From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Mon Apr 26 19:14:44 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 27 Apr 1993 10:18:19 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1777; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:17:43 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4314; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:15:35 EST Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 23:14:44 -0400 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Esperanto on sci.lang pt 4 of 4 X-To: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Message-ID: Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 4 of 4 KM1:(cont. on MR2) This sort of thing is far more important in language use than literal meanings (if such there are!), and reaches depths of subtlety we can at present only imagine. MR3: Very true; but most of these inferences would seem to be pretty safe in talking to an Esperanto speaker, few of whom, I would think, come from countries in which coffee is drunk from gourds. KM3: "[discussion of implicatures; no real disagreement]" MR3: I can't accept the claim that Esperanto has *no* pragmatics, but I can see that differing cultural expectations could derail many an exchange between Esperanto speakers (of different cultures). On the other hand, is this really much worse than possible interactions conducted in English between (say) an inner-city African-American, a Jewish New Yorker, a Scotsman, and a recent Chinese immigrant? KM3: Probably not. Having used plenty of E and plenty of International English in my life, I can't say I've noticed much if any difference in this regard. The best E speakers know several (European) languages. This gives them a good feel for what pragmatics they need, though of course this takes place below the level of awareness unless something goes wrong. EGE1: Although it is true that some of the best Esperanto speakers were accomplished linguists (Zamenhof, Kalocsay, Grabowski and Szilaghy, for example), I don't think this generalisation is correct. Julio Baghy, definitely a very major figure, knew only two languages (Esperanto and Hungarian), and I don't think that William Auld, possibly Esperanto's greatest poet, is a particularly great linguist. MR3: If you were often thrown into such situations, you'd surely develop some strategies to deal with it (e.g. you'd avoid slang, paraphrase a lot, become aware of some foreign idioms). Perhaps Esperanto speakers just borrow the pragmatics of their native language until experience teaches them better. KM3: Yes, I think that's what happens. (It would be nice to have some research on this, but it's the kind of thing that's very hard to research.) MR3: But again, not only did Zamenhof blow off Chomsky; he completely failed to read Anna Wierzbicka. KM1:(cont. on MR2) There's no way to do justice to this subject in a posting and I'm not going to try. (For one thing, there's lack of agreement within the field on details.) But I would just like to point out that lack of attention to pragmatics, or ignorance of it, is what IMO underlies the endless argument about the "expressiveness" of Esperanto. It also underlies the undeniable fact that Esperanto is at its liveliest when used to discuss Esperanto. (A few weeks ago on soc.culture.esperanto there was a self-conscious attempt to talk about other things for a while; it didn't last of course!) MR3: Ooh, can you say "flame-bait" (in Esperanto)? MR2:(cont.) * Word order and pragmatic marking. Thanks to its morphological accusative, Esperanto has fairly free word order, but not all word orders are equivalent. According to J.C. Wells, VSO is unmarked, others are used "for stylistic effect". Similarly adjectives can follow the noun if they are long or "for emphasis". DH2: VSO is rare, but I've seen it consistently used (in a partial translation of the first book of the Mabinogion), and it did not strike me as foreign or unusual. Wells, who is a native English speaker, may well use non-SVO word orders "for stylistic effect" -- others (Hungarians, for instance) use other word orders much more liberally, again without bothering other speakers of the language. Adjectives can follow the noun for any reason whatsoever -- I usually put them there when I think of them as afterthoughts. MR2: * Adjective order. One can say "granda rugha libro" 'big red book', or "tri blindaj musoj" 'three blind mice', but surely "rugha granda libro" or "blindaj tri musoj" sound odd. DH2: An interesting point. "Rugha granda libro" does not sound odd to me at all, but "blindaj tri musoj" does indeed. Could this be because "tri" is not an adjective but a numeral (a completely different type of bird)? (To relatively new English-speaking Esperantists, "tri unuaj lecionoj" also sounds odd; they favor "unuaj tri lecionoj". As you can see, this is the exact opposite of the "tri blindaj musoj" vs. "blindaj tri musoj" situation. I think what we have here is simply first-language interference.) ID1:(on MR2:) Wait a minute. "Tri" is a numeral, not an adjective. One of Greenberg's universals says that if the demonstrative pronoun, the numeral and the qualifying adjective precede the noun, they go in this order, and if they follow it, the order is either the same or the opposite. This relieves Zamenhof from the responsibility for "tri blindaj musoj". Since "granda" and "rugha" are both qualifying adjectives, the problem with "rugha granda libro" can't be up to the language. MR2:(cont.) A few oddities more peculiar to Esperanto: * Use of adjectives vs. participles. Compare Chu lingvo internacia estas bezona? 'Is an internat'l language needed?' Chu lingvo internacia estas ebla? 'Is an internat'l language possible?' The _Krestomatio_ disapproves of the first (it prefers _bezonata_) but not the second. Why? DH2: Zamenhof (?) disapproved of the first simply because it is wrong. "Bezoni" is a transitive verb, more or less equivalent to the English "to need"; so when you convert it to an adjective, you also get a transitive adjective (if that makes sense). Convert it back again: "Chu lingvo internacia bezonas?" Bezonas kion?? Actually, a good translation of the original sentence is: "Is an international language in need (of something)?" Does this make a lot of sense? On the other hand, the second usage is not only grammatically legal (from the inherent meaning of -EBL-) but also quite common. MR2:(cont.) * There's a curious transformation which turns verbs into adverbials: Forpelite de la edzino, li rifughis chi tie. 'Chased out by his wife, he found refuge here.' Trovinte pomon, mi ghin manghis. 'Having found an apple, I ate it.' DH2: This is not really "curious," but follows directly from the fact that any Esperanto stem can be converted from one word type to another simply by changing the ending. So a participle can be adjectival, adverbial, substantive, or even verbal (so-called "synthetic" verb forms which some people like to use). For those interested, the difference between Mark's example "Forpelite de la edzino, li rifughis chi tie" and one with a standard adjectival participle, "Forpelita de la edzino, li rifughis chi tie" is this: The first describes the situation in which he took refuge (in other words, it describes the verb) -- "After being driven out by his wife, he took refuge here" -- while the second identifies the person who took refuge (in other words, it describes the subject) -- "He, who had been driven out by his wife -- not my brother-in-law, the other guy -- took refuge here." MR2:(cont.) * Roots fall into verbal, nominal, and adjectival classes, sometimes arbitrarily. For instance, _shoveli_ 'to shovel' forms a nominal with the same root (_shovelo_ 'a shovelling'), but _marteli_ 'to hammer' requires suffixation (_martelado_); this seems to be because the root for 'shovel' is verbal, but that for 'hammer' is nominal (_martelo_ = 'a hammer'-- compare suffixed _shovelilo_ 'a tool for shovelling, a shovel'). DH2: The "class" theory, proposed by de Saussure and polished up by Kalocsay years later, was accepted by the Esperanto Academy some years ago, but certainly not by all Esperanto-speakers (e.g. William Auld, Szerdahelyi Istvan, to some degree myself). However, it is true that every root contains some kind of semantic content, and that there is a lot of arbitrariness in what that semantic content is. (The classic expression of the particular discrepancy you've quoted is "broso" vs. "kombilo" -- brush vs. comb.) Again, this is a lexical, not a syntactic, matter. MR2:(cont.) If you're not a linguist, your reaction to all this might well be, "So what's wrong with all that? That's just how languages behave." In a way that's precisely my point. Esperanto behaves, syntactically, like any other language because it *is* a human language-- and because Zamenhof simply modelled his use of the language on the languages he knew, probably without thinking about it much. DH2: As mentioned above, Zamenhof defined Esperanto's syntax in the _Ekzercaro_; most of his books were written during the period 1906-1913, long after the syntax had been defined. The principle, of course, remains the same. MR2:(cont.) Statements like this make me suspect we're not talking about the same thing. The corpus represented by the _Ekzercaro_ is nowhere near big enough or complex enough to address many of the questions about syntax a modern linguist would have. The _Krestomatio_ and Zamenhof's translations would be a better start, but really only an extensive reading of Esperanto writing and interaction with large numbers of Esperanto speakers would suffice. DH2: Ah, there indeed we aren't talking about the same thing. The student of Esperanto who reads and understands the content of the _Ekzercaro_, and then augments his knowledge with a sufficiency of lexical material, can speak Esperanto correctly and fully -- but obviously he won't know those syntactic rules implicitly defined in the _Ekzercaro_, _nor the great number of others which follow automatically from the first batch_. At least not consciously. Your hypothetical linguist (hypothetical, because very few linguists seem to have any interest in Esperanto) reminds me of Tycho Brahe in his observatory, spending his life making planetary observations -- all of which could have been calculated ahead of time if only he'd had access to Kepler's three simple laws of planetary motion (which in turn all derive from one simple formula of Isaac Newton's). This is not, of course, a put down either of Tycho Brahe or of your descriptive linguist; Kepler's laws wouldn't have been devised without Brahe's observations, nor Newton's gravitational formula without Kepler's laws. But the need for a large number of observations to induce and define a set of natural laws does not necessarily relate to the amount of complication involved in those laws. MR4: True; but you can't make the syntactic generalizations before you have the syntactic data; and syntactic data just take time to discover. Linguists are still discovering new oddities of English syntax-- things that people automatically do, and learn somehow, but that nobody's ever stated explicitly. NY1: For fear of starting a battle, I will get to the point (at which point my friends will say "Eh?"): Some time back I posted a query abt a transformational grammar of Esperanto. I got a few replies and am grateful. But the recent conversations about syntax & pragmatics in or around Esperanto have been interesting. Thanks to those involved for the further info. I am presently taking a grammatical structures course and from time to time see things in the phrase structure rules and transformations that remind me Esperanto. By no great shakes a speaker of Esperanto, I still have to wonder how Zamenhof managed to capture so much about the operation of language without any training in linguistics. (Yes, I know. He was a language genius. I know. I know.) As for the culture of Esperanto, I think there is one, but from what I see, the culture of Esperanto exists because of Esperanto. It is the language that is the culture. How this plays in real languages is a good question. Maybe after I get my copy of the "Great Eskimo Hoax" (or whatever it is called), I'll understand that one better. =================================== lojbab again: Lojban will presumably have a culture as its speaker base grows. It is important to Lojban's use as a tool of linguistic research that we be aware of such "cultural" aspects of Lojban use - places where usage makes the language other than what it is defined to be on paper, and of course, places where what we have designed on paper is not adeqauate to the task of human communication. The preceding discussion, although solely about Esperanto, points out several areas we need to look at in Lojban. Are we subject to a similar analysis? Will someone say that Lojban is a "complex" as Esperanto? I will collect the replies from both conlang and Lojban List on this issue. Conlangers - I also await people talking about these questions as they apply to other conlangs. lojbab