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bartlett22183 (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 19.49.47
T0dd:A perfectly good point which I admit that I had not thought of when I first wrote the essay a number of years ago. Thank you.bartlett22183:There are numerous factors as to why a conIAL may or may not succeed. (At the risk of blowing my own horn, see my essay "Thoughts on IAL Success" atIt's a good essay. We've discussed this on AUXLANG (I've been pretty inactive there lately, however), but I'll repeat a point that I made there: People are not just language users; they are language consumers, and for that reason content needs to be added to your list of Contributors to IAL Success. [trim for brevity]
http://www.panix.com/~bartlett/thoughts.html .
For most conIALs, one or more of those factors are simply lacking.
razlem (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 20.11.12
erinja: I guess it depends on how you define "function", then! If something functions perfectly but no-one uses it, then how "functional" is it really? If you write your own perfect, ideal language, and no one else learns it (or even if only one or two other people learn it), then how useful is it?Well, it still functions, just not on the same scale. The essay summed up the problems pretty well. I think there are many well-constructed IALs out there, and I've made a conscious effort to find them, but I have not been able to because they aren't publicized.
I've been forced to create a new language that's inspired by Esperanto because I can't change it directly, and when I try to publicize it, I get "Esperanto has more speakers, it already works." Well, English has 1000x the amount of speakers Esperanto does, so why should people learn Esperanto? (This is another discussion entirely).
I'm addressing a need that Esperanto has only partially filled. I never said my language/revisions were perfect, nor did I say it would replace Esperanto.
sudanglo (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 20.28.56
I'll grant you Todd that the studies of phoneticians might have some use if someone seeks advice as to how to lose an English or French (or whatever) accent when he speaks Esperanto. And a phonetician who knows Esperanto would be useful if we want to produce software to convert Esperanto text to speech.
Bu I really don't see how a linguist who knows some languages even say 6 of them out of the 6000 on the planet, but doesn't know Esperanto, can have any special knowledge which allows him to comment on Esperanto.
As regards interlinguistics, Ceiger, if this is the study of Pidgins and Creoles, then OK.
If it is the study of auxiliary languages like Esperanto then it is just the study of Esperanto, since there aren't any other auxiliary languages that are spoken and have a sufficiently large corpus for serious study.
The so called conlangs are just people's schemes for languages. Hardly a serious academic subject,
Bu I really don't see how a linguist who knows some languages even say 6 of them out of the 6000 on the planet, but doesn't know Esperanto, can have any special knowledge which allows him to comment on Esperanto.
As regards interlinguistics, Ceiger, if this is the study of Pidgins and Creoles, then OK.
If it is the study of auxiliary languages like Esperanto then it is just the study of Esperanto, since there aren't any other auxiliary languages that are spoken and have a sufficiently large corpus for serious study.
The so called conlangs are just people's schemes for languages. Hardly a serious academic subject,
razlem (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 20.57.21
sudanglo: If it is the study of auxiliary languages like Esperanto then it is just the study of Esperanto, since there aren't any other auxiliary languages that are spoken and have a sufficiently large corpus for serious study.It's studying how people communicate without sharing a common first language. Pidgins, creoles, as well as Esperanto, Ido, and Interlingua are studied (this doesn't mean we actually learn them, rather we learn their structure and origin).
You discuss the merits and flaws of these auxiliaries and learn about what people need for both basic communication and creative expression. This field requires basic knowledge of several different types of language families, otherwise, yes, we're just discussing what Esperanto has already done.
sudanglo (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 20.59.50
Forgive me if I have misunderstood the talk about rules of derivation, but this does not seem to me to have any relevance to Esperanto.
Esperanto works by 'kunmetado' not derivation.
It is of no more importance that a meaning has not yet been ascribed to 'homi' (other than this is the meaning of 'hom' plus the meaning of 'i') than it is of importance that no meaning has been yet ascribed to 'lum-barel-o' beyond that it is the meaning of 'lum' plus the meaning of 'barel' plus the meaning of 'o'.
Esperanto works by 'kunmetado' not derivation.
It is of no more importance that a meaning has not yet been ascribed to 'homi' (other than this is the meaning of 'hom' plus the meaning of 'i') than it is of importance that no meaning has been yet ascribed to 'lum-barel-o' beyond that it is the meaning of 'lum' plus the meaning of 'barel' plus the meaning of 'o'.
sudanglo (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 21.20.42
Phooey!
Discussing the merits of conlang projects is just so much waffle. Since without any actual serious international usage you can't know which are actually practical and which are pipe-dreams, or which will conserve their original plans or which will become something else when actually spoken.
Unless, Razlem, you have discovered the much vaunted Universal properties of human language and are keeping quiet about it.
And as regards studing a language without actually learning it - well, your knowledge of that language is going only to be superficial and your opinions commensurately trivial.
However, if you want to learn Esperanto, then this site will help and people will be ready to help you on points that are not clear to you.
Discussing the merits of conlang projects is just so much waffle. Since without any actual serious international usage you can't know which are actually practical and which are pipe-dreams, or which will conserve their original plans or which will become something else when actually spoken.
Unless, Razlem, you have discovered the much vaunted Universal properties of human language and are keeping quiet about it.
And as regards studing a language without actually learning it - well, your knowledge of that language is going only to be superficial and your opinions commensurately trivial.
However, if you want to learn Esperanto, then this site will help and people will be ready to help you on points that are not clear to you.
razlem (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 22.09.23
sudanglo:Forgive me if I have misunderstood the talk about rules of derivation, but this does not seem to me to have any relevance to Esperanto.Except that it dictates the assignment of the opposite prefix (which is a vastly inefficient concept itself).
But I was talking about how you get the roots themselves, not compounding.
"Unless, Razlem, you have discovered the much vaunted Universal properties of human language and are keeping quiet about it."
I've actually developed with my language an idea I have not seen in many IALs, which is ambiguity. IALs strive for non-ambiguity, but this leads to the development of complex grammatical systems and mountains of vocabulary. I'd love to talk more about this, but it's straying off topic.
"And as regards studing a language without actually learning it - well, your knowledge of that language is going only to be superficial and your opinions commensurately trivial."
On the contrary, the knowledge gained by studying the structure and formation makes me much more qualified to discuss said structure than a fluent speaker who has not been trained to recognize inconsistencies in the language.
bartlett22183 (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 23.46.27
razlem:[trimmed for brevity]I am not sure I agree here. A person can be a fluent speaker and still recognize problems. For example, I am an educated native speaker of (General American) English, and I am well aware of some of the problems of English as an international auxiliary language, even though there are many non-native speakers who have the opportunity to learn it (at least to some extent) in school as youngsters.
"And as regards studing a language without actually learning it - well, your knowledge of that language is going only to be superficial and your opinions commensurately trivial."
On the contrary, the knowledge gained by studying the structure and formation makes me much more qualified to discuss said structure than a fluent speaker who has not been trained to recognize inconsistencies in the language.
Similarly, there are many fluent Esperantists who would readily concede this or that feature of the language to be less than the best. (For example, although I am not a fluent E-ist, as a long time student of IALs, I consider the E-o personal pronoun system to be quite defective relative to another conIAL's.) Nevertheless, the real issue, in my mind, is how well the language works in practice, not what its theoretical constructs are. If I were Zamenhof in 1887 with what is now known from experience about conIALs, I would not construct E-o exactly in the form that he published. Nevertheless, experience since then has shown that E-o does work as an auxiliary language and is probably far easier to gain at least some proficiency in for many learners than many, probably most, natural languages.
T0dd (Tunjukkan profil) 12 Januari 2011 23.54.50
sudanglo:Esperanto works by 'kunmetado' not derivation."kunmetado" is derivation. See Derivation (linguistics).
It is of no more importance that a meaning has not yet been ascribed to 'homi' (other than this is the meaning of 'hom' plus the meaning of 'i') than it is of importance that no meaning has been yet ascribed to 'lum-barel-o' beyond that it is the meaning of 'lum' plus the meaning of 'barel' plus the meaning of 'o'.There are a couple of things wrong here. First, "plus" is meaningless as applied to the formation of words in Esperanto or any other language. The fact is, the relation between the elements of derived words in Esperanto is not uniform. Moreover, Esperanto roots are not words, and don't have meaning the way words do. What is the meaning of "bros-"? Is it a thing or an act? "Brosi" means "to brush" and "broso" means "a brush", but while "kombi" means "to comb", "kombo" does not mean "a comb"--to take a well-worn example.
I think it's a strength of Esperanto that derived words do not entail their meaning, but merely suggest it. In some cases, the suggestion is pretty idiomatic, too. How many people, looking up the meanings of "el" and "doni", would guess how "eldoni" is used in Esperanto? What about "aliĝi"?
If you see this vagueness as a problem, then you're likely to want more and more affixes to try to nail things down, which is the path that Ido took. Once again, Zamenhof had good instincts concerning what is a tolerable level of ambiguity. I think Esperanto's principle of "neceso kaj sufiĉo" is more workable than Ido's more "logical" principle of reversibility.
Todd
razlem (Tunjukkan profil) 13 Januari 2011 00.56.34
@Todd
"If you see this vagueness as a problem, then you're likely to want more and more affixes to try to nail things down, which is the path that Ido took. Once again, Zamenhof had good instincts concerning what is a tolerable level of ambiguity. I think Esperanto's principle of "neceso kaj sufiĉo" is more workable than Ido's more "logical" principle of reversibility."
I don't see vagueness as a problem at all- quite the opposite actually. The brain has an uncanny ability to generate meaning from context.
But Zamenhof's idea of "necessary" was a bit biased (accusative case, for example). This is the central theme of this thread: Some grammatical concepts in Esperanto are not necessary for international communication. This is assuming that facilitating basic conversation is your ultimate goal.
"If you see this vagueness as a problem, then you're likely to want more and more affixes to try to nail things down, which is the path that Ido took. Once again, Zamenhof had good instincts concerning what is a tolerable level of ambiguity. I think Esperanto's principle of "neceso kaj sufiĉo" is more workable than Ido's more "logical" principle of reversibility."
I don't see vagueness as a problem at all- quite the opposite actually. The brain has an uncanny ability to generate meaning from context.
But Zamenhof's idea of "necessary" was a bit biased (accusative case, for example). This is the central theme of this thread: Some grammatical concepts in Esperanto are not necessary for international communication. This is assuming that facilitating basic conversation is your ultimate goal.