Re: TERMINOLOGY: Re: another new language to check out

En réponse à Mark J. Reed :


>It seems to be mostly agglutinative, but it "feels" inflected to me.
That's because it was consciously designed in such a way. Zamenhof himself 
wrote in one of his letters that he designed Esperanto as an isolating 
language (nearly all the affixes can be used as full words) but masqueraded 
it by careful design as an inflected language, because he felt Europeans 
wouldn't adopt it if it felt too foreign to them. And the world being as it 
was more than a century ago, it was all that mattered at that time.
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En réponse à Chris Bates :


>Is it still a pidgin? I've been waiting for it to creolize before I try
>learning it. :( Only problem is, you need a community who actually use
>the language regularly for that to happen....
In my experience, it has never been a pidgin (but that's not a problem, 
quite a few creoles around here have had no pidgin state). Creole is not 
quite the right word, but fits if you're not too strict about its definition.

And the community has used it enough for entire books' worth of 
Esperantisms (expressions that are peculiar to Esperanto), play on words 
untranslatable in other languages, turns of phrases that Zamenhof didn't 
expect or use but are allowed and even encouraged by the rules of the 
language, etc... to appear (they make the language a bit more difficult to 
learn, but in an unbiased way, since those specificities are not . My short 
stay within the Esperantist community has convinced me that while the 
language will never become the world's IAL, it will carry on being used by 
an international community that may not grow much, but will not shrink either.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.