Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6669 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil
| Message 1 of 3 21 September 2007 at 7:20am | IP Logged |
I've got a question for the Esperanto speakers on this forum. The usual word order in Esperanto seems to be SVO, however I was wondering if there are Esperanto speakers with a SOV native language who use SOV word order consistently in Esperanto and if yes, if this is tolerated/causes problems in understanding.
The reason I ask is that I started the 'Kurso de Esperanto' and doing the exercises I had to fight an urge to put the verb at the end (maybe because I studied some Latin and a lot of Turkish recently).
By the way, it's scary how fast I progress, after maybe 3-4 hours of study I can already make rather complex sentences. (Well, knowing most languages the Esperanto
words are taken from, virtually all words look familiar and having a decent knowledge of an agglutinating language, the word formation in Esperanto seems familiar...°
Edited by Marc Frisch on 21 September 2007 at 7:21am
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Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese
| Message 2 of 3 21 September 2007 at 7:57am | IP Logged |
Neither Chuck nor I have met somebody who uses SOV word order in Esperanto. It's not forbidden, but people don't do it because it's harder to understand in conversation (everybody being used to SVO word order). It may be found in poetry though, for reasons of rhythm and stress.
OSV word order (as in "Tion vi povas skribi") can be heard occasionally, particularly from German Esperanto speakers.
I am glad that your studies are going well! Since the "Kurso de Esperanto" focusses on the sentence level, you should afterwards do a course that uses Esperanto in dialogues and texts - or just read Gerda Malaperis.
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mankso Pentaglot Newbie Canada esperanto.memlink.ca Joined 6295 days ago 10 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto, Spanish, French Studies: Irish
| Message 3 of 3 23 September 2007 at 5:10pm | IP Logged |
It's really not the word-order that confuses people (or should I say ME!), it's those learners who "forget" the accusative, or send all the wrong grammatical signals, i.e. failing to understand that if you use a nominative noun (or phrase) you are signalling that that is most probably the SUBJECT of some verb (which never comes): and that if your are using an accusative noun (or phrase) it is most probably a DIRECT OBJECT, or an adverbial time or measurement expression. It's absolutely essential to be able to distinguish between subject and direct object, and to know what is meant by transitive and intransitive verbs, and by copula verbs!
Those errors found most often are usually in contravention of this, and of the rule that all prepositions must be followed by the nominative. A preposition, when followed by the acusative, signals that a change of location has occurred/is occurring, e.g. 'en la ghardeno' versus 'en la ghardenon', 'sub la ponto' versus 'sub la ponton', and cannot be used with all prepositions. [Compare German : im Garten/in den Garten; unter der Brücke/unter die Brücke]
Try listening to a program from Radio Polonia, or read some prose written by a good author, and you'll soon discover what is "normal' Esperanto word-order.
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