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Emile comments on The rational way to name rivers - Less Wrong
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Comments (42)
If you want that kind of language learn Esperanto. The problem is that it takes up much more space than English. You need more letters to express the same idea.
Tio ne estas pligrandan problemon. Pligranda problemo estas ke malmulta homoj parolas Esperanto. Mi de longa tempo ne uzis tion.
On the other hand, it is kind of awesome that people with no knowledge of Esperanto but knowledge of two or three European languages can immediately understand everything you say--as I just did.
Agreed, tho my sentence is probably easier than average because I haven't used Esperanto for years now, so I'm much more likely to remember vocabulary similar to languages I know.
Knowing some of a Latin language and a Germanic one, plus knowledge of basic syntax (nounds end in -o, adjectives in -a, verbs in -is/-as/-os (past/present/future), adverbs in -e, plural is -j, accusative has an extra -n) is enough for understanding a lot of simple content.
And this is 'knowledge of' in a very loose sense - I don't know any European languages except English, and I could still work it out. (I did take 'parolas' from French 'parler'.)
You'd like Interlingua then:
(caveat: I do not speak Interlingua at all. This is just what I managed to put together from a grammar handbook and a dictionary)
Had Zamenhof created his language to be more like Interlingua, we might be using this in international communication by today. Compared with Esperanto, it's easier for Romance speakers, but adequately more difficult for the others.
I don't think that is wholly correct. I'd have written:
Sorry for nitpicking; I'd have said nothing (or maybe just in a PM), but since others have commented on the construction in the first sentence...
Thanks for the correction, it's helpful! I wrote that in a hurry (pomodoro break at work), I wanted to add "there are probably plenty of grammatical mistakes in all this" but I didn't even remember how to say "mistake" in esperanto :)
There are people who write their own notes in short hand regardless of whether someone else will be able to read them because short hand is more efficient.
I think it's possible for a whole language to be simply nicer than the established languages so that it would encourage you to write your own notes to yourself in that language.
Esperanto is relatively easy to learn but it doesn't perform better in some niche in a way that would encourage people to use the language for that niche.
Construing a copula with accusative case is a very curious and interesting mistake!
It's kind of Slavic-like construction.
Wait, this is a thing in Esperanto? That wasn't a performance error on Emile's part, but they actually use accusative case predicatively like Slavic languages do instrumental case? That would be pretty bizarre.
It's a performance error; the predicate should be nominative.
English pronoun cases don't divide up the same way Esperanto cases do (e.g., prepositions take the object case), but note that many English speakers say, "It is me" rather than "It is I". (I don't know Emile's first language.)
Also, leaving off the accusative ending is such a pitfall for most beginners at Esperanto that people sometimes overcorrect anything matching the pattern "nominative verb nominative" to "nominative verb accusative".
Edit: Corrected "pronouns take" to "prepositions take".
Right. I forget the technical terms used in the case of English (they aren't usually called nominative vs. accusative anymore), but the default case is 'me': 'I' is the special case, used only in subject position.
(The default case in English is actually descended from the Old English dative, not the accusative, with the exception of 'it' (OE nom. 'hit', acc. 'hit', dat. and gen. 'him' and 'his' just like the masculine pronoun) though the two merged for most of the pronouns in the OE period: it's only obvious from 'him' (OE nom. 'he', acc. 'hine', dat. 'him') and the pronoun 'they', which was borrowed from Old Norse (nom. 'þeir', acc. 'þá', dat. 'þeim').)
French, and despite liking learning languages, I'm not that good at reasoning abstractly about grammatical rules; "accusative" and "nominative" are not very salient concepts in my mind, and I have to look them up to be sure of what they mean exactly.
I am lucky in that reasoning abstractly about grammatical rules is a good fit for the way my mind works; even so, I only got good at it after I learned a second language.
Makes sense, thanks for providing the explanation I didn't think of!
What motivated you to learn Esperanto in the first place?
I like learning languages in general, and Esperanto looked interesting and easy.
Then E-minmal may be interesting for you. I created an Anki deck for it.