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How easy is Esperanto really?

  Tags: Esperanto | Difficulty
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto Post Reply
40 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4
jean-luc
Senior Member
France
Joined 4720 days ago

100 posts - 150 votes 
Speaks: French*
Studies: German

 
 Message 33 of 40
23 October 2011 at 8:48pm | IP Logged 
Enriquee wrote:

Which is the one for English? Maybe Cambridge, Oxford, The American Heritage, Webster, Macmillan, Collins, Macquarie, dictionary.com, thefreedictionary.com, ...?


All these one + millions of native speakers.

Edited by jean-luc on 23 October 2011 at 8:49pm

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jean-luc
Senior Member
France
Joined 4720 days ago

100 posts - 150 votes 
Speaks: French*
Studies: German

 
 Message 34 of 40
23 October 2011 at 8:56pm | IP Logged 
Kartof wrote:

I help the girls.
I the girls help.
Help the girls I.
Help I the girls.
The girls I help.
The girls help I.


It works here because you mark the case with I (with become "me" when is object) but if not for that you would not discriminate I help the girls from The girls help I out of context. Which may be enough in real life but the choice of esperanto was different.
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jean-luc
Senior Member
France
Joined 4720 days ago

100 posts - 150 votes 
Speaks: French*
Studies: German

 
 Message 35 of 40
23 October 2011 at 9:55pm | IP Logged 
Volte wrote:

Getting laughed at is quite rare


When I see a thread on a non-linguistic forum about esperanto, there is usually several people commenting badly about the language. I never seen that for any other language.

Volte wrote:

PIV has too many Gallicisms, but it's still pretty good


Good to know. As beginner, I was a bit worried to not have a reference for the future.


Volte wrote:

No language seems to really have a 'definitive' reference for vocabulary (there are so many fields where so much new vocabulary is introduced so quickly).


I disagree here. You have either native speakers or dictionaries. Of course there is some disagreement for some words but only on the fringes. I've never heard someone saying about a french dictionary "it's a good dictionary but it has too many Anglicism".

Volte wrote:

As for the 'bona lingvo' vs neologisms argument, it's quite similar to the arguments in several national languages about either importing loan words or making up calques and equivalents out of the roots from the local language.


I can talk only for french. There is often debate for the inclusion of this or this loaned word. But only for new words and very few of them compared to the bulk of the language, not the kind of words I found in this review of la bona lingvo :

Quote:

If instead of the quoted words [pediatro, miokardio, diakrona, aŭtoktono, monokromata, eŭfonie], the lecturer or author uses words such as, respectively, infankuracisto, kormuskolo, tratempa, praloĝanto, unukolora, belsone.


As a beginner, it makes me wonder if I have to learn all these words if they are not considered good. I finally don't know what's good or not if even words like monochrome are not fixed.

But my main concern is to know if it's finally so easy to learn the vocabulary. It's advertised to be a little number of root + the combination of these roots, but when I read the quote below, I start to wonder if I don't have to learn a lot of synonyms also.



1 person has voted this message useful



Kartof
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4826 days ago

391 posts - 550 votes 
Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 36 of 40
23 October 2011 at 10:23pm | IP Logged 
Марк wrote:
Kartof wrote:

There's no reason why Esperanto couldn't loosen some of its reliance on cases in exchange
for some moderate verb
conjugation to reach this effect.

First of all, you suggest to change one ending "n" for many en dings for conjugation.
Then, it does not solve the problem in sentences, where both the subject and the object
are third person singular or plural. Then, it is used to distinguish between location and
direction. There are some other uses of the accusative. When I first read about Esperanto
case system, I was impressed how simple and efficient it is.


I never suggested anything; I just find it rather odd that a language claiming to be universal would rely so heavily
on cases and not at all on verb conjugation for person or number!

jean-luc wrote:
Kartof wrote:

I help the girls.
I the girls help.
Help the girls I.
Help I the girls.
The girls I help.
The girls help I.


It works here because you mark the case with I (with become "me" when is object) but if not for that you would not
discriminate I help the girls from The girls help I out of context. Which may be enough in real life but the choice of
esperanto was different.


Not necessarily, it works just as well if I replace I with John or a name not marked for a declension.

Edited by Kartof on 24 October 2011 at 2:46am

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Enriquee
Triglot
Groupie
United States
esperantofre.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5095 days ago

51 posts - 125 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, Esperanto, English

 
 Message 37 of 40
24 October 2011 at 1:49am | IP Logged 
jean-luc wrote:
Enrique wrote:

Which is the one for English? Maybe Cambridge, Oxford, The American Heritage, Webster, Macmillan, Collins, Macquarie, dictionary.com, thefreedictionary.com, ...?

All these one + millions of native speakers.

Maybe I didn't understand your point. I thought you were talking about trusting your sources. These dictionaries have different spellings and different pronunciations for many words, and even some extra or different meanings for a given word.

I also believe that many of those millions of native speakers aren't good spellers.

2 persons have voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6199 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 38 of 40
24 October 2011 at 8:16pm | IP Logged 
jean-luc wrote:
Volte wrote:

Getting laughed at is quite rare


When I see a thread on a non-linguistic forum about esperanto, there is usually several people commenting badly about the language. I never seen that for any other language.


Bizarre criticism happens, but it's a lot more common online than face to face. The majority of people I mention Esperanto to offline either don't care, or are mildly curious. A small minority originally ask "isn't it dead?" or similar, and then are pretty much like the rest, in not caring or being mildly curious.

jean-luc wrote:

Volte wrote:

PIV has too many Gallicisms, but it's still pretty good


Good to know. As beginner, I was a bit worried to not have a reference for the future.

Volte wrote:

No language seems to really have a 'definitive' reference for vocabulary (there are so many fields where so much new vocabulary is introduced so quickly).


I disagree here. You have either native speakers or dictionaries. Of course there is some disagreement for some words but only on the fringes. I've never heard someone saying about a french dictionary "it's a good dictionary but it has too many Anglicism".

Volte wrote:

As for the 'bona lingvo' vs neologisms argument, it's quite similar to the arguments in several national languages about either importing loan words or making up calques and equivalents out of the roots from the local language.


I can talk only for french. There is often debate for the inclusion of this or this loaned word. But only for new words and very few of them compared to the bulk of the language, not the kind of words I found in this review of la bona lingvo :

Quote:

If instead of the quoted words [pediatro, miokardio, diakrona, aŭtoktono, monokromata, eŭfonie], the lecturer or author uses words such as, respectively, infankuracisto, kormuskolo, tratempa, praloĝanto, unukolora, belsone.


As a beginner, it makes me wonder if I have to learn all these words if they are not considered good. I finally don't know what's good or not if even words like monochrome are not fixed.

But my main concern is to know if it's finally so easy to learn the vocabulary. It's advertised to be a little number of root + the combination of these roots, but when I read the quote below, I start to wonder if I don't have to learn a lot of synonyms also.


PIV's a good reference. I often hear experienced Esperantists claiming they'd hate to work without it on their desks.

Esperanto has native and fluent speakers, and dictionaries, and a fairly well-established core vocabulary. And, in practice, 'bona lingvo' is a reform movement, and there are quite a lot of synonyms to deal with. As a speaker, you can fairly freely use either; in English or French, it sounds weird to say 'infant doctor', while it's perfectly normal Esperanto. As a listener, it's helpful to know both 'bona lingvo' style words and European cognates; different people use a different mix. It's like any language community where there's an effort to reduce foreign roots. It goes farther than reform movements in French tend to, but there are plenty of national languages where people sometimes try to remove foreign roots which have been in the language for centuries.

As someone who already speaks a European language fluently, 'bona lingvo'/neologism synonyms add basically no work to learning Esperanto for you. It does make the language harder for people who can't at least passively recognize neologisms based on common European words, which is one of the major arguments for the 'bona lingvo' style.
1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6199 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 39 of 40
24 October 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged 
Plenty of people try to explain -j and -n. Both are strictly unnecessary.

However, in a language, you need a way to figure out who's biting who in a sentence like "the dog bites the cat". You can do it through word order, like English. You can do it through somehow marking the object, with a case ending (like in Russian or Esperanto or German) or a particle (like Japanese). But it needs to be done.

Conjugating by person does not solve this problem. If you have a group of teachers, and a group of students, and say "The teachers the students help", without a fixed word order, merely changing the form of the verb is useless.
2 persons have voted this message useful



remush
Tetraglot
Groupie
Belgium
remush.beRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6028 days ago

79 posts - 94 votes 
Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch
Studies: German, Polish

 
 Message 40 of 40
25 October 2011 at 10:50pm | IP Logged 
Kartof wrote:
You could mark verbs for their subject, like in any natural language.

Zamenhof spoke Polish. So, he was well aware of the difficulties caused by such a system. He also learned English and was struck with the simplicity of constructions as:
I/you/he/she/we/you/they/one must/can/may (mi/vi/li/ŝi/ni/vi/ili/oni devas/(sci)povas).

If English had been allowed to evolve freely, it would have lost the "s" at the third person everywhere. The past tense in English does not make any distinction.
In Esperanto, there are no exceptions.


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