Newsgroups: sci.lang.translation,sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!uknet!festival!edcogsci!iad
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Subject: Re: International Language.
Message-ID: <D23pE6.C7D@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <D1yvLF.p2@indirect.com>
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 1995 19:13:17 GMT
Lines: 58
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang.translation:539 sci.lang:34057

In article <D1yvLF.p2@indirect.com> stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer) writes:
[responding to iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)]
>  Any given linguistic feature must either be included in or omitted from
>Esperanto.  There's no two ways about it.  Zamenhof included features 
>common to most Indo-European languages:  gender, number, tense, etc.,
>because omitting them would make the language clumsy for people who were 
>likely to use the language (Europeans, for the most part).

I'm not sure what you mean by saying that Esperanto has gender.  It does
have three 3rd person singular pronouns (_li_, _shi_ and _ghi_), but the
relevant pronoun is chosen in each case on the basis of the speaker's
knowledge of the real world, not the language, and there is no gender
agreement or anything of that sort.

Furthermore, I disagree that a speaker of a language which has gender
would find a genderless language clumsy.

>I believe his native language didn't have a definite article, but he
>noticed its usefulness and included one (even though it's hard for
>some people to get used to).  But the indefinite article isn't as
>useful, so he didn't include one of those.

Have you measured their usefulness somehow?  Has someone else?
And when you say `definite article', do you mean the English one,
the French one, the Bulgarian one or the Arabic one?  They are
not used in the same way.

>Explicit cases for nouns are an optional feature that he included,
>and it's a useful feature.

You think so?  Yet so many languages are perfectly well off without it.

>>What I dislike is that Esperanto attaches that suffix to roots which
>>denote male beings in the source languages, yielding such monstrosities
>>as _patrino_ `mother' (`fatheress') and _knabino_ `girl' (`boyess').  [...]
>
>  Yes, it is odd, but it's consistant with a basic philosophy of 
>collapsing the vocabulary by factoring out common partial meanings of 
>words, making roots and affixes.

What I meant was that for me, as a speaker of German and a number of
Romance languages, the stems _patr-_ and _knab-_ contain the semantic
component `male', so _patrin-_ comes across as `male+parent+female',
not just `parent+female' as Zamenhof intended it.

>  When I was trying to learn Farsi (the language of Iran), one of the
>few things I learned was that it has no male/female distinction in 
>third-person pronouns.  The singular is "u".  Period.
>  What do we learn from this?

That the correlation between gender and sexual discrimination isn't as
obvious as some people appear to think.

-- 
`Release Jesus wi this mob hangin aroon?  Nae chance!'  (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk, iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,   Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House E113, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Pk Rd, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
