Re: Esperanto and Interlingua

12 Mar 2007 08:32:55 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:


Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:14:07 +0100: Ruud Harmsen
<realemailonsite@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

12 Mar 2007 04:49:39 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

Is malgranda = small also 'dangerous, evil'?

If the language has no way of distinguishing between "small" and "not
big," then it's a pretty piss-poor language.

Malgranda doesn't mean "not big" but "the contrary of big", i.e.
small. Cf. malvarma = cold.

If the language has no way of distinguishing between "big" and "not
small," then it's a pretty piss-poor language.

big = granda
not small = nemalgranda.
Or in a sentence: "it is not small" = "ghi ne estas malgranda". No
problem at all.
When translating, every translator encounters ways of expressing
things that are very hard to translate, in any language combination.
This is just as true between natural languages (even if they are
closely related *)) as in a combination in which Esperanto is
involved. It is quite easy to coin Esperantisms that cannot be
expressed in other languages with the same conciseness.

*) Example: German has Bereich and Dutch has bereik. The meanings are
similar, yet German occurances of Bereich are often very hard to
translate into Dutch. The word is often "translated away", for lack of
a better solution. Words aren't just meaning, but also the ways in
which they can be used.

So all such examples do not prove anything about the intrinsic value
or usefulness of Esperanto.
(My own main objection to it is that it doesn't sound very beautiful,
Interlingua is better, and of course European Portuguese and Greek.)

And (in my opinion, but perhaps those who really know Esperanto
disagree):
varmega = very hot
malvarmega = very cold
varmeta = rather hot, warmish
malvarmeta = a bit cold, coldish
fimalvarma = unpleasantly cold, f***ing cold.
etc.
and arguably perhaps even:
warmacxja, warmetacxja = pleasantly warm, spring-like.
although -cxj is probably meant to reserved for people.

These possibilities are rarely used, because most users employ the
language is ways resembling their own language. But the mechanisms
exist in Esperanto, which is what makes it unique.

So there's one of the ways Esperanto differs from any human language.

Yes. That makes it nice and interesting. Don't you think? (;-0

I wonder whether Orwell modeled Doublespeak on Esperanto. I wouldn't
be surprised; he had a rather jaded view of utopianists.

One objection to Esperanto is that meaning are rather sharpely
defined, and that as a consequence, word play isn't easy in it. I
don't quite remember what Orwell's doublespeak entailed, but it seems
unlikely it is anything like Esperanto.

To refresh my memory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak , where incidently I also
read;
===
The word doublespeak was coined in the early 1950s. It is often
incorrectly attributed to George Orwell and his 1948 dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. The word actually never appears in that novel;
Orwell did, however, coin newspeak, oldspeak, and doublethink, and his
novel made fashionable composite nouns with speak as the second
element, which were previously unknown in English.
===

One can certainly create such a language on the basis of Esperanto,
but as it is, it is nothing like it, as I said, on the contrary,
because Esperanto is rather direct and concrete, more so than many
natural languages.

--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com


.

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