johume:But with less ambiguity than others. That's the philosophy of Esperanto. Create as little ambiguity as possible.

Your "true for any language" sounds a bit like "There is no 100% security, so why should I care about security issues?"

I'm saying that ambiguity is unavoidable, no matter how hard you try and eliminate it. If this is really the philosophy of Esperanto, then it has a long way to go.

ceigered:Re this Angos, off topic but I must add that it is very interesting and a good little thought experiment in the case it doesn't take off. Where can I borrow this creativity?

Thanks- this sounds cheesy, but it was mostly teamwork.

razlem:

johume:But with less ambiguity than others. That's the philosophy of Esperanto. Create as little ambiguity as possible.

Your "true for any language" sounds a bit like "There is no 100% security, so why should I care about security issues?"

I'm saying that ambiguity is unavoidable, no matter how hard you try and eliminate it. If this is really the philosophy of Esperanto, then it has a long way to go.

Have you actually read what I have written?

johmue:Have you actually read what I have written?

Yes, but I don't understand what the alternative would be. Many natural languages are either more precise than Esperanto, or have qualities of precision that should have been included in Esperanto. I don't mean to say that total ambiguity is a good thing, but having to rely on context is completely natural, and it makes the language a bit easier to learn.

Bovinoj.

razlem:

johmue:Have you actually read what I have written?

Yes, but I don't understand what the alternative would be. Many natural languages are either more precise than Esperanto, or have qualities of precision that should have been included in Esperanto. I don't mean to say that total ambiguity is a good thing, but having to rely on context is completely natural, and it makes the language a bit easier to learn.

A bit easier to speak, but a bit harder understand. Keep in mind, that Esperanto is designed to be an international language. And an international language should avoid ambiguity where it can.

Imagine an international language I that has ambiguity all over the place in order to be easy to learn. Now consider a sentence that is unambigous in language A, meaning X. This sentence is translated to I resulting in an ambigous sentence, meaning either X or Y.

A speaker of language A might be unaware that the sentence in I is ambigous and thus does not give enough context to understand it. A listener who does not know A maybe due to his native language understand Y at first, when hearing the ambigous sentence in I.

Esperanto tries to avoid cases like that by avoiding ambiguity as much as possible.

johmue:A bit easier to speak, but a bit harder understand. Keep in mind, that Esperanto is designed to be an international language. And an international language should avoid ambiguity where it can.

I don't think it's hard to understand, as long as you have context, which, 99 percent of the time, you do.

johmue:Imagine an international language I that has ambiguity all over the place in order to be easy to learn. Now consider a sentence that is unambigous in language A, meaning X. This sentence is translated to I resulting in an ambigous sentence, meaning either X or Y.

A speaker of language A might be unaware that the sentence in I is ambigous and thus does not give enough context to understand it. A listener who does not know A maybe due to his native language understand Y at first, when hearing the ambigous sentence in I.

Esperanto tries to avoid cases like that by avoiding ambiguity as much as possible.

In context, it wouldn't matter. And there are modifiers and other words that you can use to specify the meaning. Maybe I'm not understanding you, could you possibly give a real-world example? Also, define "ambiguity all over the place."

I think this train of thought may stray from Esperanto into Angos (the language I'm using for reference). In which case, personal messages may have to be substituted for forum posts.

sudanglo:Keep your shirt on Ceiger, I am perfectly entitled to express my opinion that it's silly to compare Esperanto with the other IL initiatives - for the very reasons that Todd so clearly gave.

Why do you not find them compelling? Isn't he right.

Except....that's not what I wrote.

Re Esperantic ambiguous transitivity, if I may join in momentarily.

@Razlem: I think you may be viewing EO as being more ambiguous than might actually be the case. It's surprisingly unambiguous most of the time, although I do have a pet irritation in "rideto"

@Johmue: A language with ambiguous transitivity isn't necessarily an ambiguous incomprehensible load of gibberish - instead, the importance shifts from word endings to the sentence as a whole, and the flow of that sentence - sort of forming a sandhi of semantics .

EO chose one way which worked due to the fact that it has similarities to classical languages - because it was sort of grounded in a sense of tradition, I guess EO would always have faired better with the more rigid system it still has today. However, to those dedicated in the other method, it is just as good if you are wiling to spend a lot of time trialling your language and trying to perfect it, although you probably will need a lot more time that making an EO-esque language.

Anyway, EO is set up from the core to behave the way it is and only gradual accidental evolution will change this for various reasons, so it's not really useful to use as a model anymore in anecdotes I think...

sudanglo:Keep your shirt on Ceiger, I am perfectly entitled to express my opinion that it's silly to compare Esperanto with the other IL initiatives - for the very reasons that Todd so clearly gave.

Why do you not find them compelling? Isn't he right.

I apologise for my shirt flying off there.
But I would ask that you reread T0dd's last post as I feel it is a more coolheaded way of saying what I want to say (as you can tell I was unfortunately blessed with a moderately small temper, but more with arrogance ).

sudanglo:.. it is laughable to compare Esperanto with the language projects that came after it..

I wouldn't regard Glosa as a joke, in terms of its conception. Don Harlow states that it is virtually unknown, but makes no linguistic criticism.

Whether a rival to Esperanto could arise in the future that would be more effective than Esperanto has been, I don't know. But it would have to prove itself, and that would not be easy.