Artificial Languages (ALs)
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
I would like to know what the feelings are among both
linguistics professionals and amateurs about ALs. I will start myself
in a sort of controversial way by declaring my complete and (to a
first approximation) inconditional abhorrence for Esperanto. I cannot
understand how such a thing has been so (relatively) successful,
bearing in mind that there existed incomparably better constructs in
its own time, Peano's Latino sine Flexione being my favourite example.
To be sure, Esperanto got (and justly so) the upper hand over Volapuk
(which was a shambles) but that does not justify why it seems to be
the leading AL nowadays, taking into account the existence of clearly
superior schemes, like the simpler Ido (a rational Esperanto), the
universal Lincos (although romantic and not very practical), and the
aforementioned LSF.
My #1 candidate is LSF, although I have to confess that I am
not acquainted with languages concocted within the last fifty years.
So, are you aware of other, better planned ALs? What's your pet AL?
What do you think of Esperanto? In order to underline my hostility
against Esperanto, I'll just mention that I am very happy about the
fact that it is not even remotely close to supercede English as an
international lingua franca.
Flames, violent attacks, and emotional outbursts are welcome
(to a certain extent ;-)
Philip Brewer
> I cannot understand how [Esperanto] has been so (relatively)
> successful, bearing in mind that there existed incomparably better
> constructs in its own time....
Most artificial languages have been created with the goal of a "better
construct" explicitly the creator's intention. Zamenhof [the inventor
of Esperanto] had a different goal: he wanted to solve the language
problem. After careful thought, he decided what the best solution would
be: a universal auxiliary language. Then decided what characteristics
such a language would have to have to be successful: easy to learn and
politically neutral. Then he created a language with these
characteristics.
> To be sure, Esperanto got (and justly so) the upper hand over Volapuk
> (which was a shambles) but that does not justify why it seems to be
> the leading AL nowadays, taking into account the existence of clearly
> superior schemes, like the simpler Ido (a rational Esperanto)....
The reason that Esperanto continues today is that it works. Esperanto
is sufficiently politically neutral and sufficiently easy to learn.
Esperanto is "good enough" and none of the "clearly superior schemes"
are enough better to counter the substantial advantages that Esperanto
has. The biggest one being that Esperanto has a hundred years of
experience behind it showing that it works. Another being the large
body of Esperanto literature (both original and translation).
> So, are you aware of other, better planned ALs? What's your pet AL?
> What do you think of Esperanto?
There may be value in other planned languages. It depends on the goal
of the language. For example, a language designed to be understandable
by both humans and computers could be useful. Further afield, a language
with special tenses (for talking about time travel) or implicit
probability (for talking about quantum mechanics) might find a niche.
But I don't see any value in another planned language with the goal of
being a universal auxiliary language. So what if we could nowadays
produce a language that was more "rational" than Esperanto? Being
"rational," being a "better construct," even being "clearly superior"
isn't very important.
--
Philip Brewer pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com
Motorola Urbana Design Center ...!uiucuxc!udc!pbrewer
Nur diru "ne" je deviga droga testado.
Nick Nicholas
>> I cannot understand how [Esperanto] has been so (relatively)
>> successful, bearing in mind that there existed incomparably better
>> constructs in its own time....
>Most artificial languages have been created with the goal of a "better
>construct" explicitly the creator's intention. Zamenhof [the inventor
>of Esperanto] had a different goal: he wanted to solve the language
>problem.
As did everyboby pre-Volap:uk. The 'better construct' methodology is really
a post-Ido concept.
>> To be sure, Esperanto got (and justly so) the upper hand over Volapuk
>> (which was a shambles) but that does not justify why it seems to be
>> the leading AL nowadays, taking into account the existence of clearly
>> superior schemes, like the simpler Ido (a rational Esperanto)....
I have respect for the rationality with which Ido's vocab was constructed,
whereas Zam. played it by ear; and it was great that Ido tried to eliminate
sexism, too. But if you think Ido's word-construction was rational, I
respectfully suggest you need your head examined. The reversibility theory
made for a language chock-a-block with redundancies, hair-splitting, and
unnecessary choices; though Esp's 'Neceso kaj Suficxo' (no pleonasms) has
not been without irregularity in application, it is squintillions of times
superior to Ido's system.
Has Jose in fact ever looked at an Ido grammar? I do have at least an extra
Ido dictionary around, if he wants one...
>The reason that Esperanto continues today is that it works. Esperanto
>is sufficiently politically neutral and sufficiently easy to learn.
Yes, but why did Esperanto become entrenched in the 1910s? (Recall that
Esp. in the 1890's was still in the wilderness, and but for Zam's biblical
style of writing, I wouldn't give the time of day to any text in the language
written before 1900). The answer is partly linguistic, but mostly socio-
logical, and, let's face it, good marketing. Now, however, Esperanto is
entrenched social fact, and if Jose dislikes it, then (1) We'll survive
without you %^), since the question of an official universal langauge has
not arisen anywhere [and there is a niche for Esp. beside English], and
(2) I recommend he take a closer look at Esp, and not give kneejerk reactions
at possibly unsubstantial points.
>> So, are you aware of other, better planned ALs? What's your pet AL?
Unfortunately the mainstream ALs have been naturalistic, trying to become
increasingly latinised and not allowing for simple word-formation. This
is probably out of phobia of Esperanto. The langauges not in this mainstream
tend to be the work of the naive or the linguocentric. The 'Better Planned'
requirement is a very loaded term, assuming horrible disasters in Esp. and
perfection elsewhere. As grammar and word formation go, I think Occidental
is reasonable. Forgive me, Bruce; Ido'saffix system still strikes me as
arbitrary and baroque.
>> What do you think of Esperanto?
*As a subject of Interlinguistic study* (as opposed to a cause whose opponents
I flame in talk.language.universal %^), Esp. has some serious faults in
its selection of stems, and was not audacious enough in its grammatical
simplification - though the mainstream alternatives are if anything even
more bound by Western syntax and semantics. In its word-formation it is
unsurpassed, and the grammar does not deserve the unthinking criticism it
gets from its partisan opponents or outsiders. It is true of interlinguistics,
as Esperantologist G. Waringhien once said, that it is those who know nothing
of the field that feel themselves most qualified to speak on it.
I don't know if I've just started an Esperanto flame-fest; if I have,
soc.culture.esperanto is getting awful quiet these days...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nick S. Nicholas, "Rode like foam on the river of pity
Depts. of CompSci & ElecEng, Turned its tide to strength
University of Melbourne, Australia. Healed the hole that ripped in living"
nsn@{mullian.ee|mullauna.cs}.mu.oz.au - S. Vega, Book Of Dreams
_______________________________________________________________________________
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <63...@munnari.oz.au> n...@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au (Nick
Nicholas) writes (among other things):
> I have respect for the rationality with which Ido's vocab was constructed,
> whereas Zam. played it by ear; and it was great that Ido tried to eliminate
> sexism, too. But if you think Ido's word-construction was rational, I
> respectfully suggest you need your head examined.
I never suggested that Ido was perfect. But I do still feel
more attracted to Ido than to Esperanto, and it annoys me that the
latter is so popular while the former (and others) seem to be mere
curiosities.
> The reversibility theory
> made for a language chock-a-block with redundancies, hair-splitting, and
> unnecessary choices; though Esp's 'Neceso kaj Suficxo' (no pleonasms) has
> not been without irregularity in application, it is squintillions of times
> superior to Ido's system.
>
> Has Jose in fact ever looked at an Ido grammar? I do have at least an extra
> Ido dictionary around, if he wants one...
I cannot claim to be an expert on Ido, but I have had a look
at its grammar. Oh, BTW, I'd extremely interested in your Ido
dictionary offer. I hope you will not back off.
>> The reason that Esperanto continues today is that it works. Esperanto
>> is sufficiently politically neutral and sufficiently easy to learn.
>
> Yes, but why did Esperanto become entrenched in the 1910s? (Recall that
> Esp. in the 1890's was still in the wilderness, and but for Zam's biblical
> style of writing, I wouldn't give the time of day to any text in the language
> written before 1900). The answer is partly linguistic, but mostly socio-
> logical, and, let's face it, good marketing.
Hear, hear!
> Now, however, Esperanto is entrenched social fact, and if Jose
> dislikes it, then (1) We'll survive without you %^),
Fair enough 8-)
> since the question of an official universal langauge has not arisen
> anywhere [and there is a niche for Esp. beside English], and (2) I
> recommend he take a closer look at Esp, and not give kneejerk
> reactions at possibly unsubstantial points.
Short of studying full-time the fine details of the Esp.
structure, I think that my next step would be learning it. This I will
not do, unless I have to (and the chances are that the status of
English will make this unlikely in the foreseeable future); I'd rather
devote my time to learning natural languages. Remember that a language
is not only a grammatical structure and a vocabulary, but a culture, a
set of traditions, a way of life, a history, ... However rich it is
(and I am sure it is pretty rich) Esp. pales in comparison with any
natural language.
>>> What do you think of Esperanto?
>
> *As a subject of Interlinguistic study* (as opposed to a cause whose
> opponents I flame in talk.language.universal %^), Esp. has some
> serious faults in its selection of stems, and was not audacious enough
> in its grammatical simplification - though the mainstream alternatives
> are if anything even more bound by Western syntax and semantics.
Agreed.
> In its word-formation it is unsurpassed, and the grammar does not deserve
> the unthinking criticism it gets from its partisan opponents or
> outsiders.
Is there a universal criterion on perfection of
word-formation? I do not intend to be cantankerous, but I wonder from
my ignorance if there is agreement on this point.
> It is true of interlinguistics, as Esperantologist G.
> Waringhien once said, that it is those who know nothing of the field
> that feel themselves most qualified to speak on it.
An educated intellectual interaction is probably the foundation of
progress in knowledge. That involves putting forward opinions and
asking questions with an open mind ;-)
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <PBREWER.91...@thrumble.urbana.mcd.mot.com>
pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Philip Brewer) writes:
> The reason that Esperanto continues today is that it works. Esperanto
> is sufficiently politically neutral and sufficiently easy to learn.
Doesn't the same apply (even more so) to Ido, Occidental, LSF,
Interglossa, ...?
> There may be value in other planned languages. It depends on the goal
> of the language. For example, a language designed to be understandable
> by both humans and computers could be useful.
They exist already; what we really want is for computers to be
able to understand our delightfully rich, varied, ambiguous, and
flexible human languages (Esperanto included).
> Further afield, a language with special tenses (for talking about
> time travel) or implicit probability (for talking about quantum
> mechanics) might find a niche.
What for? Any natural language is flexible enough to be able
to tackle such things. And conversely, those specializations perhaps
wouldn't have such an impact on our way to look at things. It is said
that the structure of Hopi makes it much easier to understand some
modern concepts of physics, but the fact it that these were developed
in the European tradition, with European languages.
> But I don't see any value in another planned language with the goal of
> being a universal auxiliary language. So what if we could nowadays
> produce a language that was more "rational" than Esperanto? Being
> "rational," being a "better construct," even being "clearly superior"
> isn't very important.
What is important, then? English is easy to learn (apart form
the well-known spelling business), and it is widely spoken all over
the world? Why should we learn Esperanto, instead (or additionally)?
Just because it is not the language of a single nation? Because it is
supposed to be politically neutral? If one wants to be pragmatic one
will learn English; if one wants to logical one will learn Loglan,
Uropi, or something like that; if one wants to be romantic one will
learn Esperanto, or, even better, Solresol.
Ivan Derzhanski
>> I cannot understand how [Esperanto] has been so (relatively)
>> successful, bearing in mind that there existed incomparably better
>> constructs in its own time....
(I'd like to know, too. I don't say that I don't want it to exist (it
doesn't bother me much), but in terms of quality, it is beyond criticism.)
>The reason that Esperanto continues today is that it works.
And you know that it works because it continues today. The question is,
why does it work? Is there any other reason besides the good marketing?
> Esperanto is sufficiently politically neutral
I'm not sure I understand. How is a language "politically neutral"?
Especially an artificial language?
> and sufficiently easy to learn.
Give me a break. Not so long ago there was a big discussion on SCE started
by people (English speakers) who had a hard time learning to pronounce "scii".
At last someone said: "Well, you know, IT IS DIFFICULT FOR EVERYONE." Not a
soul thought that it was an absolutely idiotic idea, after all, to try to sell
an universal language made of words that would break the tongues of most
inhabitants of the planet.
>Esperanto is "good enough" and none of the "clearly superior schemes"
>are enough better to counter the substantial advantages that Esperanto has.
> The biggest one being that Esperanto has a hundred years of
>experience behind it showing that it works. Another being the large
>body of Esperanto literature (both original and translation).
Yes, but the world also works without any artificial languages. Spanish
certainly works much better than Esperanto (it has more speakers, a longer
tradition and a larger body of literature). Its grammar is quite easy, too.
And learning the vocabulary doesn't involve as many surprises as Esperanto
presents. (Zamenhof has borrowed words from many languages without any
obvious system. I don't see what Russian speakers gain from an axe being
called "toporo", but I can see what everybody else loses.)
I say Spanish rather than English chiefly because of the awkward spelling
of the latter; but at least it uses the 26 Latin letters, full stop, whereas
the circumflexed letters and the u-bow of Esperanto are as exotic as anything,
and the SCE netters use "ch/cx", "u/w" etc. rather chaotically.
>Philip Brewer pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com
I don't have a reference handy, but let's admit that the most widely spread
languages are Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi (and its close relatives),
Russian (and its relatives), Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Arabic (in some
order). My apologies for whatever else I ought to have included in this
selection. (Two candidates might be Japanese and Indonesian.)
Now I think that it is safe to include a grammatical feature or a phoneme
in the artificial language if it is found in at least five of these eight.
This is a little bit ad hoc, but it is good as a first bet.
So here is what we get:
C E H R S P F A Total
c yes no no yes no no no no 2
gh (gx) yes yes yes no no no no yes 4
h no yes yes no no no no yes 3
hh (hx) yes no no yes yes no no yes 4
jh (jx) no no no yes no yes yes no 3
accusative case no no no yes no no no no 1
definite article no yes no no yes yes yes yes 5
(So by my standards, the article should stay; but Russian doesn't have one,
and it was the only language to vote for the accusative case.)
Any comments?
--
Ivan A. Derzhanski i...@chaos.brandeis.edu Any clod can have the facts,
MB 1766 / Brandeis University but having an opinion is an art.
P.O.Box 9110 / Waltham, MA 02254-9110 / USA Charles McCabe
Loren Petrich
>
> In article <PBREWER.91...@thrumble.urbana.mcd.mot.com>
>pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Philip Brewer) writes:
>
>> Further afield, a language with special tenses (for talking about
>> time travel) or implicit probability (for talking about quantum
>> mechanics) might find a niche.
>
> What for? Any natural language is flexible enough to be able
>to tackle such things. And conversely, those specializations perhaps
>wouldn't have such an impact on our way to look at things. It is said
>that the structure of Hopi makes it much easier to understand some
>modern concepts of physics, but the fact it that these were developed
>in the European tradition, with European languages.
Why is Hopi supposedly better for dealing with quantum
mechanics?
I suspect that no existing language has constructions
specially suited for quantum mechanics, for a simple reason -- QM was
not known about before this century, and all of humanity's experience
before then was based on the classical limit. Even those whose work
leads them to confront QM effects operate in the classical limit most
of the time, simply because the large majority of macroscopic
phenomena operate in the classical limit.
I am somehow suspecting that this may be as bogus as
comparisons of QM with Eastern philosophies, for which the same
comments about the lack of direct experience with QM apply.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster: lo...@sunlight.llnl.gov
Since this nodename is not widely known, you may have to try:
Loren Petrich
[on how to pronounce Esperanto "scii", etc.]
:Yes, but the world also works without any artificial languages. Spanish
:certainly works much better than Esperanto (it has more speakers, a longer
:tradition and a larger body of literature). Its grammar is quite easy, too.
:And learning the vocabulary doesn't involve as many surprises as Esperanto
:presents. (Zamenhof has borrowed words from many languages without any
:obvious system. I don't see what Russian speakers gain from an axe being
:called "toporo", but I can see what everybody else loses.)
: I say Spanish rather than English chiefly because of the awkward spelling
:of the latter; but at least it uses the 26 Latin letters, full stop, whereas
:the circumflexed letters and the u-bow of Esperanto are as exotic as anything,
:and the SCE netters use "ch/cx", "u/w" etc. rather chaotically.
Exactly what are these and how are they pronounced?
:I don't have a reference handy, but let's admit that the most widely spread
:languages are Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi (and its close relatives),
:Russian (and its relatives), Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Arabic (in some
:order). My apologies for whatever else I ought to have included in this
:selection. (Two candidates might be Japanese and Indonesian.)
: Now I think that it is safe to include a grammatical feature or a phoneme
:in the artificial language if it is found in at least five of these eight.
:This is a little bit ad hoc, but it is good as a first bet.
: So here is what we get:
:
: C E H R S P F A Total
:
:c yes no no yes no no no no 2
:gh (gx) yes yes yes no no no no yes 4
:h no yes yes no no no no yes 3
:hh (hx) yes no no yes yes no no yes 4
:jh (jx) no no no yes no yes yes no 3
:accusative case no no no yes no no no no 1
:definite article no yes no no yes yes yes yes 5
:
:(So by my standards, the article should stay; but Russian doesn't have one,
:and it was the only language to vote for the accusative case.)
:
:Any comments?
First off, while English and the Romance languages listed here
have no nom/acc case distinctions for nouns, these languages do have
them for pronouns.
While we are in the typology business, let us not forget word
order: Is it Adj-Noun or Noun-Adj? Is it Sub-Obj-Vb, Sub-Vb-Obj, or
Vb-Sub-Obj? Is there a relative conjunction/pronoun like English
"that" in:
I note that English has a relative conjunction/pronoun.
Some languages would only have constructions equivalent to:
I note English's having a relative conjunction/pronoun.
And consider what verb tenses/aspects/voices/moods are
distinguished. Or how possession is expressed.
Esp. C E H R S P F A
Sentence SVO SVO SVO SOV SVO SVO SVO SVO VSO
Adj. + Noun AN(?) AN AN ? AN NA NA NA NA
Rel. conj. ? ? yes ? yes yes yes yes ?
(I'm doing this from memory)
Here are some other languages: German, Latin, Greek
(classical), Sanskrit, and Japanese.
G L Gk Skt J
c yes no no no yes
gh/gx no no no yes yes
h yes yes yes yes yes
hh/hx yes no no no no
jh no no no no no
Acc. case yes yes yes yes yes
Def. art. yes no yes no no
Sentence ~SVO ~SOV ~SVO ~SOV SOV
Adj. + Noun AN ~NA ~AN ~AN AN
Rel. conj. yes yes yes? yes? no
~ means "usually" here.
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <88...@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> lo...@dweasel.llnl.gov
(Loren Petrich) writes:
> >It i said that the structure of Hopi makes it much easier to understand some
> >modern concepts of physics, but the fact it that these were developed
> >in the European tradition, with European languages.
>
> Why is Hopi supposedly better for dealing with quantum
> mechanics?
Read what I wrote: I did not say QM specifically. Anyway, the
idea is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the relationships
between language and thought. Thus, one could think that a language,
the verb structure of which is luxurious, as opposed to a relatively
poor noun inventory, would allow its speakers to have a better grasp
of processes, rates of change, and so on. The Hopi example would be a
particularly illustrative one, due to its uncanny way (to our western
minds) of reckoning with time.
> I suspect that no existing language has constructions
> specially suited for quantum mechanics, for a simple reason -- QM was
> not known about before this century, and all of humanity's experience
> before then was based on the classical limit. Even those whose work
> leads them to confront QM effects operate in the classical limit most
> of the time, simply because the large majority of macroscopic
> phenomena operate in the classical limit.
No language seems to especially suited to anything, but all of
them are wonderfully flexible. Thus, Eskimo has dozens of words for
`snow', depending on the circumstances; but it can react and cope with
modern concepts just the same as English would in Eskimo-like
environments if it had to.
> I am somehow suspecting that this may be as bogus as
> comparisons of QM with Eastern philosophies, for which the same
> comments about the lack of direct experience with QM apply.
Perhaps it is. But can you prove it?
Ivan Derzhanski
> Exactly what are these and how are they pronounced?
"These" were the Esperanto sounds "ch" and "w": they are both pronounced as in
English. The original letters are "c" with a circumflex and "u" with an arc,
and books say that when these letters are not available, one may use "ch" and
"u" instead, but on SCE for some reason one sees "cx" and "w" as well.
(Next I started comparing some features of Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian,
Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Arabic, as an approximation of a set of the
most spoken languages.)
>: C E H R S P F A Total
>:accusative case no no no yes no no no no 1
> First off, while English and the Romance languages listed here
>have no nom/acc case distinctions for nouns, these languages do have
>them for pronouns.
True, but, while their speakers have no problem with pronominal cases (and
even take them for granted), they do have trouble with cases on nouns when
they learn other languages that have them. Maybe an artificial language
should follow suit, and have only pronominal cases? It is much easier for
a Westerner to learn to use correctly "mi/min" than "libro/libron".
Let me complete the word order table:
> Esp. C E H R S P F A Total
>
>Sentence SVO SVO SVO SOV SVO SVO SVO SVO VSO SVO 6
>Adj. + Noun AN(?) AN AN AN AN NA NA NA NA Drawn
>Rel. conj. yes no yes * yes yes yes yes yes yes
* Hindi has a relative conjunction (borrowed from Persian), but the
relative pronoun construction works in a peculiar way.
BTW, how about yes/no-question formation? Esperanto adds an interrogative
particle in sentence-initial position. In the above list only Hindi and
Arabic do it.
> And consider what verb tenses/aspects/voices/moods are distinguished.
Good point. I hate the Esperanto set of tenses. Having only three of them
(including only one past tense) with no aspect is not typical for that many
languages.
> Here are some other languages: German, Latin, Greek
>(classical), Sanskrit, and Japanese.
German and Japanese are fine, but Latin and classical Greek are not too
many people's native language. Same about Sanskrit. They must be consulted
on vocabulary matters, but their sound systems don't matter much.
> G L Gk Skt J
>c yes no no no yes
In Japanese it only occurs before /u/ as an allophone of /t/. It is not
a separate phoneme.
>Sentence ~SVO ~SOV ~SVO ~SOV SOV
>Adj. + Noun AN ~NA ~AN ~AN AN
>Rel. conj. yes yes yes no no
>
>~ means "usually" here.
Big question: shall the world's language have a free word order with cases
(as Latin or Russian) or a fixed one with none (as Chinese or English)?
>Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster: lo...@sunlight.llnl.gov
--
John O'Neil
[...]
No language seems to especially suited to anything, but all of
them are wonderfully flexible. Thus, Eskimo has dozens of words for
`snow', depending on the circumstances; but it can react and cope with
modern concepts just the same as English would in Eskimo-like
environments if it had to.
JCA
van...@cs.dal.ca
About Eskimo...
This is disinformation of such awesome scope that it puts the CIA to
shame. It has been repeated so often that it has acquired that status
of fact, and since almost no one knows any Inuit languages, it's
virtually unassailable *unless you ask a native speaker*, as Paul
Postal did for a recent article (whose reference escapes me right now,
unfortunately, but I'll look for it.)
As it turns out, there are one or two words for snow, just like any
other language. Of course, most Inuit languages are agglutinative
(I'm told), so the morphology might cause some confusion -- but then,
by the same logic, I could say that Turkish has dozens of words for
snow. Somehow, that does not have quite the same Whorfian thrust.
However, your basic point (``Languages are very flexible.'') is one
I'll second.
John O'Neil
Organlegger
"From head to toe, you know where to go."
Spleens a specialty.
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <1991Jan05.2...@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu>
i...@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ivan Derzhanski) writes:
> Big question: shall the world's language have a free word order with cases
> (as Latin or Russian) or a fixed one with none (as Chinese or English)?
Big question indeed! I am strongly biased towards isolating
languages, and therefore I vote for fixed order and no declensions.
What do you guys think?
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <VALIS.91J...@e40-008-10.mit.edu>
va...@athena.mit.edu (John O'Neil) writes
> About Eskimo...
>
> This is disinformation of such awesome scope that it puts the CIA to
> shame. It has been repeated so often that it has acquired that status
> of fact, and since almost no one knows any Inuit languages, it's
> virtually unassailable *unless you ask a native speaker*, as Paul
> Postal did for a recent article (whose reference escapes me right now,
> unfortunately, but I'll look for it.)
>
> As it turns out, there are one or two words for snow, just like any
> other language. Of course, most Inuit languages are agglutinative
> (I'm told), so the morphology might cause some confusion -- but then,
> by the same logic, I could say that Turkish has dozens of words for
> snow. Somehow, that does not have quite the same Whorfian thrust.
Thanks very much for this comment; I understand and
acknowledge your point. However, this might be the starting point of a
discussion of the concept of word, something that I'd rather not do,
for the time being ;-)
> However, your basic point (``Languages are very flexible.'') is one
> I'll second.
All's well that ends well (although I should have thought of a
better example 8-)
Herman Rubin
Few of the artificial languages go for very much in declensions and
conjugations. Even there, they usually have a fixed word order. There
MAY be some advantage in having endings specify the part of speech, etc.,
but this is because "natural" syntax and semantics is somewhat ambiguous,
or should it be multiguous?
--
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hru...@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet) {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)
R o d Johnson
[About the Eskimo-words-for-snow idea]
>This is disinformation of such awesome scope that it puts the CIA to
>shame. It has been repeated so often that it has acquired that status
>of fact, and since almost no one knows any Inuit languages, it's
>virtually unassailable *unless you ask a native speaker*, as Paul
>Postal did for a recent article (whose reference escapes me right now,
>unfortunately, but I'll look for it.)
Are you thinking of Geoff Pullum's article in Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory? I don't remember any articles by Postal on this
question. If it is Pullum, he didn't ask a native speaker that I
remember (and asking a native speaker doesn't seem like a very
reliable way to do it anyway: quick, how many words for acts of
violence does English have?)--he simply traced the evolution of the
"fact". We've rehashed this question in sci.lang over the years and
it seems to me I've seen as many as seven roots for snow in Inuit.
Pullum's debunking is pretty conclusive; however, the positive part of
his answer (how many words for snow *are* there) is not very
convincing.
>As it turns out, there are one or two words for snow, just like any
>other language. Of course, most Inuit languages are agglutinative
Usually considered polysynthetic, I think. Same diff for the point
you're making.
>(I'm told), so the morphology might cause some confusion -- but then,
>by the same logic, I could say that Turkish has dozens of words for
>snow. Somehow, that does not have quite the same Whorfian thrust.
--
Rod Johnson * rjoh...@vela.acs.oakland.edu * (313) 650 2315
"Stop whining and enjoy the puppet show"
--Richard Gehr
ada...@csc.anu.edu.au
Message-ID: <1991Jan2.1...@cs.dal.ca>
> I would like to know what the feelings are among both
>linguistics professionals and amateurs about ALs.
Speaking as a linguistics professional, I'd suggest that a lack of
serious interest in ALs is virtually a defining characteristic of
LPs. It's really much more interesting try to figure out how actual languages
work than to try to inflict upon the world the results of somebody's inevitably
ignorant prejudices and wild speculations.
The `exception that proves the rule' is Esperanto: it would indeed be
interesting to see what human nature has made of Zamenhof's scheme.
But the interest of Esperanto derives from the fact that it probably isn't
really an AL any more, but a creole based on one.
It might also be in principle interesting to try to find out what kinds of ALs
people could actually learn to use and which ones they could'nt (as a teenager
I designed an AL & found that neither myself nor the friend I tried to teach
it to could actually write anything intelligible in it), but I suspect that in
practice it would be very diffcult to get useful results from this activity.
Avery Andrews (ada...@csc.anu.edu.au)
Philip Brewer
>> But I don't see any value in another planned language with the goal of
>> being a universal auxiliary language. So what if we could nowadays
>> produce a language that was more "rational" than Esperanto? Being
>> "rational," being a "better construct," even being "clearly superior"
>> isn't very important.
> What is important, then? English is easy to learn (apart form the
> well-known spelling business), and it is widely spoken all over the
> world? Why should we learn Esperanto, instead (or additionally)? Just
> because it is not the language of a single nation? Because it is
> supposed to be politically neutral? If one wants to be pragmatic one
> will learn English; if one wants to logical one will learn Loglan,
> Uropi, or something like that; if one wants to be romantic one will
> learn Esperanto, or, even better, Solresol.
The notion that "English is easy to learn" is ludicrous.
I've written a bit more here than I had intended to, so let me summarize
for people who don't want to read the whole thing: Esperanto is much,
much easier to learn than English (or any other national language).
A good comparison of easy-of-learning between Esperanto and English
would be useful. Unfortunately, as far as I know nobody has done a
really good study of this. The ability to learn a new language varies
quite a bit (at least for adults) from one individual to another. This
makes studies hard. Also, people who learn Esperanto are mostly
self-selected, which makes simple study-by-observation less than
completely compelling.
Still, let me share a few observations. The company that I worked for
in the early 80s had a small development group in Germany. From time to
time we would have Germans come to work at the U.S. facility where I
worked for a few months or years. These German workers were all highly
educated. Most of them had been studying English in school for years.
They could, in fact, make themselves understood pretty easily.
But, even after speaking English (all day, everyday) for months, most of
them could not speak correct English. In fact, it was not unusual for
any of them to make a grammatical or word-choice error in nearly every
sentence. Mind you, their spoken English was perfectly understandable.
It was just full of errors. For example, they would say "Do you live in
the near of the plant?" when a native speaker would say "Do you live in
the area of the plant?"
I don't want to sound like I'm picking on them. I studied German for a
year in college and spent a month in Germany. But, my German is not
nearly as good as their English.
For people who have a talent for learning languages, English is
learnable. Certainly it is a useful language to learn, because so many
people in so many parts of the world speak it.
I have no talent for learning languages (I submit my lack of success in
learning German in college as evidence). After studying Esperanto for
only a few days I could read and write Esperanto better than I had been
every been able to read and write German. After studying Esperanto for
a few months I was able (with a dictionary at hand) to push my way
through just about anything written in Esperanto (News articles, novels,
song lyrics, etc.).
Philip Brewer
>>The reason that Esperanto continues today is that it works.
> And you know that it works because it continues today.
No, what I'm saying here is more than a tautology. I know Esperanto
works because I've used it for communicating. I've read letters from
people in Czechoslovakia. I've read a newsletter from a group in
Uzbekestan. I've written things in Esperanto that were read and
understood by people with whom I share no other common language.
>> and sufficiently easy to learn.
> Give me a break. Not so long ago there was a big discussion on SCE
> started by people (English speakers) who had a hard time learning to
> pronounce "scii". At last someone said: "Well, you know, IT IS
> DIFFICULT FOR EVERYONE." Not a soul thought that it was an absolutely
> idiotic idea, after all, to try to sell an universal language made of
> words that would break the tongues of most inhabitants of the planet.
It's only difficult to learn to say "scii" from a book. If everybody
had a local Esperantist as a teacher, learning proper pronunciation
would be easy.
Many people learn Esperanto from a book. There are thousands of
proofs-by-example that Esperanto is easy enough to learn that any
ordinary person, without any special talent for learning languages, can
learn it (well enough to read any ordinary prose) without even needing a
teacher. Try finding any national language for which that is true.
(For people who are curious, in Esperanto the "c" character is a "ts"
sound. So "scii" sounds like "s-ts-ee-ee" which is a bit hard to
describe. However, the sound combination appears in English as well.
The classic example is "bestseller." Others are "breaststroke" and
"postscript.")
[I've omitted your analysis and comparison of several widely spoken
national languages, with the suggestion that a good universal language
should include a feature only if it is common among major national
languages.]
My point is that there is no great value in doing this sort of analysis.
So what if accusative case is an uncommon feature in major languages? I
could argue that it is not nearly so uncommon as you make it out to be
(we have it in English, at least for pronouns). But the question is not
What is common? The questions are: What is easy to learn? What is easy
to use? What features in a universal auxiliary language make it easy
for people with no other common language to communicate?
We know from a hundred years of experience that ordinary people can
study Esperanto on their own and learn to speak and read well enough to
communicate with people from all over the world. That's makes is a good
choice for a universal auxiliary language despite any theoretical
arguments about obscure choices for word stems.
cameron shelley
>
> In article <VALIS.91J...@e40-008-10.mit.edu>
>va...@athena.mit.edu (John O'Neil) writes
>
>> About Eskimo...
>>
>> This is disinformation of such awesome scope that it puts the CIA to
>> shame. It has been repeated so often that it has acquired that status
>> of fact, and since almost no one knows any Inuit languages, it's
>> virtually unassailable *unless you ask a native speaker*, as Paul
>> Postal did for a recent article (whose reference escapes me right now,
>> unfortunately, but I'll look for it.)
>>
>> As it turns out, there are one or two words for snow, just like any
>> other language. Of course, most Inuit languages are agglutinative
>> (I'm told), so the morphology might cause some confusion -- but then,
>> by the same logic, I could say that Turkish has dozens of words for
>> snow. Somehow, that does not have quite the same Whorfian thrust.
>
> Thanks very much for this comment; I understand and
>acknowledge your point. However, this might be the starting point of a
>discussion of the concept of word, something that I'd rather not do,
>for the time being ;-)
>
Inuit aside, if I recall correctly Whorf worked for a while as an
inspector of some type for the US government which was where he
developed his first evidence for the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis. The
example I remember was that he observed that workmen often smoked
around gas/oil drums which were marked "empty", which is actually a
dangerous practice since the drums are still "full" of fumes. His
conclusion was that the workmen's concept of empty was influencing
their behaviour in a tangible way -- thus the hypothesis.
--
Cameron Shelley | "Absurdity, n. A statement of belief
cpsh...@violet.waterloo.edu| manifestly inconsistent with one's own
Davis Centre Rm 2136 | opinion."
Phone (519) 885-1211 x3390 | Ambrose Bierce
Jeff Deboo
<In article <1991Jan04....@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> i...@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ivan Derzhanski) writes:
<:
<: C E H R S P F A Total
<:
<:c yes no no yes no no no no 2
<:gh (gx) yes yes yes no no no no yes 4
<:h no yes yes no no no no yes 3
<:hh (hx) yes no no yes yes no no yes 4
<:jh (jx) no no no yes no yes yes no 3
<:accusative case no no no yes no no no no 1
<:definite article no yes no no yes yes yes yes 5
<:
<:(So by my standards, the article should stay; but Russian doesn't have one,
<:and it was the only language to vote for the accusative case.)
<:Any comments?
< First off, while English and the Romance languages listed here
<have no nom/acc case distinctions for nouns, these languages do have
<them for pronouns.
So does Arabic. "Standard" Arabic also has an accusative case
for nouns, though the colloquial does not, so educated speakers
are familiar with the concept.
< I note that English has a relative conjunction/pronoun.
< Some languages would only have constructions equivalent to:
< I note English's having a relative conjunction/pronoun.
<
< And consider what verb tenses/aspects/voices/moods are
<distinguished. Or how possession is expressed.
<
< Esp. C E H R S P F A
<
<Sentence SVO SVO SVO SOV SVO SVO SVO SVO VSO
<Adj. + Noun AN(?) AN AN ? AN NA NA NA NA
<Rel. conj. ? ? yes ? yes yes yes yes ?
^
|
|
yes
Jeff
Bruce Robert Gilson
with two of the posters in this
chain. Jose Castejon-Amenedo points
out the fact that Esperanto has been
improved upon many times, and I agree
with him that (for example) Ido was
much better in its word formation.
He favors something called LSF, about
which I admit I know nothing. I would
submit as my "pet" the languagewhich
Erich Weferling developed, called
Intal. (Anyone interested in a copy
of Intal's grammar, I will send one
to anyone who gives me a postal ad-
dress. The grammar is IN Intal, but
most people I think can read it with
reasonable ease.)
However, I could happily accept Ido
or Novial. I think that the best
criteria for what phonetic and gram-
matical structures to include are
just what Ivan Derzhanski did -- if
the majority of the world's languages
possess a feature, it is natural to
more people. The only thing I would
do differently would be to weight the
languages by number of speakers.Do
not count Mandarin and English the
same as Japanese.
If anyone would like to, I would be
happy to be part of a group th
would , by using criteria like these,
help to design a better AL. That is
a much more sensible idea than try-
ing to claim that because Zamenhof
came up with a good idea in the 1880s
no further progress is possible.
Lars Henrik Mathiesen
>pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Philip Brewer) writes:
>> For example, they would say "Do you live in
>> the near of the plant?" when a native speaker would say "Do you live in
>> the area of the plant?"
>I suspect your problem here is failing to recognize that the ENGLISH is an
>idiomatic expression. Are you sure that the Germans did not say "nearness"
>which is literally "neighborhood" in English? I would be surprised if
>anyone not knowing the expression would use the term "area".
At a guess, the German (wrongly) assumed that English would have a
noun form of "near", corresponding to the German "N\"ahe": "in die
N\"ahe" is German for "nearby". But he could just have said "near the
plant", so this is not a good example of English being difficult to
learn.
>One of the problems in learning a language, and not adequately addressed, is
>that of GRAMMAR. Now English has one of the simplest grammars of major
>languages; I believe that only Chinese has fewer grammatical forms.
I don't think the number of inflectional forms is a good measure of
the complexity of a language. English has extremely complex rules for
word order, for instance, and the rules about the combinations and
tenses of modal verbs are probably as difficult to learn as, say, the
verb conjugations of Latin.
--
Lars Mathiesen, DIKU, U of Copenhagen, Denmark [uunet!]mcsun!diku!thorinn
Institute of Datalogy -- we're scientists, not engineers. tho...@diku.dk
Herman Rubin
> In article <1991Jan4.1...@cs.dal.ca> van...@cs.dal.ca (Jose Castejon-Amenedo) writes:
.................
> A good comparison of easy-of-learning between Esperanto and English
> would be useful. Unfortunately, as far as I know nobody has done a
> really good study of this. The ability to learn a new language varies
> quite a bit (at least for adults) from one individual to another. This
> makes studies hard. Also, people who learn Esperanto are mostly
> self-selected, which makes simple study-by-observation less than
> completely compelling.
>
> Still, let me share a few observations. The company that I worked for
> in the early 80s had a small development group in Germany. From time to
> time we would have Germans come to work at the U.S. facility where I
> worked for a few months or years. These German workers were all highly
> educated. Most of them had been studying English in school for years.
> They could, in fact, make themselves understood pretty easily.
>
> But, even after speaking English (all day, everyday) for months, most of
> them could not speak correct English. In fact, it was not unusual for
> any of them to make a grammatical or word-choice error in nearly every
> sentence. Mind you, their spoken English was perfectly understandable.
> It was just full of errors. For example, they would say "Do you live in
> the near of the plant?" when a native speaker would say "Do you live in
> the area of the plant?"
I suspect your problem here is failing to recognize that the ENGLISH is an
idiomatic expression. Are you sure that the Germans did not say "nearness"
which is literally "neighborhood" in English? I would be surprised if
anyone not knowing the expression would use the term "area".
Many years ago, at a conference in Germany, one of the American speakers
gave his talk in German. It was a translation of the English, and gave
me little problem. But if he had not given the technical terms in English,
the German speakers would have had difficulties. He had mistranslated them
into German.
One of the problems in learning a language, and not adequately addressed, is
that of GRAMMAR. Now English has one of the simplest grammars of major
languages; I believe that only Chinese has fewer grammatical forms. All
artificial languages share this feature with English and Chinese. Chinese
may have even gone to far, in that personal pronouns are without gender.
Artificial languages also have not built up the idiomatic expressions which
come with use.
I am a speaker of English only, and I have limited knowledge of other
languages. But I think that these features of languages discussed here
should be "common knowledge".
R o d Johnson
>One of the problems in learning a language, and not adequately addressed, is
>that of GRAMMAR. Now English has one of the simplest grammars of major
>languages; I believe that only Chinese has fewer grammatical forms.
I'm not sure why you say this. First of all, the idea of a
simplicity metric for grammars has been tossed around in linguistics
since the sixties, to no real resolution--nobody really knows how to
implement one.
What makes one grammar "simpler" than another? You seem to be
equating grammatical simplicity with uninflectedness--what you're
calling simple I would term analytic or isolating (the technical terms
aren't important). In that sense, English is simple but many
languages are simpler yet, besides Chinese. But it's important to
note that there are often compensating complexities. For instance,
languages like Chinese that are largely isolating (no grammatical
morphology) often have quite complex clausal syntax (complex
compounds, case-marking particles, serial verbs), and very
hard-to-describe pragmatic constraints that enable speakers and
hearers to keep track of who is doing what to whom. These are no
easier, presumably, for non-native speakers to learn master than
English (or French, or German) morphology. And English *syntax*,
which is what's more commonly meant by "grammar", is actually quite
complicated compared to typologically more consistent languages like,
say, Japanese or Turkish (going by the seat-of-the-pants
impressionistic simplicity metric).
If I were giving advice to language designers, I would tell them to
find out about recent results in typology (you want your language to
be as typologically "harmonious" as possible to minimize the number of
grammatical phenomena that have to be learned separately) and
learnability theory (much of what we know about learnability is rather
speculative at this point, but any tips on constructing learnable
languages will probably be appreciated by the people who actually have
to learn them).
Rick Morneau
In article <PBREWER.91...@thrumble.urbana.mcd.mot.com> pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com
(Philip Brewer) writes:
>
>
>I've written a bit more here than I had intended to, so let me summarize
>for people who don't want to read the whole thing: Esperanto is much,
>much easier to learn than English (or any other national language).
>
>would be useful. Unfortunately, as far as I know nobody has done a
>really good study of this.
>
I'd like to add my two cents to this debate by both agreeing and
disagreeing with Phil Brewer.
I agree that learning the *basics* of Esperanto is easier than for
any national language if the student already speaks a Romance or
Germanic language. For example, I am a native speaker of English,
and I have studied Esperanto, Italian and German. It took me less
time overcoming basic hurdles with Esperanto than with either German
or Italian.
However, in trying to achieve some degree of proficiency, I
encountered difficulties with Esperanto that I did not have with
either German or Italian.
First of all, thanks to Esperanto's implementation and use of the
accusative case, word order is essentially chaotic, making it
very difficult for even intermediate students to understand what
the "pros" are writing or saying. A fixed word order and
elimination of the accusative would make Esperanto much easier
to learn. Also, Esperanto uses the accusative to perform many
"tricks" and "shortcuts" which in any other language would be
called irregularities.
Secondly, Esperanto allows and encourages the coinage of new
words from basic roots and affixes. Unfortunately, many roots
and most affixes have imprecise or multiple meanings. Thus,
the process is subjective and the result is often ambiguous.
Furthermore, most of these "new words" are created on-the-fly
and cannot be found in a dictionary. There have been many times
when I gave up in disgust trying to understand something in
Esperanto, because I could not decode the meaning of a word
from its roots and affixes.
So, even though I plan to continue my study of Esperanto, I cannot
say that it is the easiest language I have ever studied. Overall,
I would say that Esperanto is as easy to learn as German, but that
it is noticeably more difficult to learn than Italian.
Finally, I imagine that people who are *not* native speakers of
a European language would find Esperanto very hard to learn.
The difficult-to-pronounce consonant clusters, the variable-length
roots, the accusative, and the essentially "European" way in
which words are coined and combined in Esperanto would make the
language very difficult for native speakers of other language
families.
Rick
-----
*=*=* A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. (T.J.) *=*=*
= Rick Morneau Idaho National Engineering Laboratory =
* m...@nairobi.inel.gov Idaho Falls, Idaho 83415 *
=*=*=*=*=*=* All kings is mostly rapscallions. (M.T.) =*=*=*=*=*=*=
Michael A. Covington
(or no grammar at all -- it exactly matches the language of thought)
and all other languages are very complicated.
:)
Ivan Derzhanski
>>>The reason that Esperanto continues today is that it works.
>
>> And you know that it works because it continues today.
>
>No, what I'm saying here is more than a tautology. I know Esperanto
>works because I've used it for communicating.
Exactly. This is what it means that it continues today: it is being used
for communicating.
> I've read letters from
>people in Czechoslovakia. I've read a newsletter from a group in
>Uzbekestan. I've written things in Esperanto that were read and
>understood by people with whom I share no other common language.
I've written things in English that were read and understood by people
with whom I share no common language. People have used Volapuk for the
same purpose. This is true for any existing language.
[about a consonant cluster which is difficult for English speakers]
>
>It's only difficult to learn to say "scii" from a book. If everybody
>had a local Esperantist as a teacher, learning proper pronunciation
>would be easy.
This is very interesting. I used to work as a Russian language tutor for
some time, and pronounciation was one of the most terrible problems for
my tutees. I learned to swear in American English by listening to them
trying to pronounce the Russian _c_ (not to mention clusters of consonants
containing it) and making comments.
I don't believe that Zamenhof cared at all about making it easy to learn
the proper pronounciation. He could have designed the phoneme system in
a way as to enable the teacher and the student to use the same time and
effort for something more useful. But he didn't.
>Many people learn Esperanto from a book. There are thousands of
>proofs-by-example that Esperanto is easy enough to learn that any
>ordinary person, without any special talent for learning languages, can
>learn it (well enough to read any ordinary prose) without even needing a
>teacher.
On the other hand, there are several ALs (LSF, for example; but not
Esperanto) which I can read without any learning at all. This makes me
believe that they are incomparably better.
> Try finding any national language for which that is true.
This would be difficult, but there are other reasons for learning NLs.
It is true for virtually all ALs, however. This is what they are for.
I wonder whether learning Interlingua requires a special talent.
>[I've omitted your analysis and comparison of several widely spoken
>national languages, with the suggestion that a good universal language
>should include a feature only if it is common among major national
>languages.]
>
>My point is that there is no great value in doing this sort of analysis.
Interesting. We are told that virtually AL designers do something very
similar when they decide what must be called what, for example. No? I
would very much like to see an ergative AL, for example, or one with a
set of glottalized consonants.
>So what if accusative case is an uncommon feature in major languages?
Oh, nothing. I was just wondering why an AL must have it, because I am
certain that it would be easier to learn and use without it.
> I could argue that it is not nearly so uncommon as you make it out to be
>(we have it in English, at least for pronouns).
For pronouns, yes. This doesn't mean at all that speakers of English-like
languages are not very confused when they have to deal with cases of nouns
in their first language that has them. My point was based on my observa-
tions of Bulgarian fourth-graders and my American tutees learning Russian.
> But the question is not
>What is common? The questions are: What is easy to learn?
These are, IMO, two ways of saying the same. A sound is difficult for
people whose languages don't use it. A grammatical rule is difficult
to learn if it goes straight against the way your language works.
> What is easy
>to use? What features in a universal auxiliary language make it easy
>for people with no other common language to communicate?
I gave my ideas already. Any others?
>We know from a hundred years of experience that ordinary people can
>study Esperanto on their own and learn to speak and read well enough to
>communicate with people from all over the world. That's makes is a good
>choice for a universal auxiliary language despite any theoretical
>arguments about obscure choices for word stems.
This doesn't answer the original question, which was: How does it
happen that it is doing the job despite its vices? Is it only marketing?
Doesn't quality matter at all? I have no doubt that it could work in the
same way even if the choices for the word stems were much more obscure.
But how is it better than the other ALs that have been proposed, and
couldn't it have been even better?
>Philip Brewer pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com
Rich Alderson
>Inuit aside, if I recall correctly Whorf worked for a while as an inspector of
>some type for the US government which was where he developed his first
>evidence for the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis. The example I remember was that he
>observed that workmen often smoked around gas/oil drums which were marked
>"empty", which is actually a dangerous practice since the drums are still
>"full" of fumes. His conclusion was that the workmen's concept of empty was
>influencing their behaviour in a tangible way -- thus the hypothesis.
Whorf was a risk analyst for an insurance firm, involved in investigating
accidents in the work place. What he discovered was that "waste water"--which
often involved lighter-than-water flammable materials--was thought of as
"water" by workers who would throw cigarettes and such in tanks to put them
out. BOOM! This led him to do further study in this area, which eventually
led to his setting forth his hypothesis.
Sapir's name is attached to it because he championed it as well as expanding on
the database.
Rich Alderson
alde...@portia.stanford.edu
Prentiss Riddle
many have functioning communities of speakers? Or even small groups actively
pushing the language?
I'd appreciate any light anyone can shed on this. I'd also like to see contact
information for as many ALs as possible. To begin with, here's what I have:
Esperanto: Esperanto League for North America
P.O. Box 1129
El Cerrito, CA 94530
Lojban: Logical Language Group
2904 Beau Ln.
Fairfax, VA 22031
Ido: Tom Todd
3709 West Main
Kalamazoo, MI 49007
Glosa: Wendy Ashby
PO Box 18
Richmond, Surrey TW9 2AU
ENGLAND
Please post any others or send them to me by mail and I'll summarize, as you
prefer. Thanks.
--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada")
--- rice.edu!sugar!lobster!hounix!priddle uunet!buster!lobster!hounix!priddle
Filisa Vistima
have studied and speak the languages which are
being discussed are probably much more informed
and "know what they're talking about" than those
which don't.
Just a thought....
filisa
__
\/ think pink fil...@hardy.u.washington.edu
"<Ci-tiu frazo estas malvera."
Karl Heuer
>"ch" and "u" instead, but on SCE for some reason one sees "cx" and "w" as
>well.
One reason: because on my computer, c-circumflex and u-breve *are* available
(I use an ISO Latin/3 font). It's only because of deficiencies of the news
protocol that I have to encode them, and it happens to be useful to use a
(mostly) reversible encoding so that the article looks right when I read it
back. The h-convention loses big when the article also contains English text
(and it screws up the occasional Esperanto word like "longhara").
I'd rather go with a completely unambiguous and reversible encoding (which
must include provision for escaping the escape character), but the flip side
is that it has to be simple enough for newcomers who don't have the
{en,de}coding software to easily {write,read} it manually.
Karl Heuer ka...@ima.isc.com uunet!ima!karl
Paul Amblard
>About Eskimo...
>
We all have already seen this old question : how many word are there to
designate 'SNOW' in Eskimo?
(Inuit is the name of the people, what is the name of the language ?)
I do not know Eskimo.
I do not have any native speaker in the pocket of my anorak.
I do not know what is a "word" . This question is related to linguistic choices
and definitions 'in a given linguistic theory'.
I have only opened a dictionnary. (What does contain a dictionnary ? words,
lexems, "dictems"?...)
"Lucien Schneider : Dictionnaires francais - esquimau et esquimau - francais du
parler de l'UNGAVA
Presses de l'Universite LAVAL, Quebec, 1970"
This is what I found :
( a few comments : the first list is of 'words' translated by Schneider with
'NEIGE', the second list contains 'words' related to 'Neige', the third list
contains 'words' translated by verbal phrases. a (short) list contains three
words from a second source, the last list was posted some months ago in the
newsgroup.
Some words are indicated with their 'root', example aneogavineq is a derivative
from aneo.)
Note: if somebody whishes to translate from french (or eskimo!!!) to english,
(s)he is welcome. I am not fluent enough...
aneo : neige pour faire de l'eau
aneogavineq : neige tre`s dure, tasse'e et gele'e; ne've'
(<- aneo)
aomannaq : neige vraiment fondante, neige pre^te a` fondre,
neige qui fond petit a` petit
(<- aomayoq = mou)
apinngraut : la toute premie`re couche de neige de l'automne
(<- apivoq = il se couvre de neige )
aput : neige qui recouvre le pays
aqidloqa^q : neige molle, en banc, apre`s poudrerie
aqidlupiaq : neige et eau en plein de'gel
(<- aqittoq = mou)
ayaq : neige aux habits
iglusaq : neige bonne pour la construction de l'iglou
(<- iglu = maison)
isherearktaq : neige jaune, rougie ( comme enfume'e, boucane'e en
tombant )
(<- isheq = fumee)
kataka^rktana`q : neige a` crou^te dure qui ce`de sous les pas
(<- katakpoq = il tombe d'une hauteur)
kaviserdlaq : neige rugueuse sur laquelle il a plu et qui a comme
des ecailles de glace; neige moutonneuse
(<- kaviseq = ecaille de poisson )
manngomaq : neige tasse'e, humide, semi-molle au de'gel
= ? mannguoma^q : neige ramollie par le temps
manngoq : neige fondante, boue de neige
maoyaq : (par exemple neige molle,) terrain qui enfonce sous
les pas
masaq (masak) : neige humide qui est en train de tomber
matsaq : neige humide, imbibe'e d'eau, au sol ou dans la
gamelle
matsaaruti : neige prepare'e pour glacer le traineau
(<- matsaq)
mingoleq : couche de neige fine, de poudrerie
naterovaq : neige fine emporte'e par le vent ou depose'e par le
vent
(<- nateq = plancher de l'iglou)
ninngeq : neige mise en muraille autour de l'iglou ou pellete'e
dessus pour le rendre moins perme'able au froid
ninngesaq : la neige pour faire du ninngeq
pe^rtorineq : couche mince de neige le'ge`re, molle, pose'e par la
poudrerie sur un objet
pukak : neige cristallise'e qui s'effrite, neige granuleuse
en cristaux durs (le plus souvent sur sol herbeux,
sous la neige normale)
qaniala^q : neige (qui tombe) fine, espace'e, le'g`re
(<- qanik )
qaniapaluk : neige tre`s fine tombant par temps calme
qanik : neige qui tombe, flocon de neige
qaniktaq : neige re'cemment tombe'e au sol
qerkshoqaq (qerkshuqa^q): neige regele'e, neige dont le dessus, regele' en
surface, est dur
qerkshusimayoq : neige agglome're'e, durcie, glace'e
qerkshutoq : neige agglome're'e, concasse'e, foule'e aux pieds
pour l'iglou d'automne
qeoraliaq : de la neige effrite'e
qeoralingneq : neige effrite'e, soit dans un seau pour faire de
l'eau, soit pour boucher les trous de l'iglou
(<- qeoralikpoq = effriter de la neige)
qeqomaq : neige dont le dessus est gele', glace' (apre`s une
fonte le'ge`re au de'but du printemps)
qikuutiksaq : neige pulve'rise'e pour boucher les trous de
(ou qikuutiksayaq) l'iglou
(<- qikoq = trou dans l'iglou par le vent qui
ronge la neige)
qimudjuk(qemuddjuk) : banc de neige, conge`res, stries dans la neige faites
par la tempe^te
sermeq : bouillie de neige pour cimenter quelquechose (les
blocs de construction d'une maison de glace) prise et
pose'e
sermesaq : me'lange de neige et eau pour cimenter (ou eau +
terre)
shiimignatoq : neige de nature a` faire grincer les patins du
traineau
(<- shiimikpa^ = il le coince)
sitidloqa^q : neige dure en conge`res apre`s poudrerie froide
(<- sitiyoq = dur)
tudlesimayoq : qui a e'te' pietine', tasse' au pied (neige a iglou)
aplani ainsi (lit de neige)
(<- tudlepa^ = il met le pied dessus)
tututiksaq : la neige destine'e a` e^tre tasse'e, me^me
e'miette'e, et mise en place mais non encore tasse'e
(pour faire l'iglou)
(<- tutunnepoq = tasser avec les pieds )
umiktuutiksaq : neige (ou autre) pour boucher les trous de l'iglou
(<- umikpa = il l'a bouche')
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
aoktorunneq : partie de neige tasse'e, fondue et gele'e (du lit de
neige sous la personne; endroit ou` un chien est
reste' couche')
(<- aoktoq =fondu; aokpoq = il fond)
(lit de neige = igleq)
aputi^t : des morceaux de neige
(<- aput)
igluligutiksaq : de quoi ba^tir un iglou : tout ce qui sert ( neige,
pana (?), bougie
iglulinekoi : de'bris de neige en construisant l'iglou
ikiartoq : un bloc de neige qu'on coupe et qui se casse en deux
horizontalement par suite de couches de neige
diffe'rentes
(ikiaq = entre-deux, inte'rieur)
miligaq : mince pellicule de neige travaille'e pour cacher un
pie`ge
(<- milik = voile)
nargrouti : morceau de neige pour boucher un trou qui de'goutte
dans l'iglou
nipitita^q : morceau de neige qu'on fait coller a` un endroit du
do^me de l'iglou d'ou` l'eau de'goutte
(<- nipittoq = coller)
nipperqut : quelquechose qui absorbe l'humidite' (e'ponge, sciure
neige)
oqootaq : rempart de neige pour s'abriter en voyage a` l'heure
du the' ou pour prote'ger l'entre'e de l'iglou
(<- oqortoq = il porte des ve^tements d'hiver)
pa^rtuilitaq : mur de neige, de protection devant l'entre'e de
l'iglou
(<- pa = entre'e de l'iglou)
pe^rte : bloc de neige qu'on dresse devant la fene^tre de
l'iglou pour l'empe'cher de s'enneiger
qatserkutit : blocs de neige empile's les uns sur les autres pour
mettre d'autres objets
(<- qatsitoq = bosse)
qerkshoq : crou^te de glace sur la neige apre`s la pluie
qodliti : le dernier bloc de neige du do^me de l'iglou
qoligaq : ce qu'on met sur un pie`ge pour le cacher (neige,
papier ou mousse)
(<- qoli = dessus)
qorktaq : trou dans la neige fait par un jet d'urine
saviuyarktuaq : bloc de neige coupe' au couteau pour faire l'iglou
saviuyarnekoit : de'bris de neige apre`s de'coupe
(<- saviuyartuaq)
saksaneq : de'bris de neige apre`s construction de l'iglou
shuarutaq : petite averse (pluie ou neige)
sittaneq : chose (glace de mer, neige, viande) qui a durci en
gelant
talugaq : e'cran de neige sur un pie`ge
(<- talutaq = rideau)
tukerksineq : moellon de neige durcie ou glace qui s'est forme'e
sur le poil, la barbe ou sur un morceau de bois
(<- tukerpa` = il l'a pousse' du pied)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
apivoq : il se couvre de neige
aqidloqertutoq : il fait un temps a` faire de l'aqidloya^q
ayamerpoq : enlever une grosse quantite' de neige de dessus ses
habits
igluiyoq : il a le mal de neige
iyaroa^nartoq : il neige avec vent de face
(<- iyi = oeil)
maodzarsatoq : il tombe de la neige floconneuse, molle, bonne a`
faire du 'maoyaq'
manngoutiksaliorpoq : il tombe une neige fine, molle, au printemps, neige
qui fera se tasser l'iglou, l'abaissera de`s que le
soleil parai^tra
manngomayoq : la neige baisse de niveau au soleil
(<- mannguk : enfonce', racine)
manngotoq : la neige baisse de niveau
masarqiyoq : il tombe de la neige imbibe'e d'eau
mingolertoq : le temps couvre, saupoudre, d'une mince couche de
neige tre`s fine
nateroviktoq : il neige de cette neige fine (<- naterovaq) dans
l'iglou
pe^rksitoq : il poudre actuellement
(<- perksivoq = il l'a enleve')
pe^rquservigiva^ :il poudre, la neige tombe en tourbillons
(<- pe^rquserpoq = il se refuse)
pe^rtuyuktoq : il poudre un peu
qaniala^rtoq : il neigeotte
qaniapalukpoq : elle (<-qaniapaluk) tombe
qannetoq : il neige, il tombe de la neige
(<- qanik)
qanniatshutoq : il neige faiblement
qeqergranartoq : la neige est de nature a` provoquer le crissement
des pas
(<- qeqergraq = bruit de pas)
tuttipa^ : il ajuste le bloc de neige pour le faire toucher en
bas et sur le cote^
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(collis)
aput
qanik (ecrit qaniit)
niktaalaq : neige porte'e par le vent
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(cedelle)
Aluiqqaniq : Snowdrift on a steep hill, overhanging on top.
Aniuk : Snow for drinking water.
-> anio, aneo
Aniuvak : Snow remaining in holes.
Aput : Snow on the ground (close to the generic Snow)
->
Aqilluqqaaq : Fresh and soggy snow
-> aqidloqa^q
Auviq : snow brick, to build igloo
Ijaruvak : Melted snow, turned in ice cristals.
Isiriartaq : Falling snow, yellow or red.
-> isherearktaq
Kanangniut : Snowdrift made by North-East wind.
Katakartanaq : Crusty snow, broken by steps.
->
Kavisilaq : snow hardened by rain or frost
-> kaviserdlaq
Kinirtaq : wet and compact snow.
Masak : wet snow, saturated.
->
Matsaaq : snow in water
->
Maujaq : deep and soft snow, where it's difficult to walk.
-> maoyaq
Mingullaut : thin powder snow, enters by cracks and covers objects.
-> mingolleq ?
Mituk : small snow layer on the water of a fishing hole.
-> mitu : petits glacons a` la surface des trous qu'on perce
dans la glace
Munnguqtuq : compressed snow which began to soften in spring.
-> manngomaq ?
Natiruviaqtuq: snow blasts on the ground.
-> nakteroviktoq --> naterovaq
Niggiut : snowdrift with South-east wind
Niummak : hard waving snow staying on ice fields
Pingangnuit : snowdrift made by south-west wind
Piqsiq : snow lift by wind. Blizzard.
Pukak : dry snow cristals, like sugar powder
->
Qannialaaq : light falling snow
->
Qanniq : falling snow
->
Quiasuqaq : re-frozen snow surface, making crust.
-> qekshoqaq ?
Qiqiqralijarnatuq: crissing snow when walked on.
-> qeqergrqnqrtoq
Uangniut : snowdrift made by north-west wind.
Uluarnaq : round snowdrift
Uqaluraq : taper snowdrift
Termes non certains, sources moins sures...
puka^ngayoq : neige suffisamment cristallise'e, bonne pour l'iglou
(<- pukak)
qivere^kkuti : neige au pied des blocs du premier tour de l'iglou
pour les bloquer
(<- qivertoq = pivoter)
--
Paul AMBLARD | amb...@imag.imag.fr
L.G.I. I.M.A.G. | amb...@imag.UUCP
BP 53X | (uunet.uu.net!imag!amblard)
F 38041 GRENOBLE Cedex | Tel (33) 76514600 ext 5144
eder...@pttrnl.nl
pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Philip Brewer) writes:
> A good comparison of easy-of-learning between Esperanto and English
> would be useful. Unfortunately, as far as I know nobody has done a
> really good study of this. The ability to learn a new language varies
> quite a bit (at least for adults) from one individual to another. This
> makes studies hard. Also, people who learn Esperanto are mostly
> self-selected, which makes simple study-by-observation less than
> completely compelling.
I would like to add something here (please be patient with my English). A
couple of years ago, a scientific study has been carried out, in which
classes of primary schools in a number of European countries were involved.
One half of the classes were taught Esperanto during one year, the other
halves were taught English. After that, in secondary school, it appeared
that those who learned Esperanto, learned other languages more easily, and
had much metter results (including for English!) than those who learned
English in primary school.
I hope I described the experiment correctly, please correct me if I'm
wrong. I don't have a reference handy. Prof. Dr. Helmar Frank, from
Paderborn, Germany, was involved and knows more about it.
greetings / groeten / salutojn,
Derk Ederveen
-------------
Kath. Universiteit, Nijmegen / PTT Research NT-TWS, Leidschendam - - NL
D_Ede...@pttrnl.nl - - eder...@hlsdnl5.bitnet - - dnlts::ederveen
** esperanto(Lingvo) :- neuxtrala(Lingvo), internacia(Lingvo), dua(Lingvo). **
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
> The notion that "English is easy to learn" is ludicrous.
Maybe, but I think that it is far easier than German, Russian,
or Finnish, for instance (I am talking from the point of view of a
Romance language speaker). I remember that in my school years I felt
annoyed about the arbitrary spelling of the language, and about
certain sounds (which to this day seem to be beyond my grasp). But the
grammatical elements never imposed a heavy burden on my memory.
> Esperanto is much, much easier to learn than English (or any other
> national language).
Quite so. But is it the only AL enjoying this property?
> Still, let me share a few observations. The company that I worked for
> in the early 80s had a small development group in Germany. From time to
> time we would have Germans come to work at the U.S. facility where I
> worked for a few months or years. These German workers were all highly
> educated. Most of them had been studying English in school for years.
> They could, in fact, make themselves understood pretty easily.
>
> But, even after speaking English (all day, everyday) for months, most of
> them could not speak correct English. In fact, it was not unusual for
> any of them to make a grammatical or word-choice error in nearly every
> sentence. Mind you, their spoken English was perfectly understandable.
> It was just full of errors. For example, they would say "Do you live in
> the near of the plant?" when a native speaker would say "Do you live in
> the area of the plant?"
So what? As you said before, they made themselves understood
without major problems. And I am sure you are aware of the fact that
most (if not all) native speakers make mistakes when talking and
writing their own tongue; you only have to read a few postings to the
net (no offense intended against anybody: I am painfully aware of my
own share of errors.)
> For people who have a talent for learning languages, English is
> learnable.
I am not especially gifted but I learnt English. Believe,
motivation is the best gift for learning a language, and in my case it
was nearly a matter of intellectual survival: how was I to be able to
follow the scientific mainstream without English?
> After studying Esperanto for only a few days I could read and write
> Esperanto better than I had been every been able to read and write
> German. After studying Esperanto for a few months I was able (with a
> dictionary at hand) to push my way through just about anything written
> in Esperanto (News articles, novels, song lyrics, etc.).
Good for you! But were I to learn a language to communicate
with a German speaker, it would German, not E.
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In <37...@cup.portal.com> EZ-a...@cup.portal.com (Bruce
Robert Gilson) writes:
> I find myself in general agreement
> with two of the posters in this
> chain. Jose Castejon-Amenedo points
> out the fact that Esperanto has been
> improved upon many times, and I agree
> with him that (for example) Ido was
> much better in its word formation.
> He favors something called LSF, about
> which I admit I know nothing.
It's Peano's Latino sine Flexione (Uninflected Latin),
something very easy for me, for obvious reasons ;-) And far more
elegant than Esperanto.
> That is
> a much more sensible idea than try-
> ing to claim that because Zamenhof
> came up with a good idea in the 1880s
> no further progress is possible.
Hear, hear! I wonder why Esperantists seem so reluctant to
accept this.
Ivan Derzhanski
>
>Speaking as a linguistics professional, I'd suggest that a lack of
>serious interest in ALs is virtually a defining characteristic of
>LPs. It's really much more interesting try to figure out how actual languages
>work than to try to inflict upon the world the results of somebody's inevitably
>ignorant prejudices and wild speculations.
Of course, since ALs are man-made, they are not interesting in the way
NLs are. Figuring out the way they work should be a really boring task
("I'll hide in the wardrobe and you'll look for me"). (It could be a
good exercise, if you don't have the grammar book, but no more.)
But there are other interesting issues. Contemporary linguistics
believes that all human languages share a certain set of features, and
this determines their learnability. On the other hand, many ALs are
older than the very concept of Universal Grammar. It might be worth
finding out whether they still follow it in the way NLs do. If yes,
this would be remarkable. If no, this might have something to do
with their acceptability.
>The `exception that proves the rule' is Esperanto: it would indeed be
>interesting to see what human nature has made of Zamenhof's scheme.
Exactly. And there is some research going on, as far as I know, on the
development of E. Its original vocabulary is not that big, and the
famous 16 rules leave a lot of things undetermined, so it is worth
knowing how new words and idioms come into existence and are accepted,
and how people with different mother tongues handle the grammar.
>But the interest of Esperanto derives from the fact that it probably isn't
>really an AL any more, but a creole based on one.
SCE readers seem to be very unhappy with this statement. It may be a
good idea to clarify what you mean.
>It might also be in principle interesting to try to find out what kinds of ALs
>people could actually learn to use and which ones they could'nt
For example, something that goes straight against UG (what it is, not what
it is thought to be) would be unhuman and therefore unspeakable. Minor
inconsistencies could be fixed inconsciously by the speakers.
This guess of mine is supported by the fact that difficulty is not an
obstacle (Volapuk used to be very successful). So, marketing aside,
there must be some other reason why some languages don't even begin
to be spoken, and some go quite far.
> (as a teenager
>I designed an AL & found that neither myself nor the friend I tried to teach
>it to could actually write anything intelligible in it),
This is an interesting exercise, and I used to be very fond of it myself
(and still am, I must confess). Do you remember what it looked like?
How can you explain its failure now?
> but I suspect that in
>practice it would be very diffcult to get useful results from this activity.
I hope it wouldn't.
>Avery Andrews (ada...@csc.anu.edu.au)
David Conrad
>In article <1991Jan05.2...@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> i...@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ivan Derzhanski) writes:
>>books say that when [c-circumflex, u-breve] are not available, one may use
>>"ch" and "u" instead, but on SCE for some reason one sees "cx" and "w" as
>>well.
>
>One reason: because on my computer, c-circumflex and u-breve *are* available
>(I use an ISO Latin/3 font). It's only because of deficiencies of the news
>protocol that I have to encode them, and it happens to be useful to use a
>(mostly) reversible encoding so that the article looks right when I read it
>back. The h-convention loses big when the article also contains English text
>(and it screws up the occasional Esperanto word like "longhara").
So does my computer, but it probably doesn't encode them the same way yours
does. The problem is not with the news protocol, but with the lack of a
standard. ASCII is a standard. Not great, but *standard*.
>I'd rather go with a completely unambiguous and reversible encoding (which
>must include provision for escaping the escape character), but the flip side
>is that it has to be simple enough for newcomers who don't have the
>{en,de}coding software to easily {write,read} it manually.
The answer would seem to be for whoever maintains them, to produce new
versions of rn and nn and <whatever>. And agree on escape sequences.
Something like:
\^c, \^g, \^h, \^j, \^s, \-u, \\;
or:
^c, ^g, ^h, ^j, ^s, ^u, ^^;
One could turn it on only for selected newsgroups. The default for new
groups would be off. Sort of 'automatic rot13 mode', but it wouldn't be
rot13, it would be accent decoding. For systems which can't display the
accented characters the users would be no worse off than they are now,
especially with the second type which I think are quite readable. And
for such systems the decoding could still be enabled, but would output
a digraph for each code. So ^c might remain ^c if a user found that
easy to read, or could become c^, or ch, or cx, whatever.
A really ambitious project would be to define a comprehensive set of codes
that could display a wide variety of accented characters.
>Karl Heuer ka...@ima.isc.com uunet!ima!karl
David R. Conrad | Rato frapas. --plia--
da...@tygra.ddmi.com | Vi mortas...--plia--
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Richard Kennaway CMP RA
<1991Jan04....@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu>
<PBREWER.91...@thrumble.urbana.mcd.mot.com>
<1991Jan9.1...@hounix.uucp>
In <1991Jan9.1...@hounix.uucp> pri...@hounix.uucp (Prentiss Riddle) writes:
>Of the many artificial language projects which have been discussed here, how
>many have functioning communities of speakers? Or even small groups actively
>pushing the language?
>
>I'd appreciate any light anyone can shed on this. I'd also like to see contact
>information for as many ALs as possible. To begin with, here's what I have:
Here's another:
Loglan: The Loglan Institute
1701 Northeast 75th Street
Gainesville
Florida 32601
U.S.A.
They have recently published a new edition of the book "Loglan 1",
describing the language, its aims and structure, and have a range of
computer-aided teaching software. A revised Loglan-English dictionary
is in preparation.
Lojban, which you mentioned, is an offshoot of Loglan; its advocates split
(acrimoniously) with the Loglan Institute a few years ago because of
disagreements over the promulgation of Loglan, rather than about Loglan
itself. To avoid the copyright claims of the Loglan Institute, they
redesigned the whole vocabulary; and since both languages are still
developing, they have drifted further apart since the split.
--
Richard Kennaway SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
Internet: j...@sys.uea.ac.uk uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk
cnb...@vaxa.strath.ac.uk
>
> BTW, how about yes/no-question formation? Esperanto adds an interrogative
> particle in sentence-initial position. In the above list only Hindi and
> Arabic do it.
How about the French "est-ce que"?
> I hate the Esperanto set of tenses. Having only three of them
> (including only one past tense) with no aspect is not typical for that many
> languages.
Well actually Esperanto has more than just the three basic past, present and
future tenses. Not including the infintive, the imperative and the
conditional, there are also tenses for (eg the verb "to swim")
I had been swimming, I was swimming, I was about to swim, I have been
swimming, I am swimming, I am about to swim, I will have been swimming,
I will be swimming, I will be about to swim. There might also be 9
corresponding passive tenses, but I'm not sure about that.
Oh, and while I'm posting the sound ^j (zh) does exist in English. In the
word pleasure, for example.
BTW, I'd be more than pleased to receive mail (e-mail or otherwise) from
any Esperantists out there. Preferably in Esperanto. My address is
Duncan Thomson
85 Durward Avenue
Glasgow G41 3UG
UK
--
Duncan Thomson
cnbr50
leszek kordylewski
Well, who says so. It is not true, absolutely NOT.
> if one wants to be romantic one will learn Esperanto
Let's have more romantic people around, the world could be better.
--
Les Kordylewski, University of Chicago
R o d Johnson
>In article <1991Jan4.1...@cs.dal.ca> van...@cs.dal.ca (Jose Castejon-Amenedo) writes:
>> English is easy to learn
>Well, who says so. It is not true, absolutely NOT.
Well, thanks for clearing that up, Les.
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <1991Jan10....@midway.uchicago.edu>
kr...@quads.uchicago.edu (leszek kordylewski) writes:
>>
>> English is easy to learn
>
> Well, who says so. It is not true, absolutely NOT.
I had a go at Polish some time ago and, believe me, English is
much easier. It is much less demanding on your memory. The same
applies when you compare it with all Slavic, Romance, and Germanic
languages (I would consider Swedish, Norwegian and Danish not much
more complicated than English though.)
>> if one wants to be romantic one will learn Esperanto
>
> Let's have more romantic people around, the world could be better.
Maybe. But in that case, let us be really romantic and learn
Solresol instead, so that we can sing like birds, or Lincos, so that
we can have cosmic conversations 8-)
Filisa Vistima
>
>> Esperanto is much, much easier to learn than English (or any other
>> national language).
>
> Quite so. But is it the only AL enjoying this property?
>
I know someone who speaks enochian fairly well. I suppose it can
be fairly easy to learn with about 200 words. I'm not sure how
long it took him to learn it; he's been studying it all his life
though. As i recall (probably incorrectly, but anyway) that this
language is useful for summoning angels. Hmmm...i don't know if
the angels speak enochian.... I bet if the angels learned
Esperanto it would "open a wide door" toward interspiritual
communication (intergalalatic communication doesn't count--
if extraterristials are so smart, let 'em learn English).
filisa
__
\/ think pink fil...@hardy.u.washington.edu
"<Ci-tiu frazo estas malvera." fil...@ai.mit.edu
ada...@csc.anu.edu.au
From: i...@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ivan Derzhanski)
>>But the interest of Esperanto derives from the fact that it probably isn't
>>really an AL any more, but a creole based on one.
>
>SCE readers seem to be very unhappy with this statement. It may be a
>good idea to clarify what you mean.
The AL designer makes up rules for the stuff s(he) thinks s(he) understands,
but, as for the rest (e.g. techniques for attaining discourse cohesion),
the community of speakers is left to its own devices. Under similar
circumstances, children whose only linguistic exposure is to a pidgin seem
to somehow make up the missing rules for themselves, which is creolization.
I would expect similar things to happen in communities using an AL instead
of a pidgin.
>>I designed an AL & found that neither myself nor the friend I tried to teach
>>it to could actually write anything intelligible in it),
>
>This is an interesting exercise, and I used to be very fond of it myself
>(and still am, I must confess). Do you remember what it looked like?
>How can you explain its failure now?
Well, it had left and right complementizers, for one thing, and different pairs
for different levels of embedding. I was *not* trying to make it particularly
natural or English-like (Whorf, Stranger in a Strange Land ... )
>>practice it would be very diffcult to get useful results from this activity.
>
>I hope it wouldn't.
But I think it would, partly because of the considerable effort it takes to
learn languages (even ALs, I think) well enough to speak them at a reasonable
pace, which I think would be essential to get reasonable results. And I think
it would be very difficult to connect the observed phenomena (construction
regularizations? Speed of learning) to actual causes. E.g., if we were
comparing Tolkien's (Sindarin) elvish with Esperanto, people might like the
former better, & therefore learn it faster, because it's prettier.
Avery Andrews (ada...@csc.anu.edu.au)
Bruce Robert Gilson
easier to learn than English. Be-
cause of its regularity, this may
be so for some people. I feel that
this does not fully exhaust the
"ease of learning" issue, though.
Try an experiment. Have two people
learn Esperanto and Ido (or Novial
or Intal). Which is easier? I think
Esperanto will be left in the dirt!
No language that I know of uses an
accusative case quite the way Esp-
eranto does -- i. e. either there
is not a distinct accusative case
at all, or if there is, it is not
restricted to verb objects but is
also used as the object of at
least SOME prepositions. No lang-
uage that has cases at all uses
the nominative with prepositions
as does Esperanto. No language
with noun-adjective concord and
definite article that looks
like an adjective eliminates
that concord for the article.
Esperantists are singularly
blind to the weaknesses of the
language, and refuse to believe
that (for example) Ido is an
improvement. (The Ido movement
is now weak, but it survived a
lot longer than Esperantists
give it credit for. I was as
recently as the 1980s correspon-
ding with Idists, in fact, and
the Idists I have exchanged
letters with were on 3 different
continents.) Many of the origi-
nal devotees of Ido moved on
to other languages (Jespersen
and deWahl developed Novial and
Occidental, respectively), and
one of the causes of Ido's
weakness was this striving for
something better. Esperanto
seems to have survived better
because some of its partisans
refused to allow any flexibil-
ity, I suppose. But even Esper-
anto has no more than a few
tens of thousands of users.
Bruce Robert Gilson
that LSF meant Latino sine flexione
-- looking back at your original
post I see that you actually stated
it but I had missed it. For a
Spanish speaker, it would be par-
ticularly easy, but I bet that
Interlingua and Occidental would
be even easier!
Karl Heuer
>But even Esperanto has no more than a few tens of thousands of users.
I'm afraid you've dropped a couple orders of magnitude: the official estimate
is now two million. (Source: The World Almanac, I believe.) Someone did a
lot of interviewing to obtain that figure, eliminating the fraction that join
a local Esperanto group but never learn to say anything.
>Esperantists are singularly blind to the weaknesses of the language, and
>refuse to believe that (for example) Ido is an improvement.
Zamenhof himself recognized that the language isn't perfect. But he decided
that it's more important to freeze the language and get on with life than to
be continuously tinkering with it. I find interesting parallels with the
standardization of ANSI C.
>Many of the original devotees of Ido moved on to other languages ... and one
>of the causes of Ido's weakness was this striving for something better.
Exactly. The result of the split seems to be that people who are interested
in communicating with each other use Esperanto, while the people who are
interested in constructing or studying the properties of ALs delve into Ido or
Logjam or something.
Karl Heuer ka...@ima.isc.com uunet!ima!karl
Nils R. Bull Young
were younger. I too did this, as did a flagrant Esperantist
friend of mine. His, I don't know about. Mine I do. It was
bizarre to the limit, highly inflected (worse than Finnish) and
agglutinative. Too much hanging around with a friend who spoke
Turkish, one might suppose.
At any rate, my own AL died from neglect and a realization of
the naively childish silliness of the whole exercise. Still, I
dlearn a lot about what language does to thought... knowing
naught then about Vygotsky or Whorf. Somewhere in the vast
collection of everything my mother, bless her, didn't pitch when
I was in the Navy, I am sure the remnants of my own AL remain.
Further, I too would be interested in seeing what others have
done in this way. Not that we need any more ALs. God knows we
have enough lawyers already. Another AL would just inspire them.
Ne sufic^e c^iam estas pli bone ol tro multe... (the Anti-Dobbs)
Too much is always better than not enough... (J.R. "Bob" Dobbs)
Nils R. Bull Young The Tagalong Press
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <1991Jan11.0...@dirtydog.ima.isc.com>
ka...@ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
> Zamenhof himself recognized that the language isn't perfect. But he decided
> that it's more important to freeze the language and get on with life than to
> be continuously tinkering with it. I find interesting parallels with the
> standardization of ANSI C.
No matter what Zamenhof (or anybody else, for that matter) a
human language will follow its own evolution after it has been spoken
by a sufficiently large number of people for a sufficiently long time
span. The handful of academies in the world that strive to "preserve"
the purity of some languages provide a nice illustration; their
inevitably conservative positions are overriden by the evidence of day
to day speech, and eventually they give up and tinker with those
languages.
I do not want to speak a standardized, dead language; I want
to speak something flexible and alive, that I can use at will. I use C
for interacting with computers, not with people.
> >Many of the original devotees of Ido moved on to other languages ... and one
> >of the causes of Ido's weakness was this striving for something better.
>
> Exactly. The result of the split seems to be that people who are interested
> in communicating with each other use Esperanto, while the people who are
> interested in constructing or studying the properties of ALs delve into Ido or
> Logjam or something.
People who are interested in communicating with each other use
English. If you speak English you can communicate with more than 400
million native speakers, and most of educated people all over the
world. With Esp. you have access to two million, and I wonder how many
of those two million Esp. speakers can't speak English as well. Let's
be realistic (or else completely romantic, as I said before.)
Richard L. Goerwitz
fact, when the group was set up, there were precious few "linguists" on-
line. I'm not trying to start a flame war about what is okay to post and
what is not. I just want to point out that, historically speaking, the
argument that the sci.lang means scientific-language (i.e. the academic
discipline of Linguistics) isn't correct.
-Richard (go...@sophist.uchicago.edu)
Lars Henrik Mathiesen
> In article <1991Jan10....@midway.uchicago.edu>
>kr...@quads.uchicago.edu (leszek kordylewski) writes:
>>>
>>> English is easy to learn
>>
>> Well, who says so. It is not true, absolutely NOT.
> I had a go at Polish some time ago and, believe me, English is
>much easier. It is much less demanding on your memory. The same
>applies when you compare it with all Slavic, Romance, and Germanic
>languages (I would consider Swedish, Norwegian and Danish not much
>more complicated than English though.)
It is true that the initial stage of rote learning required to get
started is smaller for English, especially written English, than for
many other languages. But mastering the English language in its full
idiomatic, idiosyncratic glory usually involves a continuing effort
over many years of using it. However, you may feel that that effort is
not used in learning English, but in improving it; and because it is a
gradual process, you may not realize how many details you acquire over
the years.
There are people who stop trying to learn more when their English is
``good enough''; we have a lot of them in Denmark, and they are very
easy to recognize: They use strange (or rather Danish) constructions,
prepositions and idioms in English, drop or add articles and
infinitive markers ("to"), will reliably substitute "does" for "is
doing", etc.. But they think they are writing or talking in English,
and they are generally understood.
The same is possible in any language. I have had 3 years of formal
schooling in German (about 2 hours/week) when I was 12 to 14 years
old. The first many years after that I was very aware that I didn't
know the gender or declination of most German nouns, so I was totally
tongue-tied. I've since learned to ignore that :-), and today I can
make myself understood in German by pretending that it's like Danish
until proven otherwise.
My point is this: I think that the amount you need to learn to be able
to, say, follow a conversation is about the same in different natural
languages. But it doesn't feel that way because of the way traditional
language instruction works: You have to learn all the inflections
before ``they'' let you think that you ``know'' the language, whereas
idioms and the finer points of word order, usage etc. are largely
ignored.
(Thanks for the nice words about Danish. I hope you know that we have
a pretty complex word ordering system here; I don't think I've ever
met a non-native who didn't make occasional errors in this matter.)
--
Lars Mathiesen, DIKU, U of Copenhagen, Denmark [uunet!]mcsun!diku!thorinn
Institute of Datalogy -- we're scientists, not engineers. tho...@diku.dk
Walter Rolandi
but richard, what does linguistics have to do with the science of language?
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walter G. Rolandi
Horizon Research, Inc.
1432 Main Street
Waltham, MA 02154 USA
(617) 466 8367
rol...@hri.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Warnock
Some sites do not get "talk" or "rec" or such groups. It would be
nice if those of us at these sites could at least read the discussions.
If interesting stuff goes only to these groups, we are cut out.
Michael A. Covington
person can learn to read English by learning a few words at a time,
whereas with, say, a Slavic language, there are substantial morphological
paradigms that have to be learned in order to recognize the words.
Interesting. This may account for the popularity of English as a language
of scholarly communication.
Jose Castejon-Amenedo
In article <thorinn....@ragnarok.diku.dk>
tho...@diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) writes:
> It is true that the initial stage of rote learning required to get
> started is smaller for English, especially written English, than for
> many other languages. But mastering the English language in its full
> idiomatic, idiosyncratic glory usually involves a continuing effort
> over many years of using it.
Mastering all the nuances of one's mother tongue, whatever it
is, involves a continuing effort over a lifetime. Most people just
mangle their own language, and only a few acquire a sound command of
it. You need not know of all the subtleties of your tongue in order to
be able to lead a normal life.
> However, you may feel that that effort is
> not used in learning English, but in improving it; and because it is a
> gradual process, you may not realize how many details you acquire over
> the years.
True.
> There are people who stop trying to learn more when their English is
> ``good enough''; we have a lot of them in Denmark, and they are very
> easy to recognize: They use strange (or rather Danish) constructions,
> prepositions and idioms in English, drop or add articles and
> infinitive markers ("to"), will reliably substitute "does" for "is
> doing", etc.. But they think they are writing or talking in English,
> and they are generally understood.
Sometimes that is the point: to communicate. Trying to learn
to speak a foreign language like a native speaker is a hugely difficult
undertaking, after a certain age. I do not endeavour to speak English
like a native; firstly, my articulatory system is adapted to a different
phonetic structure, and I do not wish to make the effort to get to
speak flawless English, since that would take an awful lot of my time,
and I am not very good at these things, anyway; secondly, I cannot be
as intimately acquainted with the underlying culture until I have
lived in the appropriate place long enough. But I can communicate,
and that's what matters. Sure, I do not know the meaning of (say) some
cockney idioms, so what? In one occasion I listened to a conversation
between two chaps in Madrid, and I could not understand what it was
about, since it was full of slang unknown to me. However, it was
Spanish. My command of Spanish is therefore incomplete, although I am
a native speaker. Doesn't something like that happen to you in your
own language?
> (Thanks for the nice words about Danish. I hope you know that we have
> a pretty complex word ordering system here; I don't think I've ever
> met a non-native who didn't make occasional errors in this matter.)
Don't Danish speakers ever make a mistake, then? I used to
take Norwegian lessons and my teacher (otherwise a charming, clever,
and highly educated girl) made occasional mistakes. And I had
conversations about Swedish with a Swedish friend of mine, and she was
unsure about things sometimes.
The bottomline is that acquiring the fluency of a native
speaker is very difficult, and not worth the while, if you only want
to be able to communicate. If you want to speak English like the Queen
or like a denizen of Spitalfields then you have a tough task in front
of you, but why would you want to do that, other than personal
fulfilment?
Bruce Robert Gilson
that Esperanto speakers number "a few
tens of thousands" and quoted a fig-
ure of 2 million in the World Almanac
to refute me. I refer to Andrew Large
"The Artificial Language Movement",
dated 1985, and I assume it hasn't
changed THAT much in 6 years:
"It seems clear, at any rate, that
the number of organized and effective
Esperantists is less than 50,000,
although a much greater number of
people have some knowledge of the
language or at least some familiarity
with the Esperanto movement and sym-
pathy for its cause." (page 95)
I think a book specifically on the
subject, representing research by a
concerned academic, is a better
source than the World Almanac.
T. Moody
>I'm not sure why you say this. First of all, the idea of a
>simplicity metric for grammars has been tossed around in linguistics
>since the sixties, to no real resolution--nobody really knows how to
>implement one.
I can see that there would be difficulties. As a non-linguist, my own
sense of simplicity comprises two properties:
1. Regularity. To the extent that the grammatical (and morphological)
rules have many exceptions, the language is less simple. I realize that
what counts as an exception depends upon how you state the rules, but I
nevertheless feel that regularity is a manageable objective concept.
2. Absence of superfluous rules. Many languages have rules that are
supposed to be followed but which have no real semantic payoff. I think
of the rules governing grammatical gender as falling in this category.
It doesn't add anything to my understanding of the French word "maison"
to know that it is grammatically feminine, but I nevertheless have to
know it to speak correct French. In my view, this works against
simplicity.
--
Todd Moody * tmo...@sjuphil.sju.edu
"In what furnace was thy brain?" -- William Blake
Bruce Robert Gilson
(approximately) I invented Simple
Romance -- basically a form of lang-
uage influenced by Spanish and French
but totally regular. My ideal AL toda
would share some aspects of SR but I
would junk accent marks and personal
endings on verbs, both of which S
had. Somewhere I still have a grammar
and vocabulary of SR, but I can't say
exactly where. Anyway, if I were to
begin a new project it wouldn't be
based on SR. (I would probably want
a largely-Romance vocabulary, but I
would want to conform to criteria
like the ones implied by Ivan De-
zhanski's charts.
)
Bruce Robert Gilson
those of us who already speak English
it seems unnecessary unless we need
to communicate with someone who
knows that language and not English.
As about 20% of the world (probably a
bigger fraction of the literate world
in fact) speaks English and less than
50,000 people speak Esperanto well
enough to consider, I can see no good
Philip Brewer
> pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Philip Brewer) writes:
>> But, even after speaking English (all day, everyday) for months, most of
>> them could not speak correct English. In fact, it was not unusual for
>> any of them to make a grammatical or word-choice error in nearly every
>> sentence. Mind you, their spoken English was perfectly understandable.
>> It was just full of errors. For example, they would say "Do you live in
>> the near of the plant?" when a native speaker would say "Do you live in
>> the area of the plant?"
>I suspect your problem here is failing to recognize that the ENGLISH is an
>idiomatic expression. Are you sure that the Germans did not say "nearness"
>which is literally "neighborhood" in English? I would be surprised if
>anyone not knowing the expression would use the term "area".
Well, I don't really have a problem. I'm just presenting a piece of
evidence to support my claim that learning English is hard. The
suggestion that this particular difficulty is as a result of the
expression being and idiom doesn't change that.
Of course the Germans had trouble learning all the idiomatic
expressions. That is part of what makes English hard to learn. But,
the also had trouble learning non-idiomatic expressions. Most
particularly, they had trouble learning which preposition to use. For
example, they were constantly using "of" when a native speaker would
either use "by" or use a possessive.
I'm not trying to claim that Germans can't learn foreign languages
(obviously false). My claim is that learning English is hard.
>One of the problems in learning a language, and not adequately addressed, is
>that of GRAMMAR. Now English has one of the simplest grammars of major
>languages; I believe that only Chinese has fewer grammatical forms. All
>artificial languages share this feature with English and Chinese.
Other non-native speakers of English I have talked with have complained
about complications in the grammer of English. The ridiculous number of
subtly different future tenses (will, shall, going to, about to) was one
complaint.
Some people have a talent for learning new languages as adults. Most
people do not. English may be easier to learn than, say, Finnish. I
don't know of any good study which supports such a claim, but I'm not a
student of the field. However, I don't think there's much doubt that
learning Esperanto is much easier than learning any national language.
Certainly much, much easier to learn than English.
>Artificial languages also have not built up the idiomatic expressions which
>come with use.
There are idiomatic expressions in Esperanto (not surprising, given the
size of the body of literature and the number of speakers). However,
most of the idioms are simply clever ways of saying things in Esperanto.
If you weren't familiar with the idiom, it would not occur to you to use
it in speach. However, its meaning would be clear when you ran across
it. More important, it would not be an error to fail to use an
established idiom in a sentence. Any clear Esperanto statement would
correct.
Philip Brewer
>> particle in sentence-initial position. In the above list only Hindi and
>> Arabic do it.
>How about the French "est-ce que"?
How about the English "did"?
Of course, in English there are complex rules for replacing "did" with
"do" in the present tense, and completely re-forming the sentence in the
future tense. And, with the verb "to be" you use subject-verb
inversion.
Despite all that, there are people out there who claim that English is
easy to learn....
David Conrad
The author of the article which suggested that the World Almanac figure
be used stated that the figure was arrived at after a long and difficult
survey. The figure you provide is supported by Mr. Large's statement,
"It seems clear...." I would accept the figure which was the result of
a scientific study over one man's opinion, though his entire book is
devoted to the topic. I'm not attacking Mr. Large, however, but the
argument presented by Mr. Gilson. I would retract my statements here if
Mr. Gilson can provide some indication of the manner in which Mr. Large's
figure was arrived at.
--
Philip Brewer
>Esperantists are singularly blind to the weaknesses of the language,
>and refuse to believe that (for example) Ido is an improvement.
This is a bit too much of a generalization. There are many
Esperantists, especially beginning Esperantists, who find what they
consider weaknesses in the language. However, there are very few
weaknesses about which there is unanimous agreement: if you have
Esperantists from around the world make a list of things they'd like
changed you will find that what some people consider a flaw, other
people consider a feature. (This is not conjecture. At least twice in
Esperanto's history such lists were constructed by linguistically
inclined Esperantists from around the world, with the results
described.)
>(The Ido movement is now weak, but it survived a lot longer than
>Esperantists give it credit for. I was as recently as the 1980s
>correspon- ding with Idists, in fact, and the Idists I have exchanged
>letters with were on 3 different continents.) Many of the origi- nal
>devotees of Ido moved on to other languages (Jespersen and deWahl
>developed Novial and Occidental, respectively), and one of the causes
>of Ido's weakness was this striving for something better.
But this is just the point! What use is a univesral auxiliary language
that nobody speaks any more because they've all moved on to a "better"
one? When would they stop and settle on one?
>Esperanto seems to have survived better because some of its partisans
>refused to allow any flexibil- ity, I suppose. But even Esper- anto has
>no more than a few tens of thousands of users.
This is a bit too much exageration, too. Esperanto is not so inflexible
as to admit no change. However, changes come into Esperanto just as
they do into other languages: as great writers use new forms and
styles, they become adopted into the language.
Scott Horne
>In article <1991Jan7.0...@csc.anu.edu.au> ada...@csc.anu.edu.au writes:
<<
<<Speaking as a linguistics professional, I'd suggest that a lack of
<<serious interest in ALs is virtually a defining characteristic of
<<LPs. It's really much more interesting try to figure out how actual languages
<<work than to try to inflict upon the world the results of somebody's inevitably
<<ignorant prejudices and wild speculations.
<
<Of course, since ALs are man-made, they are not interesting in the way
<NLs are.
I disapprove of this talk of "man-made". Are NLs not "man-made"?
Nevertheless, I get your point and agree with it.
<<The `exception that proves the rule'
I also disapprove of this term, which, unfortunately, seems quite popular
among linguists (not to speak of "linguistics professionals").
<<But the interest of Esperanto derives from the fact that it probably isn't
<<really an AL any more, but a creole based on one.
<
<SCE readers seem to be very unhappy with this statement. It may be a
<good idea to clarify what you mean.
I'm one SCE-reader and Esperanto-speaker who'd appreciate a clarification.
--Scott
--
Scott Horne ...!{harvard,cmcl2,decvax}!yale!horne
ho...@cs.Yale.edu SnailMail: Box 7196 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520
203 436-1817 Residence: Rm 1817 Silliman College, Yale Univ
Uneasy lies the head that wears the _gao1 mao4zi_.
Michael A. Covington
Yes. Learning *any* language is hard.
Because of its lack of morphology, English can be learned word-by-word,
leaving the learner with a large vocabulary but an imperfect grasp of
the structure. This would not be possible in, say, Russian, where the
only way to say "I might have gone" is to pick the right verb form.
I find that many non-native speakers are content to speak imperfect
English, as long as they can make themselves understood and understand
what is said to them. I can't really blame them; I use about 10 languages
and know I'll never master all of them; I just know them to the level that
meets my needs.
But the problem is, such a person, after 10 years of practicing bad
English, is practically immune to good English.
A standard problem in foreign language teaching is the person who
thinks he knows the language very well, but in fact has either
(a) a heavy accent, or (b) a lot of imperfect syntax. It's sometimes
hard to motivate such a person to improve.
Freiss#Martin#STO SI 355#6153
>hru...@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>> pbr...@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Philip Brewer) writes:
>>>
[Lots of things about Germans learning English]
[...]
>particularly, they had trouble learning which preposition to use. For
>example, they were constantly using "of" when a native speaker would
>either use "by" or use a possessive.
[...]
>Other non-native speakers of English I have talked with have complained
>about complications in the grammer of English. The ridiculous number of
>subtly different future tenses (will, shall, going to, about to) was one
>complaint.
I find the concept of a "native speaker" less than appealing when it
is used to define the "correctness" of spoken language. A native speaker
from city A usually uses different idioms, different words, even
different grammar than a native speaker in city B. (if needed, I can
supply examples in German). The same (in my experience, correct me
if I'm wrong) is true for English.
>people do not. English may be easier to learn than, say, Finnish. I
>don't know of any good study which supports such a claim, but I'm not a
>student of the field. However, I don't think there's much doubt that
>learning Esperanto is much easier than learning any national language.
>Certainly much, much easier to learn than English.
I beg to differ :-)
Easiness in the mind of the student. I had less trouble learning
Dutch than Esperanto. Given proper motivation, most things are easy.
Personally, I find languages which are close to other languages I already
know easy to learn. I've also heard the opposite, that related languages
confuse the learner and therefore a language very much different from
the native language is easier. Anyway, your native language
influences you very much in what is easy for you and what is not.
Granted, Esperanto and other AL's do not have the pitfalls of
living languages: nobody can say one doesn't speak it like a native,
'cause there are no native speakers :-).
-Martin
--
freis...@sni.de
The above incoherent ramblings are my opinions, not those of my company.
R o d Johnson
><<The `exception that proves the rule'
>
>I also disapprove of this term, which, unfortunately, seems quite popular
>among linguists (not to speak of "linguistics professionals").
Not for the first time, Scott, I think your sample must be a bit
skewed. This is a common expression in the populace at large, but
I've never heard a linguist use it in a "professional linguistics"
context. In my experience, the feeling is that exceptions *disprove*
rules, just as one might expect.
--
Rod Johnson * rjoh...@vela.acs.oakland.edu * (313) 650 2315
"Stop whining and enjoy the puppet show"
--Richard Gehr
Tom Wachtel
>In article <28...@cs.yale.edu> horne...@cs.yale.edu (Scott Horne) writes:
>><<The `exception that proves the rule'
>>
>>I also disapprove of this term
>In my experience, the feeling is that exceptions *disprove*
>rules, just as one might expect.
As far as I know, the 'proves' in the phrase 'the exception that proves
the rule' involves (historically) the notion of testing rather than
concluding (cf. Italian 'provare', Polish 'probowac', etc. etc. etc.
in many other languages, all having the meaning 'try, test, attempt').
Compare also English 'probe'. After the phrase became a fixed idiom,
'prove' shifted in meaning.
So it was supposed to refer to the exception that tested the rule, like
a 'probing question', which seems quite sensible.
But I prefer the paradoxical flavour of the modern meaning...
tom
cameron shelley
>In article <28...@cs.yale.edu> horne...@cs.yale.edu (Scott Horne) writes:
>><<The `exception that proves the rule'
>>
>>I also disapprove of this term, which, unfortunately, seems quite popular
>>among linguists (not to speak of "linguistics professionals").
>
>Not for the first time, Scott, I think your sample must be a bit
>skewed. This is a common expression in the populace at large, but
>I've never heard a linguist use it in a "professional linguistics"
>context. In my experience, the feeling is that exceptions *disprove*
>rules, just as one might expect.
>
Actually, the "exception that proves the rule" is a mis-translation of
the latin "exceptio regulam probat" which should really be something
more like the "exception that tests (probes) the rule". Presumably
the proof/disproof of the rule would follow.
--
Cameron Shelley | "Absurdity, n. A statement of belief
cpsh...@violet.waterloo.edu| manifestly inconsistent with one's own
Davis Centre Rm 2136 | opinion."
Phone (519) 885-1211 x3390 | Ambrose Bierce
David M Tate
>
>Actually, the "exception that proves the rule" is a mis-translation of
>the latin "exceptio regulam probat" which should really be something
>more like the "exception that tests (probes) the rule". Presumably
>the proof/disproof of the rule would follow.
Actually, as I understand it, this was not a *mis*translation at the time
it became current. The problem is that we no longer use the verb 'to prove'
in its original sense of 'to prove (or disprove)'. C.f. "The proof of the
pudding is in the eating", which uses the word "proof" in this disjunctive
mode.
--
David M. Tate | "The psychology committee at [West Point] is pretty
dt...@unix.cis.pitt.edu | uniformly Behaviorist in philosophy, and anything
Cute, Cuddable, and | that doesn't involve albino rats and a buzzer is
Loveabobble | usually dismissed as Velikovskyan." -- T. R. O'Neill
Ivan Derzhanski
>I assume that an English speaker would have just as much trouble get-
>ting the prepositions right in Esperanto as a German speaker in English.
Getting the prepositions (postpositions, cases, or what have you) right is
generally one of the biggest problems in language learning. Oddly, there are
quite a lot of dictionaries which don't consider it necessary to say which
verb (or adjective, or ...) governs what.
>Actually, A speaker of British English uses prepositions differently
>from a speaker of American English!
Yes. I discovered this several weeks ago. In a way I find the American
use more intuitive and the British one more idiosyncratic.
>So Esperanto prepositions, I am sure, cannot possibly correspond
>exactly to those of any other.
And they don't.
I find the idea of a neutral preposition that you can use whenever nothing
else works ("je" in Esperanto, inherited by Intal as "ye") quite interesting.
I can't think of a natural language with anything of the sort.
> And Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Chinese, etc. would have far more
>difficulty remembering when to use the -n ending of Esperanto than they
>would have with a language like Novial or Intal where the noun has
>no inflection save plurality and the adjective none at all.
So they do. Let's remember that English, French, Hindi, Persian, Colloquial
Arabic, Bulgarian etc. all have had cases once, and have lost them. I wonder
whether the same will happen to E-o's accusative, if the language is left to
live in the natural way, as any other language. Would its speakers simply
start caring less and less for the accusative, - until it vanishes?
I vote yes.
> (To those who say "English has an accusative
>for pronouns" let me respond that the Esperanto accusative is not
>even used uniformly where English would -- it is used after verbs but
>_not_ after prepositions.)
So what. Who said that E-o's accusative had to correspond to the pronominal
accusative in English? In fact, if anything, this case is closest to the
postposition _ra:_ in Persian, which some grammarians call a case ending,
although then they have to say that all prepositions govern the nominative.
--
Ivan A. Derzhanski i...@chaos.brandeis.edu Any clod can have the facts,
MB 1766 / Brandeis University but having an opinion is an art.
P.O.Box 9110 / Waltham, MA 02254-9110 / USA Charles McCabe
Matthew Huntbach
>One of the problems in learning a language, and not adequately addressed, is
>that of GRAMMAR. Now English has one of the simplest grammars of major
>languages; I believe that only Chinese has fewer grammatical forms.
Is it really simple? Writing a full formal context-free grammar
for perfect English is a non-trivial task. I suspect it may be
easier to write such formal grammars for languages with a
reputation for "difficult grammar". In both cases the
easiness/difficulty is on the surface.
Matthew Huntbach
Ivan Derzhanski
>This starts my counterattack on the infidel goyim that despise Espo. %^)
Infidel goyim? Damned right, we sure are. How about you?
What is a good word for narrow-minded fanatics? :-) I say,
let's not call each other names, okay?
>As I indicated last time, this debate is getting sidetracked by emotion
>into sociology, for which I feel the most appropriate forum is soc.c.esp.
Absolutely. Rod Johnson was right after all.
>EZ-a...@cup.portal.com (Bruce Robert Gilson) writes:
>>So Esperanto prepositions, I am sure, cannot possibly correspond
>>exactly to those of any other.
>
>True. Espo is not English, so cannot trace its pattern of prepositions, nor
>should it be expected to.
It should be expected not to.
> This is a universal problem (to my mind exacerbated
>if anything by Ido's hairsplitting (an, etc.; sorry for the cheap shot, Bruce!)
One man's hairsplitting is another man's philosophy of life, remember.
>Furthermore, but for something approaching Tok Pisin's universal 'long',
Is this where the E-a "je" comes from?
> I can't think of any way of resolving this dilemma. So Bruce is irrelevant
> here. Nyuh!
Yes, he is. What does "nyuh" stand for? Wait, I'll find out myself.
There is an E-o dictionary in the library here.
>>And Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Chinese, etc. would have far more
>>difficulty remembering when to use the -n ending of Esperanto than they
>>would have with a language like Novial or Intal where the noun has
>>no inflection save plurality and the adjective none at all.
>
>Excuse me, did you say Novial - the language with a *genitive*?!
We're talking about the *accusative* here. It is more difficult to learn.
Cross-linguistically, subjects and direct objects are much more frequently
marked in the same way than possessors and possessees.
>The use of -n as indication of a direct object, as opposed to position, does
>not to my knowledge constitute a capital offence. It is not the step back
>to barbarism that knockers claim; it is a choice among many alternatives.
Most certainly, but it is a bad choice.
>A consistent treatment of position in such a role would be welcome; but
>I am not aware of English, French, or esp. Chinese (use of 'ba' participle,
>isolative sentence structure) doing this consistently.
Well, the fact remains: many speakers of accusativeless languages have
trouble with this feature. This is where a great lot of errors are made.
Nobody is saying that E-o is more difficult than a NL just because of this,
only it would gain from dropping it. The claim that it is necessary to
have it for poetry and stuff doesn't hold water. Look at English, Spanish,
Chinese, Persian, Bulgarian poetry. No cases, no fixed word order, no loss
of meaning.
>The widening of -n's role to the fac-totum of Esperanto is possibly strange
>to langauge speakers unacquainted with accusatives.
It is also strange to language speakers acquainted only with accusatives that
don't have such a wide range of functions.
> To me this is still
>emotion, rather than an objective refutation.
We wanted to have an objective discussion. It didn't work. Emotions, you say?
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Nick S. Nicholas
--
Ivan A. Derzhanski i...@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu Any clod can have the facts,
leszek kordylewski
Les Kordylewski, University of Chicago
leszek kordylewski
>for example, a Frenchman who marries a Vietnamese woman. The only
>language they have in common is English
Well, this example doesn't seem to be quite right. Isn't it, that French was
a more common foreign language in Vietnam, than English ?
leszek kordylewski
>>> Esperanto adds an interrogative
>>> particle in sentence-initial position. In the above list only Hindi and
>>> Arabic do it.
Polish has also an interrogative particle CZY in sentence-initial position.
Perhaps some other slavic languages have it, too.
Bruce Robert Gilson
I will get an 80-column terminal when
you (or one of the others who send me
E-mail about it) send me one at your
own expense. I have to struggle
through others' postings who set up
columns & fancy graphics that assume
that everyone is using 80 columns.
Believe me, it is much harder to read
those on my 40-column C-64 screen
than it is for you to read my posts
here -- I've READ 40-column formatted
material on an 80-column screen at
work and I know what I'm talking
about.
Second, also to Scott:
To me, Andrew Large has more credi-
bility than the World Almanac, and
I prefer the Information Please any-
way -- I've been buying it every year
since 1953 which is probably before
you were born, so don't call it
garbage.
Third, to those who talk of using
Esp'o to communicate with those who
have no common language with you:
Obviously, you HAVE a common language
with those people: Esperanto. If I
learned Esp'o, I would be able to
communicate with that fraction of the
20K Esp'o speakers in the world who
speak no other language that I know.
I think I got a greater number by
learning German -- and so what if it
is harder to learn. The difference in
usefulness is worth it. I actually
ran into a situation where it helped
me and neither I nor the other person
was a native German speaker -- he was
a Czech customs worker on a Vienna-
to Berlin train. I assumed that
German might work since it was run-
ning between two German-speaking
countries, and I was right.
Fourth, to whoever remarked about
Novial's genitive;
Sorry to mention Novial -- I forgot
about that point. But I think the
number of languages with an inflected
genitive (English and Rumanian) ex-
ceeds the number with an accusative
and no genitive (none, to my know-
ledge)
So therefore a genitive is preferable
to an accusative, but I prefer a
language with neither, like Intal.
Fifth: to those to whom Esperanto is
"easy to learn" - I sent an Intal
grammar to one person who responded
to me in an E-mail message in Intal.
I presume that proves that Intal is
also easy to learn -- and I maintain
easier than Esp'o.
Bruce
Claus Tondering
book on idiomatic expressions, proverbs and the like that the statement
should be interpreted thus:
The existence of an exception proves that we are dealing with a rule,
not with a law of nature. Laws of nature do not have exceptions, but
rules may have. Therefore the exception proves that we are talking about
a mere rule.
--
Claus Tondering | The number of seconds
Dansk Data Elektronik A/S, Herlev, Denmark | in a leap year is
E-mail: c...@dde.dk | sqrt(1E15)
James M. Unger
had the meaning "test, try," found today only in phrases like "proving
grounds." Trying to rationalize it while insisting on "prove" as in "prove
a theorem" (demosntrate the truth of) is, I am afraid, a hopeless task.
The idea was that extraordinary situations are the ones that put
generalizations to the test. All computer programmers today are taught to
check what happens when data take on extreme values--the same idea
expressed in different words.
I would guess that the saying survived even as "prove" in the sense of
"test" fell into disuse because "prove" in the sense of "turn out" made it
possible to give a new, ironic interpretation to the phrase--a new "lease
on life" as it were. What we really need is an empirical study: what do
people who use this phrase think it means? Are there other phrases that
survive despite radically changed meaning? If so, doesn't this suggest
that we store a hell of a lot more in the lexicon than generativists have
allowed?
--
J. M. Unger, Chairman
Department of E. Asian Languages & Literatures
University of Hawaii
Nick Nicholas
>n...@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Nick Nicholas) writes:
>>This starts my counterattack on the infidel goyim that despise Espo. %^)
>Infidel goyim? Damned right, we sure are. How about you?
>What is a good word for narrow-minded fanatics? :-) I say,
>let's not call each other names, okay?
Sheesh, Ivan, I was just trying to point out the insularity of the Esperanto
community. Joke? Humour? Oh well...
>>EZ-a...@cup.portal.com (Bruce Robert Gilson) writes:
>>>So Esperanto prepositions, I am sure, cannot possibly correspond
>>>exactly to those of any other.
>>True. Espo is not English, so cannot trace its pattern of prepositions, nor
>>should it be expected to.
>It should be expected not to.
No argument. But a deliberate policy of "let's avoid this language's prepos-
itional semantics" seems to me unworkable.
>>Furthermore, but for something approaching Tok Pisin's universal 'long',
>Is this where the E-a "je" comes from?
No. Esp. is a European construct.
(Greeks don't seem to cope with subtle humour, huh?)
>> I can't think of any way of resolving this dilemma. So Bruce is irrelevant
>> here. Nyuh!
>Yes, he is. What does "nyuh" stand for? Wait, I'll find out myself.
>There is an E-o dictionary in the library here.
Hehehe.
>>>And Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Chinese, etc. would have far more
>>>difficulty remembering when to use the -n ending of Esperanto than they
>We're talking about the *accusative* here. It is more difficult to learn.
>Cross-linguistically, subjects and direct objects are much more frequently
>marked in the same way than possessors and possessees.
No argument here either. May I say, once and for all, that, *on balance*,
I would NOT RECOMMEND THE USE OF AN ACCUSATIVE IN AN AL. OK? This does
not mean that Esp is unworkable, but that it is *probably* not an optimal
AL. The determination of what *does* constitute an optimal AL is too
subjective and bias-prone to be resolved (cf. Interlingua, Glosa, Lojban,
Basic English); Esp is thus pretty prudent to rely on the establishment
of a community and social context, to maintain the lingo. May I also say
that, compared with, say, Occidental, *I would not have given Espo the
time of day in 1895*. It was the weight of a further couple of decades
of use that made the language actually interesting.
>>The use of -n as indication of a direct object, as opposed to position, does
>>not to my knowledge constitute a capital offence. It is not the step back
>>to barbarism that knockers claim; it is a choice among many alternatives.
>Most certainly, but it is a bad choice.
I wonder if you would consider *all* morphemic indication of object a bad
choice. How about the Spanish use of 'a'? Or the corresponding usage in
Afrikaans?
>>A consistent treatment of position in such a role would be welcome; but
>>I am not aware of English, French, or esp. Chinese (use of 'ba' participle,
>>isolative sentence structure) doing this consistently.
>Well, the fact remains: many speakers of accusativeless languages have
>trouble with this feature. This is where a great lot of errors are made.
I have my doubts on the alternative (positional indication of object) not
raising similar problems for other language groups. But the errors are made.
>Nobody is saying that E-o is more difficult than a NL just because of this,
>only it would gain from dropping it.
Hm. In what sense? We are talking about the dichotomy between Esp-ology
(study of Esp 'from the inside') and intelinguistics ('from the outside',
search for an optimum AL), and while the removal of an accusative might
be an advance interlinguistically, I doubt it would attract a single
person to the language that wouldn't have gone for it anyway, or retain
a single person that wouldn't have left anyway; further, the linguistic
disruption such a change would bring, *even in steady evolution*, could
be catastrophic to the community's cohesion.
>The claim that it is necessary to
>have it for poetry and stuff doesn't hold water. Look at English, Spanish,
>Chinese, Persian, Bulgarian poetry. No cases, no fixed word order, no loss
>of meaning.
Agreed that this argument is Bullshit, an apologist's whinge. It does not
stop the Esp speaker with any literary sense from using the accusative
as self-consciously as s/he might any other of the language's resources
at his/her disposal. But that's a post gacto argument.
>>The widening of -n's role to the fac-totum of Esperanto is possibly strange
>>to langauge speakers unacquainted with accusatives.
>It is also strange to language speakers acquainted only with accusatives that
>don't have such a wide range of functions.
Take it or leave it. Esp does not use -n so widely to irritate you or Bruce,
but because of the forces of analogy and conciseness that come into play
in the development of a stylistics. This is a grave question, rarely if
ever systematised, and to my knowledge all but ignored in other ALs.
>> To me this is still
>>emotion, rather than an objective refutation.
>We wanted to have an objective discussion. It didn't work. Emotions, you say?
Sheesh again, Ivan, don't get so uptight! %^)
>>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>Nick S. Nicholas
Philip Brewer
>Well, the fact remains: many speakers of accusativeless languages have
>trouble with this feature. This is where a great lot of errors are made.
>Nobody is saying that E-o is more difficult than a NL just because of this,
>only it would gain from dropping it. The claim that it is necessary to
>have it for poetry and stuff doesn't hold water. Look at English, Spanish,
>Chinese, Persian, Bulgarian poetry. No cases, no fixed word order, no loss
>of meaning.
I take issue with your last sentence here. A native speaker can often
figure out the meaning of a hideously ill-constructed sentence either
because he has seen similar constructions in poetry before, or because
he has some other cultural reference that clears up the ambiguity. But
artificial languages are intended to be used as a second language. Have
you every tried to explain (to a non-native speaker) an English sentence
which played fast and loose with word order?
People who only speak English well enough to "get by" (most non-native
speakers) would have no chance of understanding such a sentence. But
even fluent non-native speakers often find themselves quite puzzled by
such sentences. I can remember futilely trying to explain why a
sentence meant one thing and not another, only to give up in the end
saying, "trust me, that's what it means."
That aside, I also take issue with your main point. Although people
whose first language does not contain an accusative are prone to make
mistakes with the accusative, this does not make it a flaw. Used
correctly, the accusative allows great flexibility in word order and
reduced ambiguity. Used incorrectly, it is an error, but an error no
different from any other error made by a non-native speaker of a
language.
There are two possible errors in the accusative: forgetting to apply the
-n ending to the object, or applying the -n to a non-object. In the
first case, you have an ambiguous sentence. In the second, since
prepositions always take the nominative, an -n ending applied after a
proposition is an obvious error and the correct meaning is usually
clear. If you put the -n on the subject you may render the sentence
incomprehensible. But, you still have some experience, cultural
references, and the meaning of the words to fall back on to figure out
what was meant. You have at least as good a chance of puzzling the
sentence out as you would of puzzling out such an ill-constructed
sentence in any other language
As we're now talking about the details of Esperanto grammer, I've
re-directed followups to soc.culture.esperanto. If someone responds to
a broader point, feel free to re-direct as appropriate.
David A. Johns
#
# What we really need is an empirical study: what do
# people who use this phrase think it means?
#
Heh heh ... it probably means "to hell with the data, I'm sticking
with my theory."
David Johns
Greg Lee
" ...people who use this phrase think it means? Are there other phrases that
" survive despite radically changed meaning? If so, doesn't this suggest
" that we store a hell of a lot more in the lexicon than generativists have
" allowed?
It suggests that there is a terminlogical conflict in using `lexical'
sometimes to refer to what people must memorize about a language (which
obviously includes syntactic idioms) and sometimes to refer to morphemes.
If you try to have it both ways, you have to make some rather peculiar
assumptions about morphemes (here, that a sense of `proves' is one which
when applied to the arguments `the exception' and `the rule' yields the
meaning "I don't care about the facts").
Kenneth C. Rich
>that everyone is using 80 columns.
I use 80, but not all of them.
I prefer a narrower column for reading.
My beef in the readable format
arena are big unbroken
blocks. CRs and LFs are cheap!
>"easy to learn" - I sent an Intal
>grammar to one person who responded
>to me in an E-mail message in Intal.
> Bruce
Intal sounds interesting. Can you
post it or send it email?
Or send more info.
The same goes for who was it that
posted about aUI.
--
-ken rich -=!=- ke...@cc.rochester.edu
Torkel Franzen
>My understanding is that "prove" in this adage originally (18th cent.?)
>had the meaning "test, try," found today only in phrases like "proving
>grounds." Trying to rationalize it while insisting on "prove" as in "prove
>a theorem" (demosntrate the truth of) is, I am afraid, a hopeless task.
This is the story that I've been told many times. However, some time
ago there was somebody who posted, in some newsgroup or other, highly
convincing evidence to show that the true story is rather more subtle.
Does anybody have the actual references at hand? What was argued was that
"the exception proves the rule" originally meant - broadly speaking - that
from the fact that something is presented as being out of the ordinary,
one may infer that there is a rule stating that the opposite is the ordinary
case.