orthohawk:Pile of huey. took thee a while but you finally got thyself to Milandland. Congrats. You make a nice pair.

I am not sure I understand this statement. It sounds like a personal insult to two of our users. I hope I am misunderstanding it.

I see this issue as a matter of individual conscience. Language is communal, but every person has a right to his idiolect. Esperantists can either use "ci" or not, and Orthohawk can use "ci" as often as he wants. Let him be.

But to orthohawk I would say: being insulted does not mean you can insult as well.

You can't rewrite historical or cultural conventions. You can reform them, if you have the support to do so. Right now your conversational partners aren't behind it. But then again, you're only speaking to a small portion of Esperantists, from somewhat similar cultures, in English, on the internet. This really isn't the one fight to worry about, no?

I'm sure you're a nice enough guy offline, Orthohawk. In the case you're speaking with another single Esperantist in real life, I'm sure you can explain your position to them without them splashing drinks in your face and huffing off. Even the ones that still won't accept it will likely won't suddenly become enraged. Let's take all the internet hyperbole out of this.

The fact is, the test of language is whether it gets its point across in the proper way. If "ci" works in your personal life, that's all that matters. If it doesn't, it might be best to drop it. I think that's really what it all boils down to.

Amazing how contentious this is.

I would have thought "la ĉielo estas blua" versus "la ĉielo bluas" would be more provocative.

I'm starting to get flashbacks to my days on Cornish-language revivalist newsgroups, watching the orthography debates.

erinja:

orthohawk:Pile of huey. took thee a while but you finally got thyself to Milandland. Congrats. You make a nice pair.

I am not sure I understand this statement. It sounds like a personal insult to two of our users. I hope I am misunderstanding it.

Does it matter? It seems regardless of what I say I'm "the offensive boor" and you've made up your mind already.

I'm done here.

“Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you."
--Dream Hampton

in english i like to say that "i enjoy life." that's the way i talk in english, but if i were to talk in esperanto, i would say "mi ĝuas la vivon" rather than "mi ĝuas vivon." similarly, in english, i would never say "i enjoy the life." that's because "la" does not directly translate to "the." they are separate words that are roughly equivalent, but not identical. the same goes for "ci," "thou" and "tu." "ci" (like any Esperanto word) has its own unique usage that does not directly correspond to the usage of "thou," "tu," etc. in other languages, but that rather corresponds only to "ci" in Esperanto as established by over a century of use.

idiosyncracies in usage between languages are common for learners to notice and be a little intimidated by. esperanto beginners often rebel against usage conventions, believing themselves justified because esperanto is a "neutral" language. it's quite normal to do this, but it's also wrong. for a language to be neutral in a meaningful way, it must *necessarily* have its own standards and conventions... otherwise, its usage would be dictated by the speakers of whatever happened to be the dominant national language at any given time. this has happened before, hence Ido.

it's true that people get very creative with esperanto usage, and that from time to time, people even reform it (hence the allowance of k instead of ĥ, which i personally find annoying because as a Jew, ĥ is very easy for me to pronounce while "sc" still really isn't)... but you have to know and master the rules before you can break them, and certainly before you can propose "reforms." if you have not yet progressed enough to talk about this subject in esperanto, then you definitely have not yet progressed enough to reform it.

Bruso:Amazing how contentious this is.

I would have thought "la ĉielo estas blua" versus "la ĉielo bluas" would be more provocative.

I'm starting to get flashbacks to my days on Cornish-language revivalist newsgroups, watching the orthography debates.

+1 - strange how people love to argue over whether the sky is blue. (*)

(*) A lot of discussions on these forums are of approximately this form; this one, about the implications and nuances of ci, is a good example:

• What color is the sky?
  
• The sky is blue.
  
• In fact, it is currently gray where I live.
  
• The sky can be of very different colors. During the night, it is black, and as has already been stated, it is gray a lot of the time. While you can often see statements that it is blue, it is actually blue less than half of the time, so that is an overgeneralization.
  
• (original poster) Ok, thank you, that answered my question.
  
• Also note that during sunrise and sunset, the sky may appear orange or red.
  
• The answers that have already been given are perfectly valid for the Earth. On other planets, the sky can be of very different colors. I think there is a Wikipedia article on this.
  
• Yes, it's here: Extraterrestrial skies
  
• I guess the original poster lives on the Earth, so I don't think he wanted to get answers about other planets. This just confuses beginners.
  
• Well, I think beginners are much more confused if they are presented with overgeneralizations about the color of the sky, as the first respondent's answer obviously was.
  
• (first respondent) Well, usually the sky is presented as blue, so I just used that; it seemed sufficient for a beginner

(... continue with discussions about the relative merit of oversimplification vs. overspecification, about whether discussions about this topic should be done on this board, with the discussion getting less civil by 5% per page - and there will be many pages in the "color of the sky" thread.)

orthohawk:Does it matter? It seems regardless of what I say I'm "the offensive boor" and you've made up your mind already.

No one is calling you a boor. Making an unintentional mistake in the usage of a word isn't a crime in any way. All it means is that you may have accidentally annoyed a few people at some point in the past without realizing it. It's certainly no big deal, and I'm sure they'll get over it (if they even remember it).

Use the common (and respectful) form of address (i.e., vi) when dealing with acquaintances and strangers going forward, and there's no harm, no foul. You are not branded as a terrible person for having used the intimate version of the pronoun with strangers in the past. But now that you are aware of the full meaning and use of ci, you may want to scale that use back a bit.

If you look at the hits in the Tekstaro you see that the bulk of them come from two titles. One from 1907 and the other - suprise, surprise - from the very same publisher who didn't see fit to apply an editorial pen to the Maigret I complained about.

This is a disease in Esperanto publishing that manuscripts are not subject to the normal editorial revision they would receive in national language publishing houses.

sudanglo:
This is a disease in Esperanto publishing that manuscripts are not subject to the normal editorial revision they would receive in national language publishing houses.

what do you expect? editorial revision isn't cheap, and there aren't a whole great many people with an interest in paying for and reading full-length Esperanto texts, now or in the past. no one is getting rich off Esperanto and i doubt many people in 1900 (or now) ever got so much as a livelihood out of it. i'd venture to guess most Esperanto publishers have lost money. and how many brilliant works of literature did the English language have in its first 125 years?