The funny thing is, I bet that with an E-o dictionary handy that Nick could probably (if haltingly) express just about any thought he might want in E-o. It might take him time, and his choices might not be the most elegant or efficient ones possible, but I bet he could use the language to communicate. And if he were talking/writing to an Esperantist who realized that he was obviously a beginner, I bet they could communicate with him. After only 2 months, that's pretty impressive.

Esperanto CAN be used for it's intended purpose, communication among people via an easy (compared to natural language) to learn language.

But Eo is a tool, and its uses are limited only by the creativity of its users. It can be used to make linguistic constructions with incredible precison, beauty or cleverness. It can be used for great literature or poems, or scientific communication, or any number of things. And yes, it can be used to communicate in ways that are recondite and obscure. So what?

Nick is a native English speaker, but I bet that Faulkner or Joyce might give him trouble (at least for understanding all the depth and nuance in their works). And I'm not picking on nick, MOST native english speakers would have to work very hard to get beyond the surface for those sorts of writers. But I doubt he would say that because it is possible to use English that deeply it becomes impossible to use it to communicate directly and simply. Yet that seems to be his conclusion about Eo. Because Eo can be used in ways that aren't immediately comprensible to a novice, it can't be used by novices for anything. It's the non sequitur he was never able to resolve. For some reason, He wants Eo to be all Hemmingway and no Faulkner. I'm glad that it has no such limits.

Nick might argue that Most Esperantists communicate more in ways that are recondite than simple. But I would say, why shouldn't they? Why shouldnt they communicate to people with a mastery of the language that is at their level? There's plenty of matierial for newbies to chew on, and when the newbies get to the more complex material, it can challenge them to grow and improve their mastery.

erinja:
Perhaps if Esperanto speakers had the practice of using separating written words, mal/san/ul/ejo, or mal-san-ul-ejo, he would have been less upset by it. But Esperanto speakers get over the need for that relatively quickly, though not within the couple of months that Nick seemed to hope for.

This is a good idea. This is the way that Zamenhof originally did it. In the Unua Libro, roots are seperated by apostrophes. patr'o, mal'jun'a, etc... to emphasize this. It's a shame that learning materials have gotten away from this. In the initial stages of learning it could be very useful.