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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: One point against Esperanto
Message-ID: <D4v10s.IyK@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <794020815snz@storcomp.demon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 1995 10:26:52 GMT
Lines: 78

In article 794020815snz@storcomp.demon.co.uk, philip@storcomp.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt) writes:
>I agree. Also in Esperanto there is no pronoun meaning person of
>indeterminate gender (like writing "he/she" in English). If Esperanto
>was adopted by the EU, I expect that that would be changed, to 
>something like this:
>
>     patr-o      parent
>     patr-iv-o   father
>     patr-in-o   mother
>

Yeah, yeah, that's an old one.  There are the ri-istoj and then there's the
hi-istoj (that's me), who'd make the table look like this:

    RI                    HI
    patr-o      (ri)      patr-o     (li)
    patr-ich-o  (ri)      patr-us-o  (hi)
    patr-in-o   (ri)      patr-in-o  (shi)

(I'm not too stuck on "-us" but I do like "hi", because "li" has an "l"
and many romance languages have "l" in the 3rd-person pronouns of both
genders and "li" matches "ili".)
  
>While they're at it they could also abolish the -n accusative ending,

Hmm!  I certainly forget that damn "n" a lot [mi chiam faras eraroj che
la akuzativon :-)] but I don't know how well an accusative-less Esperanto
would work out in practice.

>and adjective agreement using -j

I find adjective agreement comes totally naturally (even to the extent
that I've been heard to say "laj belaj floroj") so dropping it would
make E-o harder for me -- and I'm a native English-speaker.

> And change some spellings to make it
>easier to recognise words:
>
>   current   new
>   -------   ---
>   kv        qu
>   k         c 
>   [...]

Easier for whom? -- basically just speakers of English and some Romance
languages.  For anyone from Eastern Europe or the rest of the world this
would make E-o much harder.  You are veering to naturalism and E-o's
strength is it's schematism.

To must people "futbalo" is an international word which causes them no
problems, but to a Japanese it's one more unnecessary root to remember.

E-o already has too many "unncessary roots".  What does "marego" mean
except "ocean", so "oceano" is baggage.  Why do we need separate roots
for "arhhitekto" and "arhhitekturo"?  Why, indeed, do we even need one?
Many languages (including the much maligned Volap"uk) use compounds
meaning "building-art" and "building-art-doer".  Who needs "kooperativo"
when we have "kunlaborantaro"?

This doesn't always work though.  "Dikfingro" is a good home-grown
word for "thumb" and "polekso"(?) baggage but whereas "poleksa" means
"relating to the thumb" the word "dikfingra" suggests far more to me
"whose fingers are thick".  Still that might just be lack of familiarity
and context.  "Dikfingra onglo" causes me no problems.  (I've read
some interesting linguistic work on the status of E-o compound words.
It suggested that (a) the rules for simple and compound words are
different (as "poleksa"/"dikfingra" suggests) and that (b) some common
compound words become so famililar that they effectively become like
simple words [ili "leksemighas"].  

For a good discussion of the pitfalls of that old seductive naturalism
see the good little book "Planlingvaj Problemoj".  [Se iu scias kiu
verkis kaj kiu eldonis tiun libron bonvolu sciigi rete(*)!]

-- julian pardoe --

(*) Is that "igi rete-sciata" or "rete igi sciata".  Lo{jb,gl}an anyone?

