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Esperanto on sci.lang pt 4 of 4
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