Newsgroups: sci.lang.translation,sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!news.sprintlink.net!news.indirect.com!bud.indirect.com!stevemac
From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: International Language.
Message-ID: <D248E2.45w@indirect.com>
Sender: usenet@indirect.com (Internet Direct Admin)
Organization: Grammar 'R' Us 
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 1995 02:03:38 GMT
Lines: 78
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang.translation:548 sci.lang:34069

Not so very long ago, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) said...

>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.

  I mean precisely the same thing that I mean when I say that the English 
language has gender, except that I'm speaking of a different language.
  Esperanto has grammatical gender, like many other languages.  By this, 
I mean that when you use a pronoun, you choose one that is the same 
gender as its antecedent.  This is the gender agreement that you claim 
does not exist.
  Esperanto happens to have "natural gender", like English, which means 
that you can determine the gender of that antecedent from its meaning.  
Just because there is some =sense= to the gender system does =not= mean 
that it is non-existant!
  Esperanto adjectives agree with the nouns they modify, like Spanish or 
French, but this agreement is number-and-case, rather than number-and-gender.
  There are varying degrees of gender-agreement.  In genderless 
languages, there is none; in English and Esperanto, there is nouns to
pronouns; in Spanish and French, there is also adjective-to-noun 
agreement; Hebrew has both of these, plus noun-to-verb agreement.

>Have you measured [definite articles'] usefulness somehow?  Has someone 
>else? 

  Measured?  Of course not.  It's a subjective determination, but that 
does not mean that it is not a determination.

>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.

  True, but that doesn't mean that none of them is useful.

me>>Explicit cases for nouns are an optional feature that he included,
me>>and it's a useful feature.
>
>You think so?  Yet so many languages are perfectly well off without it.

  No -- I =know= so.  The feature has uses, and therefore it is a useful 
feature.  The fact that many languages get by without it proves that it 
is not a necessary feature, but not that it is useless.
  Verb tenses are not a necessary feature, but they're useful, too.
  Zamenhof chose a set of useful features.  He could have chosen a 
differet set, like Interlingua's (with no adjective-concord at all, and 
three conjugations of verbs (including some irregular ones).

>What I meant [about the "-in-" suffix] 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. 

  Yes, that's true.  But if you were a speaker of Esperanto, they 
wouldn't (at least, not while you were speaking Esperanto).
  Used with non-sex-specific nouns like "studento", it adds the
specification of "female" (and to add the specification of "male", you
use the prefis "vir-").
  Used with sex-specific nouns like "patro", it removes the male 
specification, and replaces it with female.

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

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

  Obviously.

-- 
         ==----=    Steve MacGregor     {GCS$(AT) -d+ !H s:++ g++ p2+ au 
        ([.] [.])     Phoenix, AZ       a49 w+ v+* C+++ U P? !L N+++ !W
-----oOOo--(_)--oOOo----------------    M? po+(++) Y+ t-(+) 5++ j+ R(-) 
%pbm++++$ G' tv++ b+++ !D B- e++ n+ h+ f+ r+>+++ n- %eo+++ y++++<->+++}
