Re: I think I am a language geek :)

From: Bill Bonde ( ``There's sunshine in my stomach'' ) (stderr2_at_backpacker.com)
Date: 07/03/04 

Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 23:33:12 -0700

Dmitri wrote:
>
> >What point do you have about Esperanto? Esperanto is considerably more
> >difficult than it has to be. It is biased towards European languages
>
> Oh, I totally agree that it is more difficult than it has to be.......but the
> fact remains that it is still simpler/easier than e.g. French or Spanish.
>
I agree with that. I doubt you'd get much argument around here against
that claim.

> I
> mean what kind of bigotted moron could look at one verb conjugation system with
> 6 endings total in the entire language and refuse to admit it would be much
> easier to learn than another langauge with a verb system of dozens of endings,
> not to mention irregular verbs, same with a multipart system of denoting direct
> object (multipart in and of itself), plural, motion towards, elision of a
> preposition, and all the differing ways of denoting all those time idioms as
> opposed to 3 endings using 3 morphemes (o, oj, ojn),
>
Why does Esperanto have any endings? What does time have intrinsically
to do with the verb? And while we are at it, what does singular and
plural have to do with the verb?

> the horrors of the
> differing forms and morphologies of the (the question words and their
> corresponding collective, demonstrative, indefinite, etc. counterparts. Now,
> each of these areas (plus a number of others I won't renumerate right
> now....they know what they are) is easier than the corresponding area in e.g.
> Spanish and French,
>
It better be. The point of inventing a constructed language that is
easier to learn than a natural language is for it to be easier to learn
than a natural language.

> so it naturally follows that all these areas taken together
> in Esperanto would be also easier when compared with those same areas in the
> other languages taken together.
>
Is someone saying otherwise? 

-- 
"How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely pouring over his
dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in
the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
be truly and livingly found out." -+Herman Melville, "Moby ***"