Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

This message is in MIME format.

-------19674-----Avana-Web-Mail------
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit


> Jim Henry wrote:
>
> > > The IAL that comes closest in the modern world to anything like universal
> > > use is English.  That has vastly more 'people and books' than Esperanto.
> > > Does that make English even more perfect?
> >
> > English is a useful language to know, but difficult to learn.
> > Esperanto is also useful (less so in many ways, perhaps) but
> > much easier.  Vorlin may be (slightly) easier than Esperanto, but it
> > isn't (yet) very useful.
>
> What in particular are you saying is simple about Vorlin?  I don't
> know much about the language, but it seems to me that just about
> any definition of "easy" is going to meet up with resistance
> *somewhere*.
I don't think any language can be really "easy" - if it's a real language,
anyone learning it will have to learn a new way of thinking. The hard part of
becoming fluent in a language, even one as much "easier" than other languages
as Esperanto, is not so much learning the rules and lexical items (though that
can be difficult enough with some languages) but putting in enough hours of
practice that using them correctly becomes unconscious habit.

A couple of points about Vorlin that look as though it might be easier than
Esperanto in those respects are:

1. Its morphophonemics look as though resolution of compounds into their
component morphemes would never be ambiguous (as in your "kataro" example
below). (Countering this, the root morphemes are necessarily recognizable from
cognates than those of Esperanto. Lojban has the same feature/bug.)

2. Its adjective are always clearly marked for transitivity, not just usually as with Esperanto.

3. Prepositions are regularly derived from base nouns, instead of having to be learned separately.

But this is theory based on reading Rick Harrison's grammar. I haven't actually
learned Vorlin, as I commented, for want of strong motivation.


> For example, I found Esperanto's case system was a *cinch* --
Same for me, in the sense of learning the rules. Forming the habit of always
applying the rules correctly took many hours of practice, but the same would
undoubtedly be true if I had had to learn a word order different from the
English default. (I wouldn't have this problem with Vorlin (strict SVO, IIRC),
but a native speaker of, say, Chinese probably would.)

> it was the "hidden" irregularities like those that we've recently
> discussed on the list ("kataro", etc.) that I found more challenging.
This can be a problem, at least at first when one's vocabulary is small, and one
encounters an unfamilar word that *might* be an odd or idiomatic compound of
known roots, or *might* be an unfamiliar root. This is partly a problem with
people's use of the language (i.e., some people over the last 112 years have
been careless in importing new root words, which makes the set of potential
ambiguities larger) and partly a feature (not totally a bug, IMO) with the
original design of the language (Anybody can borrow a new root word if it's
necessary in their judgment, and the morphophonemic rules don't prevent
compound ambiguity). It's rarely a problem once one has a larger vocabulary
though, and it makes neat wordplay possible. (Raymond Schwartz's essays &c
mayn't be a sufficient reason to start learning Esperanto, but they may be a
good reason to learn more if you've learned a little.)



-------19674-----Avana-Web-Mail--------