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Critique of the Esperanto profile | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6383 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 19 01 February 2010 at 4:39am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Please tone it done and keep it on topic (the Esperanto profile). There are already a number of other threads on the usefulness and culture of Esperanto that you are free to contribute to if you have something to say about those topics. Edited by newyorkeric on 01 February 2010 at 4:40am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7160 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 18 of 19 01 February 2010 at 6:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
If you look closely at the Finnish examples, the only difference between the two is word order. Yet on the strength of this change, Finns make a detectable distinction in the definiteness of "tietokone" and even the sense of the sentence changes (as seen in the translations into English). The Esperanto examples change not only the word order, but also the verb ("estas" vs. "ekzistas") and article ("la" vs. (no article)).
I do not find this to be a helpful approach for learning ANY language, natural or not. By this logic, when I started learning Hungarian, I should then have been permitted to impose my native word orders when constructing similar sentences in Hungarian because I would have been still grammatically correct or conveying the same general meaning. As I showed in my post, Hungarian's flexible word order is used to express subtle rather than wholesale changes in meaning or emphasis. It's not to be used as a way to entice foreign learners to shape Hungarian word order in ways that are more familiar to those foreign learners. The result would be "un-Hungarian" word order with Hungarian words. All the while, exploitation of Hungarian flexibility in word order to suit my native word order would have made me ignorant of the importance of Hungarian's flexible word order as used to express degrees of emphasis which English would express with changes in voice (i.e. active vs. passive), intonation / volume / stress (if speaking) or italics / bolding (in print). We definitely need learn to crawl before we walk (let alone run), but we shouldn't encourage bad habits when crawling. It seems attractive (or may even evoke "warm fuzzies") when someone exploits a language with flexible word order as a selling point saying something like "See? X is great because you can use whichever word order you prefer and still be fully understood". However even a cursory look at the examples of Esperanto sentences shows that its word order is not as "free-spirited" as it appears. In this case different users can be generally understood by the same fluent Esperantist but there are different subtleties which that same Esperantist will take away. Looking at the example of the red car:
Someone who's used to putting the adjective before the noun, will tend at first to do so in Esperanto. Someone who's used to putting adjectives after the noun, will likewise tend initially to use the same order in Esperanto. Beginners learning that it's OK to use whichever word order is more comfortable for them (i.e. closer to that of their native language) are relying on a crutch that turns them away from the fact that Esperanto word order actually is not a free-for-all and that some rules about word order exist in order to convey subtleties.
The relationship between the importance of word order and presence of cases is a non sequitur. A more accurate statement would concern a relationship between *rigidity* of word order and quantity of cases. The comment about redundancy in German because of the importance of word order and its use of 4 cases overlooks something that you yourself pointed out earlier with your examples of Esperanto sentences in differing word orders. Word order is important if not for broad meaning, then for other reasons such as poetic license, emphasis or changing of voice. Esperanto has 2 cases (if I remember correctly) and word order is important as shown in your examples. Word order in Finnish, Hungarian and Slovak (among many other languages) is also important if not for broad meaning, then for other, more subtle reasons. For the record Finnish, Hungarian and Slovak have 15, 18 and 6 cases respectively. I don't think that any serious linguist would say that these languages have redundancy by virtue of the importance assigned to word order together with the use of cases. German is indeed a V2 language, but the example of "Dich liebe ich" is not a good one. In this case, it occurs rarely outside poetry or song-writing, and many teachers (or even native speakers) would often correct you perhaps even saying something like: "'Ich liebe dich' klingt besser." in line with a strict SVO sequence. However German's rule of V2 in declarative sentences does permit (or even encourage) something like the following: Ich komme heute Abend nach Hause. vs. Heute Abend komme ich nach Hause. (note that "heute Abend" is not an object but an adverb, and the flexbility here can be used either to reflect personal style, or slight change of emphasis) However you as a beginner in German may already detect a difference in emphasis, despite the identity of the general meaning. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| zooplah Diglot Senior Member United States zooplah.farvista.net Joined 6372 days ago 100 posts - 116 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: German | Message 19 of 19 01 February 2010 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Morphemes are invariable in Esperanto (Esperanto is actually an isolating language, not an agglutinative one). So the morpheme est and the morpheme ekzist have different meanings. Both are intransitive, so you don't use the accusative. [The invariability of morphemes and the isolating character of Esperanto were two of the reasons behind Ido; the fact that you say ebla (instead of posibla) and troaĵo (instead of exceso), among others, drove the elite francophones nuts. This is probably the most humorous overview of Ido: Blueprints for Babel: Ido]
It's better than when learning German, and they tell you how similar it is to English, starting you off with a bunch of cognates. Then you get into grammar, and that's a total nightmare. I liked learning Esperanto because you started on the (very easy and minimal) grammar right away. The first thing you learn is verb conjugation, then forming the plurals and accusative case in Esperanto. I know English speakers hate the accusative case but don't mind the plural, where the Japanese are the other way around (because Japanese has the object particle o, which works similarly to Esperanto's bound morpheme n).
And? In Fundamento de Esperanto, Zamenhof himself mentions that there are only two cases: nominative and accusative. The others are done with prepositions: de for the genitive, al for the dative, per for the instrumental, etc. [Actually, Z uses kun instead of per in the English version, but not in a couple of the other versions, obviously because English doesn't differentiate between the two totally different concepts; we use "with" for both; of course, separating them comes in handy, as kunigi and perigi are totally different things. He also says that "de" is used for replacing the genitive, but sometimes "da" is used. I remember one of the phrases I learned in German: Ich möchte eine Tasse Tee. In Esperanto that would be: Mi volas tason da teo.] In his book, Sylvan Zaft talks about the cost-benefit ratio. Some language features just have too high of a cost and too little of a benefit (like the Japanese verb system and the Indonesian second-person-pronoun system), so those features are lost.
Not really. It's customary to put adverbs before the words they qualify (except when you need to change it for emphasis). Like I put in the original post: Mi povas bone paroli Esperanton. (I can well to speak Esperanto) Mi hodiaŭ multe pli bone fartas. (I today much more well feel)
What use could the accusative case be if not for flexibility of expression? I know that in English, we still have it for pronouns (a merging of the dative and accusative cases, actually), but not for nouns.
As I understand it, Finno-Ugric languages like Finnish and Hungarian use cases primarily where we use prepositions. Also, the genitive case is still relatively important, because there's no way to tell if something's possessive by its position in the sentence. However, if you follow the template subject-indirect object-direct object, the presence of inflected forms for the dative and accusative cases become dead weight.
One wouldn't think that a serious linguist would say things about a language that they know nothing about, but the fact that both dilettantes and professionals pass judgment on Esperanto without having even studied it shows that to not be the case.
Of course; it's like Esperanto's ĉi-vespere (note that you use a hyphen there to avoid confusing it with the correlatives that start with ĉi; for example, ĉiokaze and ĉi-okaze are totally different). And as the moderator said, future arguments should be put into the appropriate threads. Arguing about this and that in Esperanto is both off-topic and over a century late. Edited by zooplah on 01 February 2010 at 10:50pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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