Meddelanden: 33
Språk: English
ceigered (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 05:32:56
Esperanto effectively assumes that the person speaks another language, and that they are intelligent in it enough to get these things. So Esperanto requires that if someone is to understand besto estas tigro correctly, they know what animals and tigers are and that tigers are animals. Maybe an imperfection planted on purpose, so that EO can't be any better than any other language? After all, if EO was super logical and perfect, it might stump learning in some other areas because too much information is coded into the language, and speakers don't need to think for themselves when the language does. Who knows.
I think Genjix, from my own little research, that esti, iĝi and restas are the only ones that do that. I can't find any others, if simili takes an -n. I guess that's good for us eh? I know my ability to count goes downhill after 5, so 3 strange verbs is good for me
Genjix (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 05:46:31
sudanglo (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 10:58:14
If there isn't one which makes any sense without changing the meaning then the structure is good.
On the other hand, you could just say that Esperanto mimics other languages which have something like Esperanto's 'n' and also have the structure Nominative Noun + V + Nominative noun.
ceigered (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 11:16:17
(you can tell I'm enjoying these emoticons), but I'm guessing Latin also avoided cases in "to be" phrases, going from This line (homo ego sum, homo tu es). 
Miland (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 12:47:34
Genjix:..why is everyone talking about transitive & intransitive verbs?The second message in this thread first brought the subject in. The reason may be that verbs which can be used to express equivalence usually contain the idea of "being" rather than "action" on an object, and so are intransitive.
Genjix:..is there a memorable list?Here's two lists of common transitive and intransitive verbs.
T0dd (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 13:10:54
ceigered:Maybe an imperfection planted on purpose, so that EO can't be any better than any other language? After all, if EO was super logical and perfect, it might stump learning in some other areas because too much information is coded into the language, and speakers don't need to think for themselves when the language does. Who knows.I think Zamenhof assumed that any person with a high school education, or its international equivalent, would be familiar with traditional grammatical concepts, so he didn't see a need to try to improve on them, or subject them to any special logical scrutiny. Esperanto, unlike Lojban, was not built from scratch as a logical language.
I agree that the price of making Esperanto more logical would be to make it considerably more complicated. And very little would be gained in the effort.
erinja (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 15:22:46
ceigered:SlightlyYes, Latin puts those "to be" phrases all in the nominative case. It's called a predicate nominative. We have it in English too. And as this link notes, predicate nominatives are also used with verbs other than "to be"; "to remain" and "to become" are other examples (fitting in nicely with "iĝi" and "resti" in Esperanto, as you mentioned earlier!)
This is also why we are technically supposed to say "It is I" and not "It is me" (although colloquially, "It is me" is more common).
ceigered (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 17:20:08
erinja:This is also why we are technically supposed to say "It is I" and not "It is me" (although colloquially, "It is me" is more common).Haha, not even that, now it's more "tsme!".
Thanks for that, I doubt I'll ever remember all this terminology but there does seem to be a pattern in non-constructed languages, so then I guess it's fair to say Zam was somewhat inspired as well? (to what extent, once again I call "who knows")
erinja (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 17:51:04
malgxoj (Visa profilen) 24 januari 2011 21:25:46