Newsgroups: alt.politics.ec,sci.lang
From: philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!storcomp.demon.co.uk!philip
Subject: Re: Languages in the EC
References: <3fdf8r$gqe@nic.lth.se> <3feev2$4df@news.INbe.net> <MATTHEW.95Feb7113419@baloo.cpd.ntc.nokia.com>
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In article <MATTHEW.95Feb7113419@baloo.cpd.ntc.nokia.com>
           matthew@cpd.ntc.nokia.com "Matthew Faupel" writes:
> PH: This is helpful to Finns, but not so helpful to many Europeans. English,
> PH: French and Italian share many words (most of which are also found in
> PH: other EU languages). Many of these words are not in Esperanto (which
> PH: prefers to build up its own words), or are hard to recognise because of
> PH: differences in spelling.
> 
> Only for on-sight reading for someone with no grounding in Esperanto at all.
> Once you've had a basic education in Esperanto, this all becomes a lot
> easier.  All the Esperanto teaching I've had is a 10 lesson postal course 15
> years ago; I don't actively use Esperanto much and can't really write it
> fluently, but that course was sufficient to allow me to now read more than
> 90% of Esperanto without a dictionary (at least judging by the posts to
> soc.culture.esperanto).

I find s.c.french easier than s.c.esperanto, but maybe that's because 
I've studied French more. 

> PH: By "fault tolerant" do you mean that people will still understand you if
> PH: you get the grammar wrong? This is probably true for nearly all
> PH: languages, including English.
> 
> I mean that getting the word order wrong matters a lot less (yes I know word
> order is not the totality of grammar, but it's an important part of it
> that's easy to get wrong in English).

It's (I imagine) easy to get it wrong enough that it doesn't sound 
natural, harder to get it wrong enough so it is hard to understand.
 
> Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are all clearly distinguished in
> Esperanto as are the subject and direct object of a sentence. Consequently
> their ordering is freer than in English (and many other European languages).
> This means that if you (by choice, or by habit) organise these things in the
> same order as your native language,

Most languages put the object after the subject (I can't think of any
exceptions); They are thus either SVO, VSO, or SOV. If a Welsh person
habitually used VSO in Esperanto, or a Japanese used SOV I imagine it
would appear very odd.

> you are less likely to be wrong in
> Esperanto than in English.

The suffix -n for objects in Esperanto is one of its features I like 
least.

-- 
Phil Hunt...philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk
Majority rule for Britain!
