Re: Indonesian and Esperanto

From: Bill Bonde ( ``There's sunshine in my stomach'' ) (stderr2_at_backpacker.com)
Date: 07/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 13:21:52 -0700

Patrick Powers wrote:
>
> "Bill Bonde ( ``There's sunshine in my stomach'' )" <stderr2@backpacker.com> wrote in message news:<40F2CD0E.21575209@backpacker.com>...
> > Patrick Powers wrote:
> > >
> > > Both are easily learnable. Indonesian scores with absence of tenses
> > > and plurals.
> > >
> > Would intelligibility of any language be hurt that much if the speaker
> > just ignored tense and whatever is used to modify nouns to show they are
> > plural?
>
> I've learned Indonesian and have never missed the tenses or the
> plurals.
>
> I was a bit unclear in that Indonesian has plurals. The difference is
> that in Indonesian it is optional and used only when the speaker feels
> necessary.
>
In black American English dialects, the use of the plural marker on the
noun is often related to whether or not it would be redundant. If you
said "five birds", the 'five' tells you that it is plural without the
added noun suffix.

> To indicate past,present, and future marker words are
> used.
>
Is this that radically different from 'yesterday', 'today' and
'tomorrow'? What would be interesting would be to see tense attached to
nouns. A language like that might not be comprehensible to humans. Who
knows? 

-- 
"It has to be big", Tyler says. "Picture this: you on top of the world’s
tallest building, the whole building taken over by Project Mayhem. Smoke
rolling out of the windows. Desks falling into the crowds on the street.
A real opera of death, that’s what you’re going to get."  -+Chuck
Palahniuk, "Fight Club"

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