Messages: 63
Language: English
ceigered (User's profile) July 24, 2009, 1:52:53 PM
It's the most peculiar thing though - look at us speaking in English, and yet not one person here would know the language inside out. It's a beautiful phenomena of 'understanding yet not really understanding'.
I guess that's one challenge to conlanging - trying to create a language innately understandable, without the need for large threads on lernu.net discussing adjectives vs. adverbs. Actually no, we would still have large threads because we all love talking about it
Vilinilo (User's profile) July 24, 2009, 3:43:43 PM
ceigered:I guess that's one challenge to conlanging - trying to create a language innately understandable, without the need for large threads on lernu.net discussing adjectives vs. adverbs. Actually no, we would still have large threads because we all love talking about itI agree with you, the distinction between adjectives and adverbs is an unnecessary difficulty - and many languages work very well without it. In my opinion, although Esperanto is a very nice language, it's not an ideal auxlang for international communication.
mnlg (User's profile) July 24, 2009, 4:03:13 PM
andogigi (User's profile) July 24, 2009, 7:28:00 PM
Example:
The building remained stable after the earthquake.
Technically, "stable" is an adjective which is being used as an adverb. (It is describing how the building remained, not the building itself) However, since "remained" links it back to the subject, it is allowed.
This can be a double-edged sword, since the part of speech is determined by the usage of the verb.
For example:
1) The rose smells beautiful.
2) I smell the beautiful rose.
In sentence 1, 'beautiful' is an adverb. In the second, it is an adjective.
Anyway, I've never heard of "linking verbs" before in my life. This is new to me.
andogigi (User's profile) July 25, 2009, 6:35:56 AM
ceigered:...without the need for large threads on lernu.net discussing adjectives vs. adverbs.If we want an endlessly long thread, it would have to be on something like whether or not we all believed in God. I think that one's been going on forever!
RiotNrrd (User's profile) July 25, 2009, 7:24:41 AM
Vilinilo:I agree with you, the distinction between adjectives and adverbs is an unnecessary difficulty - and many languages work very well without it.I think the relatively free word order in Esperanto makes having a distinction between adjectives and adverbs useful. You can't rely on the word order to tell you what's modifying what, so it makes sense (to me) that you'd want to make a clear distinction between them. If it ends in an -a(jn), it's modifying the noun. If it ends in an -e, it's not.
Certainly there are other ways of doing it, but the way it's done in Esperanto seems quite workable to me.
ceigered (User's profile) July 25, 2009, 9:47:27 AM
andogigi:LOLceigered:...without the need for large threads on lernu.net discussing adjectives vs. adverbs.If we want an endlessly long thread, it would have to be on something like whether or not we all believed in God. I think that one's been going on forever!
!!!That thread will not die will it?
I think word order is another underrated way of distinguishing between adverbs and adjectives. If you make it so adjectives and adverbs always come before what they describe, it generally seperates them quite nicely, as far as I'm concerned
And word order is easy to learn in my opinion, even if you speak Russian where it is more free, word order is the easiest concepts ever in a language (actually, if I'm correct, I think word order is one of the things that separates human language ability from chimp language ability, amongst some other things).But there are numerous ways to approach this, and while its not ideal, Zam's idea is one of the best using the traditional european method of classification.
I'd personally combine verbs and nouns into a single class, use copulae to join them together, and then combine adjectives and adverbs into a single 'describing' class (where they function as both) and then that way nouns and 'verbnouns' can be described easily. The final position in the sentence can be reserved for special adverb phrases like 'also' etc. And then add in the accusative class as a preposition.
Actually I like that idea.. I might try and form a conlang using that method to see how viable it is.
Anyway, before I go to try and start an Age of Empires 3 game, its good that we get to talk about these things, maybe one day in the future our discussions will contribute to international communication... Maybe a 'vulgar esperanto' is being set up now by our discussions...
tommjames (User's profile) July 25, 2009, 11:16:57 AM
RiotNrrd:I think the relatively free word order in Esperanto makes having a distinction between adjectives and adverbs useful.I can agree there that it's useful, perhaps not in an absolute sense but for Esperanto I can imagine some difficulties with the free word order if you were to get rid of the disctinction between adjectives and adverbs.
If you wanted to say "The car went quickly down the street", you might translate as La aŭto rapide iris laŭ la strato. Presumably if you were to get rid of adverbs you'd have La aŭto rapida iris laŭ la strato which would mean the quite different "The fast car went down the street", unless you enforced the kind of description-before-object word order that ceigered proposes.
But I agree with you ceigered having strict word order isn't really much of a problem in itself, if I were designing an optimal language I would probably go down the fixed word order route. Personally I'm not big on the whole "Esperanto is great because you can change the word order!" thing, but I respect it's appeal for those who find utility/beauty in it.
mnlg (User's profile) July 25, 2009, 12:34:42 PM
tommjames:Personally I'm not big on the whole "Esperanto is great because you can change the word order!" thingTry translating poetry, or creating poetry, and you will understand.
Miland (User's profile) July 25, 2009, 1:20:02 PM
Vilinilo:In my opinion, .. Esperanto is .. not an ideal auxlang for international communication.Do you have a better alternative?