feliz123:"Tiom da pecoj kiom estas"

Is this in any way relevant (at least for lernu-teamanoj to remember what is being taught)?

As darkweasel has explained, no.

However a phrase from the page you linked to that is relevant is "Kiom kontenta vi estas pri tia respondo?", as the "kiom" relates to grade here.

erinja:

EdRobertson:This break-up-into-dialects-bogeyman has been around for a while, and there's no evidence of it ever happening.

Right, the breaking up into dialects doesn't happen because Esperantists are culturally fairly rigid about maintaining grammatical rules.

Not quite. If that was the case, you'd expect the Esperanto of 2011 to be like that of 1911. It isn't. Even the 'netuŝebla' Fundamento, is, well, tuŝita. Take rule 2, nouns end in 'o'. There are now syntactic nouns like 'la angla' and 'la kvara matene', and although morphologically they might look like adjectives, they aren't, they're nouns. Or rule 9, 'la akcento estas ĉiam sur la antaŭlasta silabo'. Listen to anybody saying a sentence where a mal- word is important. If the speaker wants to be understood, they'll stress the first syllable of the mal- word. I don't know if people still followed the 'rules' in 1911, but they sure as hell don't follow them now.

Esperanto works like every other living language on the planet, and fluent Esperanto speakers imitate other fluent Esperanto speakers. That's what the 'rules' are.

erinja:However I personally would never ever use "da" in this manner. It's a preposition, and it doesn't make sense to use a preposition all alone, without a noun after it.

Q:"Ĉu vi estas por aŭ kontraŭ?"
A:"Por."

erinja:In a case where I wanted to emphasize that I want a quantity of a box, rather than an actual box, I would say "Mi volas kvanton de unu skatolo". Easy peasy! No weird and questionable grammar necessary.

Trouble is, this is two words longer than it needs to be, and just doesn't have the same impact as "Mi volas skatolon da". It's a matter of style.

EdRobertson:There are now syntactic nouns like 'la angla' and 'la kvara matene'..

As we know, the substantives lingvo and horo are respectively implicit in those expressions. Subkomprenataj vortoj have a long and honorable tradition in Esperanto.

Phew! I'm glad the Fundamento remains netuŝita

EdRobertson: There are now syntactic nouns like 'la angla' and 'la kvara matene', and although morphologically they might look like adjectives, they aren't, they're nouns.

No, they are adjectives without any associated noun - well, with an implicit one.

Angla is not a noun. La angla is an abbreviation of la angla lingvo.

That is something that exists already in the Fundamento (§12 Ekzercaro):

El ŝiaj multaj infanoj unuj estas bonaj kaj aliaj estas malbonaj.

... where aliaj is an abbreviation of aliaj infanoj.

edit: Miland was faster

EdRobertson:

erinja:In a case where I wanted to emphasize that I want a quantity of a box, rather than an actual box, I would say "Mi volas kvanton de unu skatolo". Easy peasy! No weird and questionable grammar necessary.

Trouble is, this is two words longer than it needs to be, and just doesn't have the same impact as "Mi volas skatolon da". It's a matter of style.

The more Esperanto-style solution "Mi volas skatolplenon." is even one word shorter than the daismo.

Thank you for those who answered my question.

Ok, I thought that would be useless...

feliz123:Ok, I thought that would be useless...

Not at all, you did well to contribute. Feel free to try again!

erinja:

EdRobertson:This break-up-into-dialects-bogeyman has been around for a while, and there's no evidence of it ever happening.

Right, the breaking up into dialects doesn't happen because Esperantists are culturally fairly rigid about maintaining grammatical rules.

Well, more that while there is clearly variation in Esperanto, those using the same variations aren't geographically group together nor really part of an exclusive subculture, and no one really has a reason to, thus even grammatically correct variations of saying the same thing are never used in opposition to eachother over regional or subcultural differences

No doubt if the fina venko ever happened, Esperanto would spawn pidgins and regional dialects not separate enough to constitute new languages, and if Esperanto suddenly fell out of use it would then split up into various dialects (mind you, with that much influence, Esperanto would become the Latin of the future). But one step at a time, and Esperanto's not even spoken by 1b so I doubt we'll see any dialects coming out of any regions yet

In the era of the Fina Venko, Ceiger, Esperanto would still be used as an interlanguage for communicating in circumstances where there isn't a shared language (same as today).

So, the pressures for consistency wouldn't disappear. Why then would it follow that Esperanto would then break up into Pidgins and regional dialects?

sudanglo:In the era of the Fina Venko, Ceiger, Esperanto would still be used as an interlanguage for communicating in circumstances where there isn't a shared language (same as today).

So, the pressures for consistency wouldn't disappear. Why then would it follow that Esperanto would then break up into Pidgins and regional dialects?

Esperanto would not break up, rather it'd just influence the languages around it, just as Latin and French and English have done/are still doing. In addition, as we've seen in Haiti and Papua New Guinea, new languages can even be created based on imperfect comprehension of the language proper. Additionally, due to strong regional influences, you'd have some dialects springing up here and there (pressures for consistency would actually be diminished amongst the general republic, remembering that we currently have a small and easily monitorable community with like minded individuals, where as the general public would have many people nowhere near as attached as us to Esperanto, not caring about slaughtering the language). Such dialects you can think of as being like "Engrish", "Spanglish", "Denglish" etc.

Esperanto, unlike English and other regional languages however, would always have a prestige dialect ("how to speak Esperanto properly"), and until you get people who are fanatically in love with their own regional dialect, everyone would know that this prestige dialect would be the proper way to communicate.

Of course, when you get people fighting for the rights of the "lower dialects", that'll be a new challenge for Esperanto.

This is all on an international scale though, and thus it's hard to imagine our cute, innocent Esperanto ever having to go through this phase, since we have relatively little native speakers of the language, and unlike English where everyone's trying to learn the language due to jobs, schooling etc, no one learns Esperanto unless they like the language. In a Fina Venko environment, this will change, and we'd have to expect Esperanto to be used the same as English is - slaughtered, mutated and mispronounced, but most worrying - being heavily changed by the new found diverse group of speakers.

And just as we have "txting" today, imagine what sort of new technologies would exist then, and how they might influence languages.... .