[cnt'd]

It is a well formed sentence in Esperanto, but with opposite meaning.

My point is: it is not that important at all, whether a sentences is grammatically correct or not. Whether the intended meaning can be understood (by correcting the errors) mostly depends on how linguistically close the writer and the reader are.

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[1] Phrases like: This is the best book I have never read. In Spanish "nunca" is both "never" and "ever".

La Hyundai havas multajn malsamajn modelojn, pli potencajn kaj malpli potencajn. Tamen la plej potenca Hyundai, kiun mi mem neniam veturigis, estas la Santa Fe V8.

What are you saying is the problem here?

Veturigi aŭton? (see meaning 2 in PIV under veturigi)

Or neniam veturigis? (je neniu okazo veturigis)

sudanglo:

La Hyundai havas multajn malsamajn modelojn, pli potencajn kaj malpli potencajn. Tamen la plej potenca Hyundai, kiun mi mem neniam veturigis, estas la Santa Fe V8.

What are you saying is the problem here?

Veturigi aŭton? (see meaning 2 in PIV under veturigi)

Or neniam veturigis? (je neniu okazo veturigis)

The latter.

As English beginners are prone to copycat structures like "I want you to eat" into Esperanto as "Mi volas vin mangxi", I have repeatedly experienced in RL, that Spanish speaking beginners of foreign languages (mostly English) tend to translate Spanish "El carro más grande que nunca he visto." as "The biggest car I have never seen." and not as "The biggest car I have ever seen.". In Spanish "nunca" and "jamás" mean both never and ever.
If this happens translating from Spanish to English it might as well happen translating to Esperanto, which would yield a wrong "kiun mi neniam veturigis" instead of the correct "kiun mi iam veturigis".

My point was just: If we understand the native language of the author, we might be able to even correct errors he makes in Esperanto, because we can ask ourselves "What did he think in English/Spanish/German?". If we do not understand the language of the author, we don't have access to this kind of reflection and analysis. So once again, the linguistic proximity of Sender and Receiver once again have a strong impact on our ability (not willingness) to understand each other, even if the translated sentence contains obvious errors.

What is your subtext here, Nornen?

That any lingua franca is doomed? That the only solution is to make everybody learn English from birth?

My personal experience, is of both teaching English to foreigners and attendance at international Esperantist events. I can certainly confidently say that my experience of difficulty in understanding has been much greater in the case of English being used as a second language than it has been in the case of my interactions with Esperantists of widely different mother tongue backgrounds.

I think you are over-playing a theoretical difficulty, and I am not at all convinced that the incidence of mother tongue intrusions with learners of national languages are good evidence for the frequency of such errors made by learners of Esperanto.

The transition from komencanto to progresinto occurs much more rapidly in the case of Esperanto.

Forget about what happens in the Forums at Lernu where the contributors are often people who have not even yet met another speaker of Esperanto and have devoted relatively little time to learning the language.

What you need to do is to go to a large international Esperanto event and record the conversations. Then you would see how often a Spanish speaker actually confuses neniam with iam or an English speaker uses sentences like Mi volas vin mangxi incorrectly.

sudanglo:What is your subtext here, Nornen?

That any lingua franca is doomed? That the only solution is to make everybody learn English from birth?

How on earth did you read that out of nornens text?

@sudanglo:

This thread started with this post:

I have noticed that in the Esperanto Forums I can understand English speakers the best. People from the UK, America, Australia, ect... I have a harder time understanding others. I have to put a lot more effort into figuring out what they are saying.

Is this because I am an English speaker and other English speakers use language similar to the way I use it? Or, is it because other speakers are not using Esperanto properly? What is your opinion?

Thanks

I am trying to say, that the ease of understanding another person while talking a language which isn't the vernacular language of neither the speaker and the listener, depens strongly on how close the mother tongues of both speaker and listener are to one another.
I tried to say, that whether a sentence is structurally correct or not in this third language has only a marginal influence on the interpretability of your utterances.
I tried to say, that your mother tongue will always influence your way of expressing yourself in any language.
I tried to say, that when the speaker and listener share the same mother tongue (or two closely related tongues), the listener can more easily (a) interpret the utterances of the speaker, and (b) even correct errors made by the speaker.
This isn't even limited to foreign languages: Maybe you understand with less ambiguity someone from southern England than someone from Texas.

Not much subtext there.

The "copying" of structures of one's mother tongue into foreign languages, decreases with the proficiency level, but is never eradicated. I believe to remember an anglophone forum member, who's Esperanto proficiency is high in my opinion, and who for instance asserted in early posts that "mi farus" couldn't possibly be past and in later posts concluded that "mi farus" defaults to present tense in the absence of contextual information. This is what I mean by "copying" vernacular (thought) structures into foreign languages.

If any lingua franca is doomed? I am not an eschatologist and don't know much about doom, but linguae francae have existed for a long time and still exist in almost all the world. So I can see no evidence why linguae francae shouldn't work. In my country we have two linguae francae. But also in linguae francae you can find influences of each speaker's vernacular language.

That the only solution is to make everybody learn English from birth?
This might be a solution. We just have to figure out to which problem.

nornen:
As English beginners are prone to copycat structures like "I want you to eat" into Esperanto as "Mi volas vin mangxi", I have repeatedly experienced in RL, that Spanish speaking beginners of foreign languages (mostly English) tend to translate Spanish "El carro más grande que nunca he visto." as "The biggest car I have never seen." and not as "The biggest car I have ever seen.". In Spanish "nunca" and "jamás" mean both never and ever.
If this happens translating from Spanish to English it might as well happen translating to Esperanto, which would yield a wrong "kiun mi neniam veturigis" instead of the correct "kiun mi iam veturigis".

My point was just: If we understand the native language of the author, we might be able to even correct errors he makes in Esperanto, because we can ask ourselves "What did he think in English/Spanish/German?". If we do not understand the language of the author, we don't have access to this kind of reflection and analysis. So once again, the linguistic proximity of Sender and Receiver once again have a strong impact on our ability (not willingness) to understand each other, even if the translated sentence contains obvious errors.

While I get your general point, I fail to understand how nunca means both never and ever. I took many years of Spanish and I have not heard of this (at least I don't recall it ), and Lernu's vortaro translates nunca as neniam. Does not "que nunca he visto" mean "that never have I seen"? Same with "jamás", it is mapped only to neniam. Is it a local dialect thing where a negative is used but not intended (in a fixed-phrase kind of way)? If it is a fixed phrase then the problem lies not with Esperanto but with the speakers' learning of Esperanto and its correct usage. This is a problem with beginners that biases you toward understanding those with common native languages and against those with uncommon native languages, but this should not persist past fluency.

Both of your examples are indeed incorrect use of Esperanto, regardless of whether they are grammatically correct or not. For the programmers out there, it is like the difference between a compiler error and a runtime error in programming languages. The programmer (speaker) is required to be proficient enough in the language to avoid runtime errors that the compiler (language) does not catch on its own. Some languages catch more in the compiler (Ada), and others catch very little (C). A common problem in C is the "assignment as comparison" bug, where you say "if (x = y)" when you meant "if (x == y)". For those who don't know, the truth value of the first is the result of the assignment of y to x, where the second is the truth value of whether x is the same value as y. Both are valid C.

You can do a lot of very bad things in C using valid syntax.

kaŝperanto:I took many years of Spanish and I have not heard of this (at least I don't recall it ), and Lernu's vortaro translates nunca as neniam. Does not "que nunca he visto" mean "that never have I seen"? Same with "jamás", it is mapped only to neniam.

For instance.

"His acting is the best I have ever seen."

If you google "que nunca he visto" or "que he visto nunca" you will find many examples, and more importantly a lot of discussions about it between learners and native speakers (and even among native speakers themselves).

If it is a fixed phrase then the problem lies not with Esperanto but with the speakers' learning of Esperanto and its correct usage.

Obviously the problem doesn't lie with Esperanto, and neither with Spanish. The problem lies with bad Esperanto and the fact that we all as beginners are prone to copy known things into foreign languages. My point was that another Spanish speaker could autocorrect this sentence and get the meaning, while for an English speaker it is unimaginable that one could mix up "never" with "ever".

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Definition of the Spanish Royal Academy concerning jamás:

RAE:jamás
1. never
2. always
3. ever

They define "nunca" as exclusively "neniam", but according to my personal experience, both are (at least here) interchangeable.

sudanglo:Nornen, I grant you that given that Esperanto is a second language for all, there will be a tendency to import structures and meaning from the mother tongue of the speaker (hence the desirability of authors submitting their efforts, before publication, to scrutiny by speakers of other languages).

I am coming late into this thread, so I will only respond to a short item in one of sudanglo's posts.

What of the Esperanto of those (relatively few, comparatively) denaskaj parolantoj? For them, E-o is not "a second language for all." It is a native tongue. However, do they import expressions and idioms typical of those (usually one or both parents) from whom they learned the language, presuming that E-o was/is a second language for that/those teacher(s) / role model(s)?

The "copying" of structures of one's mother tongue into foreign languages, decreases with the proficiency level, but is never eradicated

Simple question, Nornen. What mother tongue intrusions can we find in the writings of Zamenhof?

Have you come across any good examples in the 4 million words of the Tekstaro, where you have to know the mother tongue of the author to understand what he is getting at?