Re: To Christophe (Uusisuom and Esperanto)

Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but however well this mail may have
been intended, it came off to me as rather condescending and perhaps even
rude.  Daniel, are you a native speaker of English?  I have a Finnish friend
who uses non-standard forms very similar to yours.  At any rate, I'll throw
the rest of my replies below with text.  (Incidentally, I may come off as
"condescending and rude" as well; I'm sorry.  My writing style is not at all
reader-friendly.)

---
Shreyas

: Well, on the basis of that logic, I find Esperanto completely inadequate.
: For one thing, I think it looks ugly. For another, it appears too much
like
: rehashed Latin or a bastardised form of Spanish and for another, the
various
: accents and marks make it awkward for feeding the language into computers,
: word processing systems and the net, the most important communications
: system in the world.
On the other hand, I am unaware of anyone asking whether you found Esperanto
"adequate", nor did I notice anywhere a comparison between your project and
Zamenhof's in any but the most passing of ways.
As for entering data into a computer, I don't know how diacritics affect
that at all.  Typography is a side concern, and in my experience, it's no
harder to input a sequence such as <aa> than it is <á>.  Doubled letters, in
fact, may be a weakness, what with phonemic length, being that if a letter
is struck too many times or not enough it may very well change the meaning
of the piece of writing.  One might be able to deduce the *intended* meaning
from the context, but if there are sufficient amounts of minimal pairs, this
would cause spellcheckers to be somewhat less than useful.

: Here, Christophe, is the difference between 'u' and 'y':
: 'u' pronounced like the 'u' in 'pUt'
: 'y' pronounced like the 'ui' in 'sUIt'
This is approximately equivalent to saying this:
'gross' is the texture of a frog.
'slimy', however, is characterized by the surface of a toad.

You may speak a different dialect of English than the reader does.  Giving
examples is ineffective.  We've been over this before, so now I'll drop it.
Sorry again.

: Doubled letters are not particularly difficult either - simply 'hold' the
: letter for a little longer if it appears doubled than if it is single.
It's
: worth pointing out that the word 'kekko' has no rival such as 'keko' to
: complicate things, same for the word 'jaani' which has no 'jani' to
compete
: against. Therefore, in theory, if you really can't pronounce letters
: doubled, you will be understood if you say 'keko' and 'jani' instead of
: 'kekko' and 'jaani'. And in case you are wondering why use doubled letters
: at all, it is because they help for one thing to distinguish between
: nouns/adjectives on the one hand and verbs on the other which never
contain
: doubled letters.
Typography again.

: The reason I chose the colour purple to indicate anger is because the
colour
: red is used to denote embarassment (people DO get red when they get
: embarassed in France as well, n'est ce pas?). These derivations are not
: 'opaque', they may simply call on the learner to adapt, just like any
: language calls on its learners to make some adaptations.
They are also, as another reply points out, deeply rooted in metaphor, which
is highly undesirable, or so I'm told, in auxlangs, though as an artlangy
thing it would be mildly interesting to see colors with nonstandard
emotional attachments (Here in the USA, I think embarrassment is pink,
incidentally).

: 'I found more negative points than positive ones (about Uusisuom)'
This isn't precisely the most wonderful thing to say.

: Somehow, I just can't believe that's true, however biased against Uusisuom
: you might be. There are some things that Esperanto can offer that Uusisuom
: cannot, but there are many things that Uusisuom can offer that Esperanto
: can't. Ultimately, it comes down a lot to personal taste and preference.
This, however, is also not thunderingly perceptive.  You can't believe that
someone's opinions differ from your own?

: Your mention of problems with pronunciation reminds me that because of its
: international quality, ANY IAL is going to have different speakers
: pronouncing certain words differently. I am sure your Esperanto is
different
: to a Russian's pronunciation. Only minor differences perhaps, and you can
: understand each other (I hope) but the point is that you haven't made one
: argument here that really 'holds water' as we say in English.
On the other hand, there should be a standard that is clearly defined, so
that it's clear exactly how everyone's accents deviate from it.

---
Shreyas

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