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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: One point against Esperanto
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Organization: Department of Redundancy Department
Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 08:48:10 GMT
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Not so very long ago, fido@cyberverse.com (Fido) said...

>My understanding is that Chinese is not considered agglutinative at all.  
>It's an "isolating" language -- each word stands alone and is uninflected.   
>Maybe you meant Japanese?  (I have seen Japanese described as agglutinating).

  No, I meant Chinese.  I'm looking at the so-called compound words of 
Chinese (borrowed into Japanese).  It makes a bit more sense to think of 
the Chinese expression for "beef" as a compound of the words for "cow" 
and "meat", rather than a two-word description of the substance, and 
noticing that this is the same way that Esperanto builds its word for 
"beef":  bov/aj`/o = cow/meat/<used-as-noun> (except, of course, 
that nearly all Esperanto words terminate with one or more usage markers).

  (PEDANTIC NOTE:  The suffix "-aj`-" in general means "substance", but 
when affixed to the name of an animal, means "meat".  Otherwise, Heaven 
only knows what would come to mind when we think of "cow-substance".)

-- 
                              ==----=                    Steve MacGregor
                             ([.] [.])                     Phoenix, AZ
--------------------------oOOo--(_)--oOOo----------------------------------
        Help stamp out, eliminate, and abolish redundancy!
