I see no reason Chainy for my remarks about Esperanto to cause offence to speakers of Esperanto who don't have a European language as their mother tongue. It's just the reality.

It is undeniably the case that Esperanto has evolved in a European language environment, so to speak, and given the conservatism of associated with the language I would expect it to continue to continue with its manifestly European character.

However, you could post, if you want, in an Esperanto forum, asking the speakers of Far Eastern countries whether their perception of Esperanto is that it is essentially European.

However, I don't see many contributors in the Esperanto forums from the Far East (or Africa or Arabia).

Ceiger, isn't the notion of a Universal Grammar just a fancy of the linguists?

I don't want to continue with this conversation as I find Sudanglo's attitude to be very unpleasant and arrogant.

Why the sensitivity on this topic, Chainy. Isn't the essential character of Esperanto obvious?

sudanglo:Ceiger, isn't the notion of a Universal Grammar just a fancy of the linguists?

Who knows. From what I've heard it's been neither proven, nor unproven, therefore it must remain as naught but a theory. So calling it a fancy would be a bit over-the-top, while calling it fact would be equally wrong. It's neither

So, who knows. Only time and research will tell. There's clearly universal factors that influence how humans deal with language (or "acceptable" language), but whether that goes to the point of a grammar (let alone a COMPLETE grammar! ) is unproven so far I believe.*

It seems that there's no universal agreement on how to handle this titular problem though, so perhaps once again the jes (yes, I agree with the statement) and ne (no, I do not agree with the statement) system with extra context is the right way to go, at least as far as we westerners here in the English board are concerned.

(ekz:
Ĉu vi ne iros al stacio?
Jes, mi ne iros al stacio)
(On this topic though, it seems that the "jes/ne" refers to the "ĉu" and not the "ne" in the sentence, so that system might actually be best?)

*It's like the classic god argument - many will be happy to argue against creationists that god does not exist, yet scientific method states that if there is no way to prove nor disprove something, you can't make a factual opinion on it, not to mention that even if we prove there's a god, we'd then have to prove which type he is - I guess universal grammar is the same, we know that linguistic universals exist so far, but how far they go is a different story!

Ceiger, it is not a good idea to muddle conventions that have already rooted themselves in the Language.

It's my view that the meaning of short answers to questions in Esperanto is already governed by a convention - which happens to be the same usage as in the European languages. If this were not the case, I feel that I would have had experienced many more misunderstandings when speaking Esperanto.

The existence of Universal grammar I suppose could be established in principle. If the same gramatical principles can be found in all 6000 languages of the world, then I think that pretty much settles it.

However, if you could create a language that violated some of these principles and it was found to be learnable by human beings, then that would undermine the case for Universal Grammar. Could there be such a violation in Esperanto? Now, that would be interesting.

But what experiment could you design to investigate the existence of God? If there's a God, then X must be true. What could X be?

sudanglo:Ceiger, it is not a good idea to muddle conventions that have already rooted themselves in the Language.

It's my view that the meaning of short answers to questions in Esperanto is already governed by a convention - which happens to be the same usage as in the European languages. If this were not the case, I feel that I would have had experienced many more misunderstandings when speaking Esperanto.

I don't understand how I'm muddling the conventions OK, rather I don't see what's wrong with muddling in this case

I'm inquiring as to whether or not a reply of yes/no in Esperanto is best thought of as addressing the ĉu, rather than the presence or lack thereof of a "ne" in the sentence.

If I can write that in a better way, perhaps it might prove to be an easier way to look at things than having the confusing double-negation problem where we don't know if "Q) ne A) ne" = jes. (if it was "Q) ĉu A) ne = ne", then we don't have to worry about double negation, no?)

The existence of Universal grammar I suppose could be established in principle. If the same gramatical principles can be found in all 6000 languages of the world, then I think that pretty much settles it.

However, if you could create a language that violated some of these principles and it was found to be learnable by human beings, then that would undermine the case for Universal Grammar. Could there be such a violation in Esperanto? Now, that would be interesting.

But what experiment could you design to investigate the existence of God? If there's a God, then X must be true. What could X be?

Well, see for me this is one of the big complications - since we don't know if it exists, we thus don't know what to look for, and how much more looking we need to do once we've found something that looks like what we've been after.

A bit like the exploration of the world in a way, like those old T maps of the world that the romans had. They had no idea what the world looked like, so when they were trying to map it, they could only assume what it looked like.
They knew the world existed, and they knew lots about it, but not what it actually looked like.

(I guess discovering if god exists is the same thing - it might prove possible to use logic to figure out how god exists, or how the universe could begin "from nothing", but even if we can prove that, we've got no way of detailing what this god/universe's nature is truly like (and if we did understand it fully, then why can't we just all become gods ourselves and create our own universes? ). Similarly, if we completely understand universal grammar, then that means we can change it or defy it as/if we wish, so it's no longer as special!).