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From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Subject: Re: One point against Esperanto
Message-ID: <D50FL8.5F5@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <D4wsoy.7y3@indirect.com> <D4y7Jv.C7M@cwi.nl>
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 1995 08:29:30 GMT
Lines: 46

In article <D4y7Jv.C7M@cwi.nl> dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:
>In article <D4wsoy.7y3@indirect.com> stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Stefano MacGregor) writes:
> > >"vasta" looks a lot like "vast". "vastajn" looks less like "vast".
> > 
> > This is a good example of your objection, and also of my reply.
> > A non-Esperantist sees the entire inflected word, and doesn't
> > recognize it.  You see this as a bad thing; I see it as irrelevant.
>
>[...]  When I was 13 I started with Esperanto, but dropped it for
>a few reasons.  One of those was that I did not enjoy learning it.
>This may be strange, but at that age I enjoyed the irregular French
>verbs, seeing what variation was possible.

When I was 14, I enjoyed FORTRAN IV, especially the GO TO statement
and the arithmetic IF.  You're not the only one who had his priorities
backwards in his early teens.  :-)

>Also learning the different declinations and conjugations of Latin,
>and the irregularities, gave more substance to the language than the
>dead-looking complete regularity of Esperanto.

I'd be interested to hear your opinion of the nearly complete
regularity of Hindi, Turkish, Japanese and (I'm told) Aymara.
Do you consider it as dead-looking as the regularity of Esperanto?
Remember, not all natural languages have as many different declensions,
conjugations, irregularities and the like as Latin, and very many are
much closer to Esperanto than to Latin in that respect.

Esperanto is an agglutinative language and should be judged as such.

> > Someone who has actually studied Esperanto for a few hours begins
> > to see the parts that the words are constructed from -- in this
> > case vast/a/j/n, and recognizes that the root of the word, 'vast-',
> > is the only part that he should attempt to recognize in other languages.

I can't help being amazed by the suggestion that one would have to
*study* Esperanto for *a few hours* in order to become acquainted with
its morphology.  I'm at a loss to imagine what kind of retarded idiot
would need more than 15 minutes to commit the whole thing to memory
(3 minutes for inflexion and 12 minutes for derivation).

-- 
`"Na, na ... ah mean, *no wey*, wi aw due respect, ma lady," stammers Joe.'
Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk)    (J Stuart, _Auld Testament Tales_)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,   Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House E113, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Pk Rd, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
