erinja:Just give a *brief* message saying that Esperanto certainly has some flaws, as does every language, but that it is not open to reforms, just as other living languages are not.

Rohan:

erinja:k1attack is known to do this both here and in other forums

Why hasn't (s)he been ingloriously banned yet?

Arpee(=k1attack?) also did some videoblogging at Youtube. So there's a visible person behind. Even if he shows some behaviour which would look him like a troll regarding lernu.net forum rules(?) I wouldn't call him a "typical" troll. In my opinion he is very strong annoyed that some E-o folks propagate E-o the true international language (short "lingvo internacia"). In my opinion that "lingvo internacia" sounds somewhat arrogant self-centered "Esperanto pride". For me E-o is simply a kind of "lingvo funkcia" like every used language on world. So please "Step-down. Thanks/ Bonvolu ŝtuparigi malsupre, fierulo. Dankon".

Yes, I aggree, E-o could have a kind of ponto lingvo like many other languages on earth, too. But that Interna ideo/Lingvo internacia thing mostly just let non-Esperantists feel offended in my opinion.

qwertz:In my opinion he is very strong annoyed that some E-o folks propagate E-o the true international language (short "lingvo internacia").

There're gobs of vile and venomous ideologies and people out there, combatting whom would make tons of sense, and this guy chooses to pick a beef with a community of mild-mannered language-enthusiasts? Sheesh. What a waste of cerebrum.

Arpee and k1attack aren't the same person, in fact. Though it really does look like that at first! Arpee made one or two posts in one of those really long threads that I posted; I corresponded with him privately at time to work something out and I found him to be a nice guy and very reasonable. I fully support Arpee's right to do his languages, and Arpee doesn't seem to frequent this site too much. It's just that for some reason, k1attack has latched on to Arpee's stuff, and uses it to troll this forum from time to time.

k1attack hasn't been banned because he hasn't actually broken the site's terms of use. There is a rule that you have to keep forums on topic but after being warned, he doesn't post totally off topic anymore. It isn't against the rules to propose language reforms. It's so common for beginners to have an idea on how to 'improve' things, and normally they lose that idea pretty quickly, after some contact with the community.

What this comes down to is that it isn't against the site's terms of use to be an annoying person. Otherwise there would be a lot more people than just k1attack who are banned. The best thing to do with annoying people is to refuse to engage.

I struggle with it as well. If someone is posting on something annoying (but not against terms of service) for the millionth time, I am tempted to say something, but then I think that by saying something I am only encouraging them to respond by writing more of the same. So I grit my teeth and try to ignore it.

Rohan:

qwertz:In my opinion he is very strong annoyed that some E-o folks propagate E-o the true international language (short "lingvo internacia").

There're gobs of vile and venomous ideologies and people out there, combatting whom would make tons of sense, and this guy chooses to pick a beef with a community of mild-mannered language-enthusiasts?

Maybe the German term for flag waving movement (de: "Bewegung") is different. But as long somebody of E-o community uses that "Lingvo internacia"/ "interna ideo" terms other people will freak-out and - jes will - attack E-o community. If I wouldn't see any "community of mild-mannered language-enthusiasts" I would not stay inside E-o community. So I definitly see that ongoing relaxed E-o community which still suffers of that "Lingvo internacia"/ "interna ideo" terms propaganda campaigns in the past. Maybe just a question of time until "Li" and "Ii" will disappear.

Obviously, Esperanto can't be a PERFECT IAL. Yet, it's hard to reform a language that many people already speak (unlike Bon Wen, which had been reformed many times).

I'm just learning Tika for fun. I'm not saying that Tika's better than Esperanto. Tika has its own problems and benefits, and Esperanto has its own problems and benefits. Not even Ido is perfect.

You guys - keep talking your Esperanto. I just won't disturb you again. Just relax.

I've got another question: can you pronounce 'n' as velar as in 'dankon'? Also, can you pronounce 'n' as palatal as in 'sinjoro'?

erinja:
k1attack hasn't been banned because he hasn't actually broken the site's terms of use. There is a rule that you have to keep forums on topic but after being warned, he doesn't post totally off topic anymore. It isn't against the rules to propose language reforms.

In my opinion terms of use aim to save what is in German "Betriebsfrieden" (undisturbed business climate within forum/company etc). Of course it has to be categorized what disturbes the forum climate this way that forum users freak out and get offending. So maybe the en.lernu.net forum past did show that "proposing language reforms disturbes the forum.lernu.net climate" then the terms of uses needs some modification. Yes I know that could maybe a kind of German view and could clash with liberal North-american mentality.

erinja:
I struggle with it as well. If someone is posting on something annoying (but not against terms of service) for the millionth time, I am tempted to say something, but then I think that by saying something I am only encouraging them to respond by writing more of the same. So I grit my teeth and try to ignore it.

I would like compare it with the German forum.ubuntuusers.de community which has a very friendly disscussion climate. It seems to be somewhat common that online disscussion are often run out of control because some members show social behaviour online like they would never do offline. So for this online behaviour also could used more harder rules like it would be offline. For the case of forum.ubuntuusers.de the moderators fading out to the public the regarding ofending posting. It's not deleted. Going further, this would give the regarding user the posibility to correct it's posting because s/he sees the matters more relaxed with some time distance later. Then it could faded public again. Of course, it's kind of censorship.

k1attack:
I've got another question: can you pronounce 'n' as velar as in 'dankon'? Also, can you pronounce 'n' as palatal as in 'sinjoro'?

Please, k1attack, don't try that sanies-vampirism/mistake-vampirism strategy. You well know that "nk" like in "dankon" is not easy to pronounce for Chineese (Asian?) people. So it's a kind of unperfectness (mistake?) of Esperanto. So what/Na und? There probably excists a workaround.

Rohan:

ceigered:Basically, all a "ĝ" is, is really a palataly sound that goes from hard to soft, and has a bit more vibration than a ĉ.

It strikes me as amusingly paradoxical that a couple of posts later, you go on to say

ceigered:Virtually all English [...etc] people can do it pretty easily, they just need to be taught and not told something stupid like "it's a soft ĝ".

I don't know what you're saying? The top one is an intentional simplification of what the sound is, without bringing in affricatives and whatnot. But the latter is quite valid since that's much more vague and it's used to actually teach people the sound, which does not work. k1attack seems to know well enough what both sounds are, so I did not think it necessary to educate him in that regard. Mind you, I guess if I had forgotten my original intentions and read that again I'd be rather embarrassed haha.

...

ceigered: Also, "manĝi" is a lot easier to pronounce in Esperanto than "manĵi", because "manĝi" means you can pronounce the "n" like a normal "n". "manĵi" means you have to learn how to pronounce a nasal vowel before a ĵi, because if you said "manĵi" with a normal "n", it would have a high chance of turning "ĵ" into a "ĝ" anyway in the pronunciation.

Well actually, more often than not, it's nasals that assimilate to following stops, rather than the other way round. So if 'manĵi' were a word, the ĵ would probably remain as it is, while the 'n' would digress from what might be called the 'default' Esperanto 'n' (i.e. 'n' would probably be post-alveolar rather than alveolar or dental, because 'ĵ' is post-alveolar). The same principle is at work in words like 'sango', where a velar 'n' is perfectly acceptable.

That also means that no one would have to bother learning to pronounce nasal vowels. Not that I care in the slightest for 'manĵi', mind.

Good point, I did not think about that! Either way, Zamenhoff seemed to have a love for mixing Italian and French, so who knows . (also, after thinking about it, even if they didn't nasalise the n before ĵ, if there weren't ĝ, there'd be no problem accidentally pronouncing it as "ĝ"... But that's now buried so that's another logic flaw for the week I don't have to admit to hahaha!).

Erinja:What this comes down to is that it isn't against the site's terms of use to be an annoying person. Otherwise there would be a lot more people than just k1attack who are banned.

Whoah, thank god, I would have been banned many times if that were the case!

k1attack:I've got another question: can you pronounce 'n' as velar as in 'dankon'? Also, can you pronounce 'n' as palatal as in 'sinjoro'?

Sure, feel free. Of course, if you pronounce "n" as velar outside of a velar situation (e.g. without k/g being there) then that might come across strange, but (since you and I both seem to like Japanese a bit) Japanese's "-n" consonant can be velar and still sound identical to an English "n".

In fact, I'm sure most people pronounce "dankon" as "dangkon" (with "ng" = the velar nasal consonant), and "sinjoro" with a palatalised "n" subconsciously, I don't think there are many who try to pronounce each letter with perfect clarity in those sort of consonant clusters.
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qwertz:Yes, I aggree, E-o could have a kind of ponto lingvo like many other languages on earth, too. But that Interna ideo/Lingvo internacia thing mostly just let non-Esperantists feel offended in my opinion.

'Tis interesting. Like Rohan said, there's much worse things out there, but for some reason Esperanto can sometimes get more flak than them. It must be because people are now very cynical, if recent politics regarding some tea-party offshoots and whatnot have demonstrated (sorry those moderate tea-partyists, but the more radical/cynical of your lot are the only one I can use as an example atm).

k1attack:
But it's easy to work out whether it should be written as a ĝ or a ĵ in the written language. I don't want to merge the letters. I just want to merge the sounds. (because French people (I think) can't pronounce the English-j sound and other people around the world can't pronounce the French-j sound)

I'm not sure of that statement. French people have no problem with the english-j. The french-j is not only french as it is spoken in other language (slavic for example).

Maybe your proposal is good (I'm neutral), but as other said, it's a bit late to make such change, and the switch from hx to k is quite an exception..

To end: if you want to merge the sounds, you have also to merge the letters..

Sorry to derail, but is the k->ĥ change really as big as people make it? I always put it down to having dual neologisms for the same word from two different sources (Greek and the latin offshoot languages), or less significantly due to a h/ĥ conflict (which isn't too unbelievable since languages like Chinese, Russian, Spanish and a few others have little ways to distinguish between them, but I'm sure it'd have more to do with the Western European influence over that of the east).

I ask since to me "ĥoro" has always been the way to say "choir/chorus" since "koruso" seems stupid to an extent and koro/horo are clearly out of bounds for obvious reasons. Well, all this in writing. In speech, mispronouncing "arĥeologio" isn't uncommon for me, but then again it took me a few good years of my life to find out that archeologists did not discover dead dinosaurs. I guess the Zamenhoffian view would have been that "kh/ch" should have been differentiated in some way from k/h, since he seems to have respect for the ancient European languages.