From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:52:20 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 27 Apr 1993 10:18:48 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1790; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:18:11 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4353; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:18:04 EST Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 23:03:41 -0400 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: sci.lang discussion of Esperanto pt 1 of 4 X-To: conlan@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch X-From-Space-Date: Mon Apr 26 19:03:41 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 1 of 4 Over the last couple of months on sci.lang (and possibly at least in part on soc.culture.esperanto), there has been an interesting discussion on the linguistic properties of Esperanto. Now that it has finally ended, I have edited the discussion together into a single stream (in order to make it short enough to post). This discussion shows the type of questions I think people who are seriously trying to develop conlangs need to discuss, if they want to have a complete design, rather than the old-hat discussions of phonology and morphology that seem to dominate everyones description of their pet project. Esperanto is clearly shown, despite its 'simplicity', to be an extremely complex language for people to actually use (and the Esperantists agreed!). We've tried with Lojban to define a lot of the things that were left up to custom in the design of Esperanto (rather than explicitly defined), hopefully resulting in a more satisfying result, at least for linguists. I didn't have time to do a comparison with Lojban. Perhaps someone else in our community would wish to tackle this??? The summary is divided into 4 parts since some people do not receive traffic over 16K. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 ========================================================== MR: From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) DH: From: donh@netcom.com (Donald J. Harlow) KM: From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu PJ: From: pcj1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Pierre Jelenc) ID: From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) NY: From: nyoung@desire.wright.edu EGE: From: etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) SLB: From: slb22@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Seth "the Lesser") MR1: Esperanto syntax is about as idiosyncratic and complex as that of any natural language. (later modified to read "the average natural language") DH1: Having studied Esperanto, Latin, and (to some degree) French, Russian and German, I would seriously question Mark's contention that Esperanto's syntax is in any way as idiosyncratic and complex as the syntaxes of any of the other four languages in that group. MR2: Well, this is merely an unsupported assertion... as was mine, of course. Would you care to build a case for your position? DH2: I should here paraphrase an old proverb: "Post in haste, repent at leisure." Actually, I would agree with Mark that Esperanto's syntax is "probably" as complex as that of any "average natural language" (assuming that we all know what a "natural language" is, and what is an "average" one). MR4: Oh, good. I won't even object to the "probably", given the informality of our discussion, and the lack of in-depth syntactic analyses of Esperanto. DH2: (cont.) I responded quickly, and took "complex" to mean "complicated," which of course it does not. I would argue that Esperanto's syntax is not as "idiosyncratic and complicated" as those of other languages, but "complexity" is quite another matter. As to building a case -- sorry, I have no rigorous way of doing so. I can only quote my own experience, which is "hands on" rather than theoretical. During the period 1957-1960 I studied Latin in high school, and in 1960 won an award at a statewide foreign-language field day as the best Latin student in the state of Oregon. During six months in 1959- 1960 I was an exchange student in Denmark, and was required to learn and use Danish in my studies and daily life. At various times I studied French (one year), Russian (one year) and German (one semester) in college, and have spent some 28 years in the company of a native Spanish-speaker (my wife) and various in-laws. I can read (to some extent), understand, write and speak (to a much lesser extent) any of these languages, but only with extreme difficulty. I studied Esperanto on my own, out of Cresswell & Hartley's "Teach Yourself Esperanto", in the summer and fall of 1959, and in October of that year heard the language spoken for the first time, at a meeting of the Randers Esperanto-Forening in Denmark; the speaker was a Japanese visitor, and I was astonished to discover that I could understand everything he said, including one very bad pun. I have never had a similar experience with any other language I've studied. Whether this can be attributed to a less complicated and idiosyncratic syntax is a question that others would have to answer. Perhaps there is a budding linguist out there who is looking for a dissertation topic? MR4: Just one quibble: syntax is precisely what you can throw out or mangle and still have a fair shot at understanding. I'd agree that Esperanto is easy to learn (for English speakers, at least), but not necessarily because of its syntax. By the way, what Esperanto I have I learned from _Teach Yourself_ book too. MR2: By the way, do you consider English syntax simple? DH2: Not that I've ever noticed. MR4: Good; I would have jumped on you if you said it was. :) MR2: To approach this question scientifically we'd have to do some solid syntactic investigation, such has been done with English over the last thirty years. I don't know how much of this kind of work has been done with Esperanto. I'll attempt to provide a bit of informal support for my claim by noting some areas where the same kinds of complexities found in natural languages exist in Esperanto. Some of the complexity lies in the mere fact that these constructions exist; but I emphasize that most of it will lurk in the detailed rules that tend to surround these constructions, and which would require further study to elaborate. DH2: Some reactions to a few of Mark's specific comments: MR4: Thanks for the reactions, which however I won't pursue. I was trying to suggest the range of questions a syntactician would be interested in; I still think a detailed study of Esperanto syntax and pragmatics would be quite worth doing. MR2: * Case usage. There are arbitrary differences between verbs, as seen in Ili diris AL SHI kelkajn vortojn. 'They spoke several words to her' vs. Demandu do LIN vi mem. 'So ask him yourself' DH2: Personally, I always say "Demandu do AL LI vi mem." It is also legitimate to say "Ili diris SHIN", but not if there is a direct object. In actual usage, the -N ending can replace the preposition AL as long as there isn't a direct object to confuse the matter (this basically follows from rule 13); but since, with words such as "diris" or "sendis" there is almost always a direct object, you almost never see this usage. (This "priority" rule, incidentally, is an interesting example of a syntactic rule not, so far as I know, explicitly described anywhere.) ID1: Could there be no arbitrary differences between verbs? MR5: Sure there could; but they add to the complexity of the language. ID5: Then which differences are arbitrary and which aren't? Could the complexity of the language be lowered by postulating that all speech verbs must use the same marking for the speaker, the same marking for the addressee and the same marking for the content of the communication? MR6: Ceteris paribus, sure. Too bad Zamenhof didn't read Fillmore... ID1: Why does one expect the two highlighted arguments above to bear the same case marking? MR5: Well, French manages it: _Ils lui disaient quelque chose_; _Je lui ai pose la question_; _Demandez-lui vous-meme._ ID5: So French marks the addressee of `tell' ("dire") and `ask' ("demander") in the same way. Is this a desirable thing to have in a planned language? MR6: I was thinking about the complexity of Esperanto syntax, not about what is desirable. But since you ask: sure, I'd think it would be desirable. Not that I think it matters what features exist in a planned language. It's not the lack of some feature or another that keeps Esperanto from taking off. ID1: Do they have the same thematic role, and if so, what is it called? MR5: c. Are you assuming that thematic roles are the same in all languages? ID5: I don't see why I should assume the contrary. MR6: Nor do I; but I wouldn't exclude it either. How much analysis of deep case has been done in non-European languages? MR2: * Preposition usage. Many of the footnotes in the _Fundamenta Krestomatio_ relate to choice of preposition. Again, many are simply arbitrary: why do you get married _kun_ and not _al_ somebody else? DH2: Actually, you can get married _al_ somebody, depending on what word you use for "get married": Mi edzighis _al_ mia edzino (I got married to [became husband to] my wife) Mi geedzighis _kun_ mia edzino (I got married with [jointly] my wife) Personally, I prefer the latter. It emphasizes the "jointness" of the act of marriage. ID1: This is essentially the same question as the first one. MR2:(cont.) * Collocations. It's often quite a chore to know what verbs go with what nouns in a language, and I don't know why Esperanto would be an exception. For instance, you 'take' a course in English, but 'follow' it in French. DH2: In Esperanto, "Mi STUDAS la kurson", which seems reasonable. ID1: And in Bulgarian the student takes the exam, if the professor will give it to him, whereas in Russian it is the other way around. But this has nothing to do with syntactic complexity, as far as I can see. MR5: What words must be used with what other words does seem like syntax to me. ID5: What categories of words must be used with what other categories of words is syntax, but here we're dealing with phraseology, to which syntax is insensitive. For all syntactic purposes that I can think of "take a pencil" and "take an exam" are identical. ID1:(cont.) In any case, I would expect a planned language to restrict metaphor to a necessary minimum. MR5: Which leads to the questions-- Why do you think that would be desirable? ID5: Because the only two alternatives are to allow any speaker to come up with any metaphor that seems handy to him, which (given the speakers' different cultural backgrounds) would make the result unintelligible, or to do what natural languages do, that is, to postulate a (necessarily idiosyncratic) set of licensed metaphoric expressions for learners to struggle with. MR5:(cont.) Why do you think it would even be possible? ID5: Well, since that necessary minimum can't be strictly defined, what I formulated was a tendency rather than a state of affairs to achieve, and Lojban, for example, follows that very tendency. MR6: I was asking these questions thinking of Lakoff's ideas on the centrality of metaphor to language. I also wonder whether one can dictate the amount of metaphor in a living language... I suspect speakers will use it extensively no matter what the language academy says. MR2: * Transformations. Like any natural language, Esperanto allows clauses to be embedded in other clauses in various ways: via conjunction, relative clauses, participles, etc. It would be interesting to know what kinds of clefting and raising are permitted-- or not permitted-- in the language. What are the rules for pronoun movement, or negative movement? * Impersonal constructions. One can say either Gravas manghi multe da freshaj fruktoj Estas grave manghi... 'It's important to eat lots of fresh fruit.' These are a nice source of complications in English; how about Esperanto? For instance, is the "Estas..." form ever prohibited? ever obligatory? DH2: No and no. Which one you use is a question of personal style (personally, I'd tend to alternate them; that way, nobody gets bored).