Friday, December 4, 2009

Esperanto - years later, still sucking.




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D: I chopped down my Basic Esperanto book. I lost the chapter headings and page numbers in the process.
Why?
It doesn't fit anywhere. It is this annoying mid-sized paperback.
I found I kept leaving it at home. It wouldn't fit in any pockets.
This seems to be the most common how-to Espo book.
Yet another oversight a century later that helped to doom the language.

Mandatory Esperanto rant:
Kiu- interrogative for who.
Then I notice Kiuj - plural interrogative for who.
Who-ez?
OMG. Every detail that English lacks is another nail in the coffin of an auxiliary language.
My brain hurts just thinking about it!
Incredible.

Then I noticed the basic vocabulary items of boy, son, and brother.
Boy- knabo (kuh-nah being such a common sound, you kuh-nah-oh what I mean? [=)
Son- filo. As in filial.
Brother- frato. As in fraternal.
These are 3 separate vocabulary items that must be memorized separately.
Let's analyze the lexical content of each word.
Boy - a male child from birth to adulthood
Son - a human male offspring especially of human beings
Brother - a male who has the same parents as another or one parent in common with another
D: a quick aside. I took a feminist soc class at Windsor U.
I wrote a paper on um reproductive techonologies, I think.
I used the terms male and female throughout it in lieu of boy/girl and man/woman.
It turns out that turned the Prof bonkers! Oops, LOL.

OK, so boy is the more basic of terms. Both brother and son (as well as father I suppose) all denote boy/male in terms of relative relationship.
Kinship terms are some of the most primordial language terms, ubiquitous in every culture.
Odd that Mr. Zamehof, aka the Big Z (zzz...) didn't infix this particular to death, like he seeemed to do with everything else.

Here is where the approach of Decimese would work very well. Time and biology are innate to it in a way not possible as an after-thought.
MELTS - math, ethics, logic, time, space.
At the very heart of the language design, giving it direction and emphases unique to Decimese.
Once we have defined boy as human/male/ time-less, some, then
we can develop variants for kinship that show relative relationships.

4 comments:

Bill Chapman said...

Hello from Wales in thev United Kingdom!

I'm not sure that I understand all of this. I've used Esperanto in practice and on my travels for all sorts of reasons for many years,with no difficulty.

Salutojn de filo, edzo, kunlaboranto, samideano ...

Dino Snider said...

If you don't mind me asking, Bill, what is your educational/linguistic background?

Bill Chapman said...

Hello, Dino

I don't mind saying. My degree is in French and linguistics - many years ago. I speak German and Welsh too.

Like me, Esperanto may not be perfect, but we both work very well.

Dino Snider said...

The other thing about that Espo book - the vocabulary lists are not lined up well. When I cover the translation with a card, I can sometimes see the words below too much since the columans are not aligned. Devil is in the details. Attention to detail was a fail! in this book. Ditto, space for a personal memory aid.
I reiterate- Espo, a language by a linguist and FOR linguists. Thanks for making my case Bill. Whereas I sucked at French and have a slight auditory processing problem. Making me a more representative example of the world for a purportedly world language.