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From: ah514@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Manuel M Campagna)
Subject: Re: International Language.
Message-ID: <D2Bp8t.60G@freenet.carleton.ca>
Sender: ah514@freenet3.carleton.ca (Manuel M Campagna)
Organization: The National Capital FreeNet, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 1995 02:50:52 GMT
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In article <D1yvLF.p2@indirect.com> stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal
MacProgra typed recently :

<<
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).
>>

Excuse me, gender, number, tense, etc., exist in many other language
families, not least the Semitic family. Dr Z had an excellent
knowledge of biblical Hebrew.

In Article 32024 iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) typed
recently :

<<
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.
>>

That's correct.

Some grammatical features of Esperanto are not common in Western
Indo-European languages as far as I know. Causative and Anticausative
are an example. They exist in Semitic languages but are rare in
English, for instance. There's fall and fell, start and startle, but
very few others.

The preposition 'po' is to my knowledge not Indo-European at all.
He gave them an apple each.
Li donis al ili po unu pomon.

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

My native language is French. I hate gender. I love its absence in
Esperanto.

<<
>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.
>>

I disagree.

<< stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgra :
>>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').
[...]
>>

Originally non-female words in Esperanto were understood as either
neutral or male. So "instruisto" (teacher) could be a male teacher or
_any_ teacher. But that's a long time ago. Nowadays "instruisto" is
normally _any_ teacher, and the difference is made by the prefix vir-
for males and the suffix -in for females. It is true that "patro"
still means "father", but I have no doubt that the days of this
situation are counted, and in the 21st century we will eventually have
:
- patro = parent
- patrino = mother
- virpatro = father
Some people are already doing it.

<<
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.
>>

If you wish to confuse diachronic and synchronic features, yes, and
then the opposite is also true :
From the German word "Prinzessin" Dr Z made up the word "Princedzino",
which he then split up as "princ" (prince), "edz" (husband), "in"
(female), "o" (noun). So the word for husband in Esperanto comes from
a _female_ German suffix ("ess"). Ironical, isn't it ?
Let's not forget that the English word "woman" comes from Old English
"wi:f" and "man"...

<< [stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgra : ]
>  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?
[iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) : ]
That the correlation between gender and sexual discrimination isn't
as
obvious as some people appear to think.
>>

In Esperanto the singular noun ends in -o and the singular adjective
-a, and there is no number distinction in verbs. Period.

                                .                                
Manuel-M. CAMPAGNA           . . . .              1 613 789 21 11
certified translator           . .        Ottawa (Ontario) Canada
(En/It/Eo -> Fr)              .   .     ah514@freenet.carleton.ca
