Chainy:I think I get wound up when people say that something contradicts this or that law in the Fundamento without giving any examples. Just out of curiosity, how does 'far' contradict FG §11, which is:

11. Compound words ...

[snip]

You're right, I should be more explicit: §11 and the examples from the Ekzercaro give a very limited number of highly productive word formation patterns, the most common being compounding or derivation via the word class classificators. Nowhere you can find subtraction, and that is what far is with regard to fari.

Chainy:

Kirilo81:
You know, I'm kidding....

Ok, you mean something along the lines of this (click on 'Tradukoj' in the left hand column)?

Ah, you got me, I should have changed this already some time ago.
To make the point clear: In my (and other's) interpretation li isn't a male, but a gender neutral which you use for male beeings as there is no counterpart for ŝi. So I thought it would be handy to create hi in order to fill this gap, at the same time not changing anything in the Fundamento, but just adding a detail. However, now my opinion is, that the Fundamento precludes the addition of personal pronouns saying "la personaj pronomoj estas", which indicates a full list, not just a partial one (the Ekzercaro adds ci, however). So hi isn't possible anymore, -iĉ still is (and would be useful).

As I understand it, linguists distinguish between two classes of words, open and closed sets.

A noun would belong to the open set because new nouns are often created, whilst a preposition or a pronoun would belong to a closed set.

To assume that the closed sets in Esperanto are forever closed would be to assume that Zamenhof solved all the problems.

The most likely evolution path in Esperanto for closed set words is when their forms are easily relatable to existing forms. or forms that are internationally recognizable.

So a using a new pronoun like ŝli to stress that you are not limiting your comment to one sex has a chance because it can be easily decoded. The same could be said of 'far'.

And the generalisation of the suffix -metro (ampermetro, spektrometro, parkometro) for a measuring instrument seems to have been widely accepted, though it clashes with metro (metre) and leaves a problem with the word 'gasometro' - a Zamenhofian word for gasometer, not gas meter (in a domestic context).

And what of 'estintus' for an example from verbs, instead of the clumsy 'estus estinta'

sudanglo:But Errinja the articles in the Monato corpus give 82 hits and they can't have been written by the same person.

And when did Monato start - early eighties wasn't it?

Edit: the Wikipedia 2010 Corpus at CorpusEye is 14 million words. Very prolific for two people only!

Now 14 million sounds a bit strange... There's only 144,285 (or around there) Esperanto-language articles. That means each article on average would have "far" in it 98 times.

Considering the large amount of stubs for the EO-language Wikipedia, which clock in at about 100 words, that'd leave some articles consisting entirely of the word "far" .

Perhaps corpuseye did a search in the English, Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin, Maltese, Norwegian, Occitan, Romanian, Romansch, Scots Gaelic, Swedish and/or Turkish wikipedia as well...

Speaking of Wikimedia, Wiktionary has this example for "far" which has its potential usefulness

"regata de la popolo, far la popolo por la popolo"
ruled of the people, by the people for the people

(of course, "regata de la popolo, far(ata/e) de la popolo por la popolo" doesn't have the same thing to it - perhaps "regata de la popolo, laŭ la popolo, por la popolo" is another way of writing it, and perhaps better than the original).

---

Edit: Nevermind, I think I understand that 14 million words refers to now. I think they have about 100+ Esperanto writing wikipedians on the site. How many are using "far" would be hard to guess.

sudanglo:Actually it can be quite useful, because of the multiple meanings of 'de'.

La libro de Maria - Maria's book (it belongs to her); la libro far Maria - Maria's book (she wrote it).

Sincerely, I don't think we need a new preposition to distinguish this. In Spanish "el libro de María" can mean either a book owned by Maria, or the book that she wrote... Just like in Esperanto.

But the difference can be picked by context, and if it cannot, and we really need to make the difference, you can say "la libro verkita de Maria".

I think in English you can use XXX's book to refer to a book writen by XXX... It's clear in context which is which... For instance, if I say:

"In Tolkien's books, elves and men were created by..."

I think it's clear that I don't mean the books that Tolkien had bought, but the ones that he wrote.

Amike,

Daniel.

Yes Daniel. It is only in certain contexts that 'far' is useful'

PMEG has a good example - 'La traduko de Hamleto far Zamenhof' which seems much clearer than 'La traduko de Hamleto de Zamenhof'.

The latter could refer to a translation into another language of Zamenhof's translation of Hamlet, or Zamenhof wote Hamlet.

Ceiger, your arithmetic does make the hit rate seem strange. But CorpusEye doesn't seem to search multiple language databases at the same time.

The first thing you do on the home page is select which language you want the corpuses from and then you can select any individual corpuses (like just Monato or Wikipedia).

CorpusEye is off-line at the moment. They keep on updating the site, I imagine. But it will probably be back in a few days.

I think I have noticed duplicate results when using CorpusEye searches. So there maybe some peculiar logic like counting occurrences in linked articles, and then counting them again when the linked article is the main article.

But there are enough non-identical hits on each page of results to show a quite high freqency of usage.

sudanglo:Yes Daniel. It is only in certain contexts that 'far' is useful'

PMEG has a good example - 'La traduko de Hamleto far Zamenhof' which seems much clearer than 'La traduko de Hamleto de Zamenhof'.

The latter could refer to a translation into another language of Zamenhof's translation of Hamlet, or Zamenhof wote Hamlet.

Good example... but, it's the same again. You may not believe it, but this sentence would also be translated into Spanish with 2 "de" (La traducción de Hamlet de Zamenhof").

Again... We are not going to add a new preposition to Spanish. I really think that context is key for these cases.

We cannot pretend that every isolated sentence has a complete, full and unique meaning. If we try to accomplish that, we will never finish tuning the language.

In all languages you will find sentences that can mean different things.

The other day I heard a coworker saying by phone "Voy a ir solo a Ovalle", which can mean any of two things:

I'll travel only to Ovalle (not to any other city/town)

I'll travel alone to Ovalle

As I know that he is going to meet his father there, and both are going to the coast to a small town, I can conclude that he's saying that nobody else will travel with him in the first part of the trip, so "solo" in this case is "alone".

In Japanese:

何で来ましたか?

Can mean:

Why did you come?
Why did he come?
... (the same for she/they/I/we)

or

How did you come?
How did he come?
... (the same for she/they/I/we)

(how in this case meaning "by means of what", in Esperanto it would be literally "per kio")

And it's worse even... as the sentence would be read different if it's why of how... 何で can be read nande (why) or nani de (by means of what).

I am sure that you can think of many sentences in English that, completely isolated, can have two (or even more) different meanings.

In those cases, it's context what solves the problem, not changing the language.

Amike,

Daniel

Ah, But Esperanto is different Daniel. You can't innovate in natural languages to the extent that you can in Esperanto.

Many features of Esperanto are there because they allow disambiguation. And Zamenof was quite right to build in those features, given that Esperanto was to be used in an international setting by people who have it as a second language.

In a sense, Esperanto is one vast continuing linguistic experiment with innovations accepted or rejected by the community as their usefulness becomes apparent or is felt to be of little value.

Such is the force of the tradition for clarity in Esperanto that it even operates at the level of selection of the vocab against other influences.

'Cigaredo' instead of the international 'cigareto', or 'aprezi' instead of the more international 'apreci' - though in the latter case it is really difficult to imagine a context in which you might want use the verb 'Apr-eci' or even what that would mean.

You are right Daniel. You can easily find sentences in English which are ambiguous out of context. But in many cases you will be forced to choose one of those meanings to render the sentence in Esperanto.