sproshua:like it or not, Esperanto, being an artificial language, gets held to a higher standard.

Esperanto has taken on a life of its own (already for over a century), well beyond the control of one or even a group of people, just like "natural" languages; you can't just scribble a reform in the margins and consider things "fixed".

So it's a little confusing to me what you mean by holding Esperanto to a "higher standard". Esperanto's artificial origins do not mean that we can still "tinker" with it today, just like we can't "tinker" with various aspects of Modern Hebrew with the justification that there was a period of huge experimentation back in the 19th century when it was being revived.

Please, use "-iĉ" and "ri" if you want to. I don't believe in prescriptivism. But if riismo is to succeed, then it will be only gradually and organically, the same way as -end and mis- evolved into official affixes, and (almost all) the non-feminine marked forms evolved from being masculine-only to gender-neutral.

Elhana2:

Tempodivalse:Esperanto has taken on a life of its own (already for over a century), well beyond the control of one or even a group of people, just like "natural" languages; you can't just scribble a reform in the margins and consider things "fixed".

Bullshit. You just put that into teaching books, and year or two everyone uses this.
The active desire not to do this simple thing shows us how Esperanto community is downplaying the manifestations of sexism (is it because it is another old boys club)?

Also, you failed to answer which are masculine analogs of "pejorative" in your eyes 'училка' и 'врачиха'. Hint: they to not exist.

Elhana2, your incite is beyond the comprehension of most.
Where I live, things like cars, boats, and chainsaws take the feminine pronoun and inanimate objects like a junk of wood take the masculine. I find this incredibly sexist and no longer wish to take the masculine pronoun as it is derogatory. I want the prestige of a machine. My language has oppressed me far too long.

Let's not feed the troll, please. Elhana2 has amply demonstrated intellectual insincerity here and elsewhere (including outside Lernu), and seems to care only about attacking contributors via red herrings, without addressing the key issues raised.

Tempodivalse:Let's not feed the troll, please. Elhana2 has amply demonstrated intellectual insincerity here and elsewhere (including outside Lernu), and seems to care only about attacking contributors via red herrings, without addressing the key issues raised.

Oh alright than..

Back on track. I did earlier make a serious comment, though it may have seemed a little tongue in cheek. Basically, I asked if by endorsing 'na' for the accusative when then conventional -on is inconvenient, should it follow (as in open a non-closable door) that a stand alone nominative -o or -oo or -oa or whatever be adapted? (I sort of feel the answer to this is probably yes.)

Further, would that be undesirable? Would it solve anything? Does anything need to be solved?

vejktoro:Does anything need to be solved?

In my view, no. Honestly, most reforms are aimed at a problem or deficiency that is minimal, if it exists at all, and which could be easily overcome by existing tools in the language.

When there has been a real difficulty or a real improvement, the language has evolved organically to fill the gap as needed. You see this primarily with lexicon - for example komputilo won out over the more naturalistic komputoro; the productive affixes mis-, -ism, and -enda were officialised.

But it happens in other ways, too. As already mentioned, most personal nouns are now gender-neutral by default - -in is only used to emphasise that the person is female (and vir- or vira can be used to emphasise that the person is male, though this isn't seen often). But it wasn't always this way; in the early 20th century -in was considered mandatory to refer to a woman.

Basically, I asked if by endorsing 'na' for the accusative when then conventional -on is inconvenient, should it follow (as in open a non-closable door) that a stand alone nominative -o or -oo or -oa or whatever be adapted?

I'm not sure I follow. Are you talking about a preoposition like "na", except that indicates nominativity? I don't see how that could be useful, since the absence of a preposition or accusative ending normally indicates a nominative by default.

As an interesting side-note, Volapük has a really neat way of dealing with foreign words: it uses el as a preposition before an unassimilated word (although otherwise it lacks articles), along with the various inflected forms: ela genitive, ele dative, eli accusative. This nicely removes headaches of how to inflect the foreign word itself.

Tempodivalse: Are you talking about a preoposition like "na", except that indicates nominativity? I don't see how that could be useful, since the absence of a preposition or accusative ending normally indicates a nominative by default.

Yes, partially that is what I mean. A tool to explicitly assign nominativity in a situation where the author feels it is needed... maybe the assimilated word ends in an 'a' or 'e' or 'on' and the writer wants to play with word order. I agree that it is mostly redundant, but for the most part, so is 'na'.

The other use would be for indirect object, or other prepositional cases of the weird noun: '{prep} o {funny foreign word}'.

Ridiculous yes; what I'm getting at is where does it end?

P.S. Despite the fact that I don't care for any of the above, the argument that such and such is redundant and therefor not needed may be weak when speaking of an engineered lingua franca where often the audience needs all the help they can get.

where does it end?

It ends in naŭzo - the ŭzoa state one experiences when encountering a na-isto.

(Ŭzo! - an expletive indicating a mixed state of confusion and disgust)

Tempodivalse:

sproshua:like it or not, Esperanto, being an artificial language, gets held to a higher standard.

Esperanto has taken on a life of its own (already for over a century), well beyond the control of one or even a group of people, just like "natural" languages; you can't just scribble a reform in the margins and consider things "fixed".

So it's a little confusing to me what you mean by holding Esperanto to a "higher standard". Esperanto's artificial origins do not mean that we can still "tinker" with it today, just like we can't "tinker" with various aspects of Modern Hebrew with the justification that there was a period of huge experimentation back in the 19th century when it was being revived.

Please, use "-iĉ" and "ri" if you want to. I don't believe in prescriptivism. But if riismo is to succeed, then it will be only gradually and organically, the same way as -end and mis- evolved into official affixes, and (almost all) the non-feminine marked forms evolved from being masculine-only to gender-neutral.

i don't plan to belabor this conversation. yes, E-o has a 100+ year history of very very few speakers comparatively. it is still a new language and one which still touts its idealistic origins. the time when a patro is a parent and nothing more is the time when riismo will have penetrated the gender-line, imo. thanks for discussing. peace.

vejktoro:P.S. Despite the fact that I don't care for any of the above, the argument that such and such is redundant and therefor not needed may be weak when speaking of an engineered lingua franca where often the audience needs all the help they can get.

I can only reitirate what I said in my previous post ... An Estonian would no doubt be offended if a learner of his language were to insist: "Hey, let's drop a couple of cases and make this easier. There are only a million speakers - shouldn't be hard to get everyone on board." Even if a few Estonian speakers were to agree, you think the reform would meet some resistance?

It's the same with Esperanto. From a linguistic and practical perspective, it doesn't matter that its origins were "engineered", as the time for engineering has long passed, exactly as it has for modern Hebrew (whose origins were quite similar to EO's).

Tempodivalse:Let's not feed the troll, please. Elhana2 has amply demonstrated intellectual insincerity here and elsewhere (including outside Lernu), and seems to care only about attacking contributors via red herrings, without addressing the key issues raised.

Yes, if anyone is a bit experience in the forum and other Esperanto pages, you can see this person active in the past years and now revive to attack Esperanto.

What this Elhana wants is to promote English but not others. Wondering who gives this person money. Learning Esperanto needs less than 200 hours, why not learn it and come to argue without using google translator. Look at when the person registered and have so many articles done.

Lernu admin should consider to ban this account.

Tanzania drops English and the Africans are going to use Swali. If the BBC reported 75% of the people in the world do not speak English, which means the British are ready to let the English go as the world language but some is still not yet wake up.

Sorry, this may not be related to the item but just to let you all know, don't entertain this Elhana2.