Re: Indonesian and Esperanto

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 07/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 21:39:51 GMT

Bill Bonde ( ``There's sunshine in my stomach'' ) wrote:
>
> 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?

Of course some nouns have tense. Divorcé(e), bride, bridegroom, etc. Jim
McCawley was interested in this. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net