Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

On 11 Jun 99, at 12:30, Charles wrote:


> 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.
One of my early conlangs, Thauliralau, was isolating.  I'm still
working on HTMLizing the materials but here's a draft:

http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/caligo/toa_tc.htm

Also, my current project {gzb} is mostly isolating.  (See .sig.)

>
> It was rather a weird choice by Zamenhof to use agglutination.
> I don't think he knew Turkish, so he "should" have gone heavily
There's an essay by him in which he explains some of his design
choices in working out Esperanto - there probably exists an
English translation, but I haven't seen it.  Basically, he thought it
couldn't get off the ground if it didn't look superficially familiar to its
initial audience (speakers of Indo-European languages, mainly) but
it couldn't really work as an IAL if it really had an IE synthetic
grammar.  So agglutination was an obvious choice.

Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/gzb/gzb.htm
*gjax zaxnq-box baxm-box goq.