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Esperanto study group | ||
Tags: Study Group | Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6113 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 17 of 20 24 April 2008 at 8:48am | IP Logged | |||||
Ouch! Wasn't Esperanto supposed to be an easy language? trezors... what? :-D 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6443 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 18 of 20 24 April 2008 at 9:02am | IP Logged | |||||
trezorsercxantoj = searchers for treasure. trezor -> treasure sercx -> search ant -> active participle marker o -> noun marker j -> plural marker The 'anto' is a little tricky, but not that much. You could say "Ili estas kiu, tiu mangxo" (he is which, that eats -> he is the one who eats/is eating). This is a common construction in Slavic languages, as far as I can gather - at least, the equivalent of 'kiu, tiu' occurs in Polish. However, it's unwieldy. The 'kiu, tiu' can be replaced by the -ant- suffix: "Ili estas mangxanto". Or so I think; corrections from more experienced Esperantists are welcome. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| awake Senior Member United States Joined 6640 days ago 406 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 19 of 20 24 April 2008 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
The relative pronoun construction is more commonly seen as "tiu, kiu" Li estas tiu, kiu mangxas = He is that one, who eats The "anto" suffix is the noun formed from the active participle. It can roughly be translated as "one who does" the thing it is attached to. ami = to love, amanta = loving (adjective - active participle) amanto = One who loves, lover legi = to read, leganta = reading leganto = one who reads, a reader and so forth And indeed, When Zamenhoff first published his international language, he used the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (esperi = to hope, and esperanto = one who hopes). That's where the name Esperanto comes from. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6144 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 20 of 20 28 April 2008 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Er, not quite. Esperanto is cleary designed as a European lingua franca. A native speaker of Chinese is at a massive disadvantage when it comes to learning vocab. Also a lot of the grammatical concepts are distinctively Indo-European in contrast to Chinese and the languages of South-East Asia, especially inflections, adjective-noun agreement etc. Many of the constructions are not simple, but merely familiar to Romance, Germanic and Slavonic speakers. The situation was very different in Zamenhoff's day, but nowadays an international language would need to contain not only a significant amount vocab from Arabic (a langaue which has contributed to many languages of various families), Mandarin etc but also the idiom of these languages eg the idea of a train as a "fire vehicle" common to the Chinese languages, Thai, Lao and Bahasa Indo-Malay to name a few. I would be interested in the opinion of students of Amerind, Bantu, Dravadian etc languages as to the European bias in Esperanto. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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