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T0dd (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 15:05:41
erinja:The only way you could "remove" transitivity would be to make all verbs loosey-goosey by default. The -N ending would make it clear when the verb is being used transitively. This would pretty much put the -IG- affix out of business.
English is so loosey-goosey about transitivity that I think this task is harder for anglophones than for speakers of other languages. But when you come down to it, it's relatively few verbs that are in doubt, and it's not that big a deal to just memorize them, or to memorize their Esperanto definitions.
As Jordan points out, there are a few loosey-goosey verbs in Esperanto now, such as fumi. To have them all work that way could be done, without loss of expressive power, I believe, but it would be major surgery to Esperanto.
sudanglo
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sudanglo (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 15:23:15
Big difference between mi manĝis la katon and mi manĝigis la katon.
erinja (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 15:31:12
T0dd:The only way you could "remove" transitivity would be to make all verbs loosey-goosey by default. The -N ending would make it clear when the verb is being used transitively. This would pretty much put the -IG- affix out of business.I agree, but I disagree that it would put -IG- out of business. I think there's still a place for IG, even in a hypothetical Esperantido with neutral verb transitivity.
Not every transitive verb is accompanied by a direct object. There's a big difference between "He already died" (Li jam mortis) and "He has already killed" (Li jam mortigis). I suppose though that if you did get rid of IG, you would be forced to use some kind of dummy object to indicate transitivity, to differentiate between "Li jam mortis" and the hypothetical *"Li jam mortis iun".
And of course it still wouldn't do away with causative IG.
Manĝi, manĝiĝi, and manĝigi are all used. I suppose that in the absence of IG you'd have no choice but to say something like "kaŭzi manĝi" or "doni manĝaĵon al", depending on context.
T0dd (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 15:37:18
sudanglo:I think that the argument from what "seems natural" is actually even thinner than the argument from the dubious metaphysics of "thingness" and the like.
The netransitiveco of lunĉi seems to me to be natural, not arbitrary, Todd. It is then, from my point of view, odd to use a near synonym with a direct object.
It also seems natural to me, and not arbitrary, that 'kongresi' and 'kunveni' don't take direct objects.
What makes these things natural-seeming, or not?
In kunveni, we have a compound whose principal root is already instransitive. In kongresi, we have a verb derived from a noun, and the meaning is kunveni kongrese, so it's not surprising that these words are instransitive.
In the case of tagmanĝi and the others, we have a compound derived from a transitive verb, and there's nothing about the meaning of that compound to suggest a change in transitivity. If we take the NPIV designation to be binding, then that classification forbids the use of a direct object. The question is: What possible purpose does this restriction serve? What confusion or misunderstanding does it prevent?
It's a general principal of Esperanto that almost all verbs are classified as either transitive or intransitive. That's fine. I'm not taking issue with that. But when you make a compound from a transitive verb, and in the process you change the transitivity, there ought to be some reasonably clear reason for doing so. In some cases, no doubt there is such a reason. But in this case, I've yet to see one. The fact that tagmanĝo is an event doesn't do it. After all, festo is an event too, but festi is transitive.
T0dd (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 15:40:08
ceigered (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 16:21:44
erinja:There's a big difference between "He already died" (Li jam mortis) and "He has already killed" (Li jam mortigis)While such would lose a shade of meaning, I guess if EO became ergative, you'd be able to say "Li mortis la monstron" and make sense, which is better than nothing. The problem with ergatives though is that you can't simply say "he kills", since it'd instead be "he dies" in that case.
But anyway I thought it was interested that you made that point, since the English "die" seems to be a remnant of a previous ergative form, where you could say "he dies (someone)" and "he dies" (he's dying/being killed) - I'm using the German "tuen" (right verb?) to come to that conclusion though, but the fact that one has the verb as "to kill" while the other has it as "to die" means that at one point they were the same, and likely ergative.
So English (or some variation of proto-germanic) would have had that exact situation as this theoretical Esperantid!
Miland (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 16:31:42
T0dd:..when you make a compound from a transitive verb, and in the process you change the transitivity, there ought to be some reasonably clear reason for doing so..But in this case, I've yet to see one. The fact that tagmanĝo is an event doesn't do it. After all, festo is an event too, but festi is transitive.Festo is a generic term for celebrations, like manĝo. However festeni means participate in a celebratory meal, an event, which provides a more appropriate analogy with tagmanĝi. And festeni. according to PIV 2005, is intransitive.
RiotNrrd (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 17:24:01
darkweasel:However, you can also learn the meaning of komenci as "to cause something to start" or something similar. Now you can use this verb correctly, without ever thinking about "transitivity", which is a term that confuses people.There is no difference in memory load. In one case you have to remember whether the verb is of the form "To X something" or of the form "To X". In the other case, you have to remember whether the verb is transitive or not. It reframes the problem, but doesn't remove it. There are still two classes of verbs, either way, and you still have to just memorize which is which.
Like I said, I'm not reform minded, so I just accept that this is what I have to do. But I think it COULD have been done in a way that at least followed some kind of pattern.
To change it now would be silly - as Todd said, it would be major surgery. But it still annoys me.
darkweasel (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 18:31:17
ceigered:I'm using the German "tuen" (right verb?)This verb does not exist in German. Do you mean tun (= "to do")?
razlem (Prikaži profil) 11. marec 2011 18:38:19
erinja:Ultimately, as someone already mentioned, if you memorize the Esperanto meaning of a verb, the transitivity is obvious.Ah, the old irregularity tactic- "You just have to memorize it."