(pri "kioj")

Miland:

It might be more accurate to describe it as a rare form than an incorrect one.

I doubt that one can formulate a set of rules about its use which doesn't lead to a contradiction.

ceigered:

Anyway, there is reason for Esperantists to show deference to the opinions of linguists about Esperanto, since the opinions of respected linguists are obviously held with greater reverence by some intellectuals. The middle class often likes to think of itself as being intelligent, so the middle class will probably just follow the whimsy of whatever those intellectuals are interested in, and if Esperanto's out of this loop, it ain't good for propaganda.

I totally agree with that, and I think that a confrontation of opinions between linguists and esperantists with linguistic knowledge would be profitable for both parties.

sudanglo:
You may well be right about Chomsky's position. But I'll not have Esperanto declared a non-language because it doesn't accommodate some linguist's pet theory whatever that linguist's reputation.

It takes more than petulance to refute an assertion. If it's important to you to show that Chomsky is wrong, then you'll need to demonstrate that you understand Chomsky's position well enough to advance counterarguments. Anything less than that only makes you look foolish. If you don't want to make the effort to understand his position, then you shouldn't expect to be taken seriously when you assert that it's wrong.

Incidentally, how does a rule based generative grammar of English decide that 'Quick food' is wrong and 'Fast food' is right.

It doesn't. Generative grammar describes which are the well-formed sentences and which are not. It's about syntax, not semantics or usage. The very shopworn sample English sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is well-formed, but meaningless.

Speakers of a language don't always utter well-formed sentences, but that's not a problem for generative grammar, which also doesn't deal with pragmatics. In some cases, however, generative grammar gives "false positives", i.e., sentences that are well-formed according to the rules but which native speakers nonetheless tend to reject.

One such (famous) sentence in English (mentioned in another thread some time back) is "The horse walked past the barn fell", which most native speakers tend to regard as not well-formed. But it violates no grammatical rule. Another is "Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish." This doesn't look like a sentence at all to most people, but grammatically it is one.

Since there is no normative L1 population for Esperanto, the relevant question is whether its actual speaker base functions in the same way, so that a proper generative grammar could be constructed. As far as I can see, this is an empirical question. Somebody would have to do the actual work.

T0dd:
It doesn't. Generative grammar describes which are the well-formed sentences and which are not. It's about syntax, not semantics or usage. The very shopworn sample English sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is well-formed, but meaningless.

That's just a reason for me to ignore GG, as it is of no use, leaving aside important aspects of language while exploring things which are not proven at all (universal grammar).
Human languages are more or less alike (in fact, they're less alike than one thinks, just take a look how languages express spatial relations) because humans share the same cognitive abilities, and in my firm conviction cognition has the most important impact on language.

razlem:

Kirilo81:most linguists don't know anything about planned languages

How so?

I think Piron is plain right about the subconscious rejection of planned languages by adults*, and linguists are no exception, unfortunately. There's a nice rant on this by Waringhien in Lingvo kaj vivo.

*http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/react...

But what job are linguists good for - other than documenting some fast disappearing language?

Linguistics is the study of human communication through spoken language, body language, and (to an extent) written symbols. The overall purpose is to find linguistic universals. Linguists of the type you describe want to research dying languages in case they reveal something new about linguistic universals. Language isolates are extremely valuable in this regard.

I assume you want concrete results from this field of study. The International Phonetic Alphabet would be one, developed by phoneticists. This system is key to understanding and reproducing the various sounds used in other languages.

razlem:Linguistics is the study of human communication through spoken language, body language, and (to an extent) written symbols. The overall purpose is to find linguistic universals.

That's not everything. I for example am not looking for universals, but try to explain how some languages developed and how the ancestral language (which is not attested) may have looked like (historical linguistics).

With regard to usable results: Lingustics is not more or less valuable than e.g. astronomical research. The difference is we don't get billions of bucks for our work.

Kirilo81:That's not everything. I for example am not looking for universals, but try to explain how some languages developed and how the ancestral language (which is not attested) may have looked like (historical linguistics).

Hehe, guess I got caught up a bit. I meant that the work of all fields of linguistics helps to develop linguistic universals.

Altebrilas:(pri "kioj")

Miland:
It might be more accurate to describe it as a rare form than an incorrect one.

I doubt that one can formulate a set of rules about its use which doesn't lead to a contradiction.

The examples in Butler may be the best guide to formulating such rules - but as kio is always used instead, we don't need to worry about it much. We could (in theory) use kioj estas where we would use kio estas but where more than one object was involved. For example:
"En la dezerto Kalahari troviĝas surikatoj."
"Kioj estas surikatoj?"
"Surikatoj estas malgrandaj mambestoj, rilataj al mungotoj."

However in practice we would say "Kio estas surikatoj?"

T0dd:Chomsky's infamous comment about Esperanto doesn't appear to be based on Universal Grammar, which is the hypothetical set of constraints upon possible learnable grammars. It is more based upon what he takes to be the absence of a generative grammar for Esperanto. Apparently, he regards the presence of a generative grammar as a necessary condition of a true language. [...] As far as I know, there is no completed generative grammar for any living language.

So, we can't have a true language without generative grammar, and we don't have a generative grammar for any (for lack of a better term) "language". Again, clearly this means that there are no true languages.