sudanglo:The problem is Chainy, that the fashion for not making full use of the complex forms in Esperanto not infrequently makes texts difficult to understand.

The desire for simplicity argument, then fails.

Sudanglo, I don't understand why you keep bringing this up. Everyone knows that the general style in Esperanto is to try to keep to the simple forms if at all possible. But on the occasions when this it is not possible, it's perfectly ok to use the more complex verb forms.

So, you are wrong when you say that the 'desire for simplicity argument fails'. Nobody is saying that you should avoid the complex verb forms entirely!! Anyone who reads Esperanto literature will notice very quickly that the complex verb forms are indeed used when necessary, and they crop up quite often.

sudanglo:
It didn't seem likely that she would have dared to tell me that she had been to Baskerville Hall, if she hadn't actually gone there.

I don't know the full context of the passage, but just out of interest, if we use the '-us' form then could we then misunderstand the text as meaning:

"It didn't seem likely that she would dare to tell me that she had been to Baskerville Hall, if she hadn't actually gone there." ??

Probably not. After all, the previous passages in the book most probably made it clear to the reader whether or not the woman had indeed already told the person about going to Baskerville Hall, or not.

PS: Slightly unusual use of the unidirectional 'gone' in the English text, but I suppose it's just so that the word 'been' is not repeated

sudanglo:The problem is Chainy, that the fashion for not making full use of the complex forms in Esperanto not infrequently makes texts difficult to understand.

I've never noticed such a fashion. What I have noticed though is that there's a preference in Esperanto to show the timing of a conditional only when it seems useful to do so. If it is not useful to do so (as in for example the majority of cases when the meaning is already clear enough to anyone capable of appreciating the context) then it is usually not done, as doing so would serve no purpose other than to clutter and overcomplicate.

If you really need to mark the time then you have other means at your disposal than "making full use of complex forms", so I find it hard to imagine that they've somehow been targeted for "elimination".

Of course if someone uses simple forms across the board in all cases and with no attention payed to clarity then confusion may result sometimes. I've certainly seen plenty of that. But that's different to simply trying to speak Esperanto in the way that is generally preferred, and usually the most elegant.

sudanglo:What intrigues me, is why the prospective international language, Esperanto, should have a preference for eliminating precise temporal reference from conditional forms (in particular), whereas the previous international language, French, and the current international language, English, are perfectly happy with greater precision.

Think of other nations that must learn this "precision", when it does not exist in their languages. This is what makes English so difficult for foreigners. In Polish we have simple tenses: present, future, past and conditional and we never need more (in ancient Polish there were more tenses, but they are not used by now). Polish is very much like esperanto - we learn it on the fly, while English takes us 10 years at least. (Not an attack on English society - just some facts from outside of anglosphere point of view).

Ne verŝajnis ke ŝi aŭdacus diri al mi ke ŝi estis je la Salono de Baskervilao, se ŝi ne vere jam iris tien.

Ŝi devintus veturi tien per kabrioleto, kaj ŝi ne estus reveninta al Coombe Tracey ĝis frue la sekvonta mateno. Tiuspeca ekskurso ne okazus sen rimarko.

sudanglo:This time I have taken a passage from the Hound of the Baskervilles, or more exactly, not having the English original to hand, I have created a passage based on the French translation.

It didn't seem likely that she would have dared to tell me that she had been to Baskerville Hall, if she hadn't actually gone there.

She would have had to taken a gig (kabrioleto) there, and would not have got back to Coombe Tracey until the early morning. Such an excursion would not have gone un-noticed.

Please don't refer to Auld's translation. Have Fun!

Rogir:

sudanglo:.. she would have dared to tell me ..

.. ŝi instigus min diri ..

When "dare" is used to mean instigi, it comes before the person being provoked, not the action. In that case the text would read ".. she would have dared me (to say) .."

Chainy:Sudanglo, I don't understand why you keep bringing this up. Everyone knows that the general style in Esperanto is to try to keep to the simple forms if at all possible. But on the occasions when this it is not possible, it's perfectly ok to use the more complex verb forms..

Chainy, I DO understand what Sudanglo is getting at. Esperanto does not wrap itself very handily around the perfect tenses which are so readily available in English by simply using some form of the verb "to have" followed by a past participle. If we think about what we really mean when we use the perfect tenses, then we can at least see what it feels like we're lacking.

In English (and in other languages that readily use the full gamut of perfect tenses), what we mean by using them is that at a given time (past, present, future), a given action already either was, will be, or WOULD be a completed action. "I have done the work" (present perfect tense) means at this time, that work is completed. If I make a past perfect statement (i.e., "I had done the work"), then I'm saying that at the time I'm referring to in the past, my doing the work was already a completed action. When we get into future perfect (will have) and conditional perfect (would have) and mix these with forms of the verb to be ("would have been", for example), the tremendous possibility for precision becomes truly remarkable.

To people who are very much interested in languages and good translation, using simple constructions and relying on context to fill in the blanks seems sloppy, and rewording things around a form of the verb "to be" (esti) along with a past/present/or future participle seems awkward.

Ironically, this same problem crops up even with languages that DO provide perfect tenses similar to English. Sometimes the demands of popular usage and the need for a native feel trump fanatical grammatical precision. English is my native language. When I was learning to interpret into Spanish, I had to get used to the fact that complex perfect tenses are AVAILABLE, but often not widely used unless truly necessary. Simpler tenses are always favored, and believe me, that IS hard to get used to, particularly when it's so easy to effortlessly whip out a grammatically correct interpretation that is full of perfect tense constructions, only to have the people to whom you're interpreting say "that's too long" (meaning they had to wrap their brains around it and decipher what you said).

But stop and think: this exact same problem exists with other grammatical features. English does not provide an IMPERFECT tense and makes very little use of the subjunctive. In English, I could say "I went to that church when I was a kid", and without context, you have no idea on God's green earth whether I meant I happened to go there once for a service, or if I meant that that's the church I regularly attended. Context has to provide all those details. If I'm interpreting into English from a Romance language that widely incorporates the imperfect tense or the subjunctive mood, I'm going to feel that lack.

I think we have to recognize the problem. It IS hard to handily express the same things in Esperanto that are expressed with complex perfect tenses without resorting to circumlocution or rather awkward grammatical contrivances--which often tend to irritate people and seem unnecessary. Denying it, pretending it isn't an issue, or getting defensive about it doesn't make it go away. On the other hand, Esperanto provides word building features and participle-manipulation devices that leave most other languages in the dust--FASCINATING possibilities that are beautifully used with ease in Esperanto that require some serious thought to find ways to express in our native languages.

We have to meet Esperanto on it's own terms and decide "how would someone express these same thoughts in a clear, concise way without unnecessary complexity?" That's where prevailing standard usage truly comes to the forefront. The way Esperanto style has evolved, simple tense constructions are preferred--and at times, absolute grammatical precision is lost in translation. That is always going to frustrate people who aren't used to doing without the precision of thought that the complex perfect tenses provide, but it does enhance comprehensibility for people whose native languages don't make involved use of those perfect tenses.

Chainy, I bring this point up because I seem to have come across too many cases in the literature where the baby as been thrown out with the bath water, so to speak.

Cases where there is a good reason, for clarity and ease of comprehension, for the use of complex forms, and yet the translator has seemed to let himself be too influenced by this notion that the complex forms should be avoided.

Your experience may be different to mine.

To translate this passage without any use of 'int' seems, at the very least, to be poor style (unless you completely rewrite it to express the ideas in a different manner to the original).

My objection to the avoidance of complex forms is not that it is difficult to get used to using simple forms. I object to a detectable tendency to overuse the simple forms to the detriment of clarity or elegant style.

Geo, are you saying that Polish just has equivalents for -as, -is, -os and -us and that's it.

Would that make it an exception among the European languages? What happens in Russian?

My guess would be that Zamenhof, noting what happens with the verb generally in the European languages, was motivated to introduce the complex forms.

I would certainly concede that English tends to pack a lot of meaning into its verbs, and not just in the grammar. I once saw a list in a English dictionary (for foreigners) of verbs that can express the idea of 'walk' with different shades of meaning.

sudanglo:Geo, are you saying that Polish just has equivalents for -as, -is, -os and -us and that's it.

Yes and no. Of course complex forms do exists in Polish, but they are avoided in everyday communication.

And as for "to go" this is just one Polish verb in all its forms:

iść, chodzić, chodzili, chodziliby, chodzilibyście, chodzilibyśmy, chodziliście, chodziliśmy, chodził, chodziła, chodziłaby, chodziłabym, chodziłabyś, chodziłam, chodziłaś, chodziłby, chodziłbym, chodziłbyś, chodziłem, chodziłeś, chodziło, chodziłoby, chodziłobym, chodziłobyś, chodziłom, chodziłoś, chodziły, chodziłyby, chodziłybyście, chodziłybyśmy, chodziłyście, chodziłyśmy, chodzą, chodzę, chodzi, chodzicie, chodzimy, chodzisz, chodzono, chodzenia, chodzeniach, chodzeniami, chodzenie, chodzeniem, chodzeniom, chodzeniu, chodzeń, niechodzenia, niechodzeniach, niechodzeniami, niechodzenie, niechodzeniem, niechodzeniom, niechodzeniu, niechodzeń, chodź, chodźcie, chodźcież, chodźmy, chodźmyż, chodźże, chodząca, chodzącą, chodzące, chodzącego, chodzącej, chodzącemu, chodzący, chodzących, chodzącym, chodzącymi, niechodząca, niechodzącą, niechodzące, niechodzącego, niechodzącej, niechodzącemu, niechodzący, niechodzących, niechodzącym, niechodzącymi,chodząc

You don't want to meet other verbs to express that meaning in Polish language, do you?

And to express the idea of walking we have:

iść, iść na wagary, iść o zakład, iść pod młotek, iść pod rękę, iść powoli, iść w górę,
iść w różnych kierunkach, iść do celu,
iść marszem, iść na dno, iść płynnie, iść sobie, iść spać, iść szybkim krokiem,
iść w ślad, iść z trudem, kroczyć, stąpać, iść, sadzić kroki, wędrować, przemieszczać się, kierować się, nie iść, przebiegać, nadchodzić, nadciągać, ruszać się, posuwać się, dążyć, iść, zmierzać, kierować się do, kierować się ku, poruszać się

I could find hundreds more, but I am too lazy for that...

If English is difficult, then Polish is the worst nightmare...