Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

Charles wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
> > Many of the posts I read on <sci.lang> had little if anything to do w=
ith
> > Esperanto, per se, but more were just attacks on any kind of complex
> > morphology whatsoever. This was a legitimate opinion to hold, but
>
> Is it? I'd like half an excuse to revert to a totally 100% isolating
> syntax without any morphology. AFAIK, English and Chinese are furthest
> out on that limb. Even creoles have some morphology.
Well, just about *all* languages have a clearly recognizable
system of morphology, and I'd bet there isn't one that has no
system whatsoever.  Even Chinese is in the process right now
of developing a more complex morphology.

The question then is not whether a language does or does not have a
morphology.  The question is about the extent to which the language
uses morphology for fundamental grammatical elements it has. The Chinese
languages, creoles, and to a lesser extent English clearly use much less
morphology to indicate case, number, gender, etc. than, say, Finnish.
But there is no particular reason why one way of doing things (morphology=
)
is better than another (syntax), because a grammatical rule is a grammati=
cal
rule: they're equally explicit.  It is true that they have different adva=
ntages,
but they also each have disadvantages. There's no objective way to say
one way is or is not better than another.

Which, of course, is what makes conlanging fun. :)

> It was rather a weird choice by Zamenhof to use agglutination.
I think he knew fairly little about agglutinating languages, and he
felt that they would make grammatical processes clearer than
either isolating or inflectional languages.  There was also the weight
of history, which held a discernible prejudice against isolating language=
s,
so in trying to avoid the perceived excesses of Volap=FCk, he probably al=
so
wanted something that would still be in line with his own views about how=
 the
linguistic world *should* look (and of course, there's nothing objective =
about
that).

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

"Things just ain't the way they used to was."
     - a man on the subway
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