Pods of juffo-wup: revisiting shattered mondonj part one.
Some time ago, I observed the hodgepodge that was the interpretation of Pokemon names by some Esperantist wiki editor; and the response, as I recall it, was that I was disparaging some linguistic culture over the names of fictional characters.
Before I begin, though: this is actually a much better take than that which I declared "fucked up" so long ago. The tapping of German 1-2-3 for the legendary birds is an especially interesting touch that I didn't expect. :)
Since my interest in languages is on the rise again, I thought I'd revisit the language, from more of a look at the language's properties themselves. Starting with the Fundamento itself:
SRC: http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_angla.html
A) The Alphabet
Others have covered the fact that Esperanto's phonology is, for the most part, that of Białystok, Poland; this is understandable given Zamenhof's origins there, and his desire to knit together the four local tongues. That will not be my focus here. Rather, a few questions follow.
1. Why are there unique letters? Granted, in the modern day, computers can produce them fairly easily; but this was not true in 1905 when Fundamento was written.
2. Why is s^ paired with j^ as the voiced affricate forms of s and z, when Polish uses s' and z'?
3. Why does c continue to exist as /ts/ without being paired with Latin-Slavic dz? Dropping c for ts allows the Czech-style pair ts^ and dz^ for /tS/ and /dZ/.
4. Why are s^ and c^ affricates of s and c, but g^ and j^ to shift these letters into their French values as attested in géant and jardin? Also, why h^ (instead of k^ is understandable, k^ is ugly) but not its voiced counterpart, the Greek gamma?
5. Why is u-breve, a uniquely Belarussian letter, in the inventory, serving its main function of allowing u to be a diphthong, while i-breve (same function) is ignored in favour of j?
6. Since u-breve creates a /w/ phoneme in Esperanto, why is it invariably shifted to /v/ outside of diphthongs, creating (amongst other things) a sizable list of kv strings that must be pronounced /kv/ with no stop-fricative or unvoice-voice assimilation?
---------------------
B) The eight parts of speech.
Summary of Fundamento: The parts of speech are as follows.
Definite article, noun, preposition, adjective, cardinal number, pronoun, verb, adverb.
-Article:
I'm guessing that Dr. Z chose the Hebrew usage because it's the Hebrew. However, two- and no-article systems are far more common than definite only, owing to the origin and nature of articles. (The is cognate with that; a(n) with one, an arrangement which is common in article-using languages; compare Hungarian a cseresznye "the cherry" and az cseresznye "that cherry", and az alma (both "the apple" and "that apple!"))
They, or the complete lack, also supply a neater grammar: "I saw a ghost" (I saw ghost) vs. "I saw the ghost."
-----
-Nouns, adjectives, and adverbs:
1. How do you form the accusative plural?
FR: Le substantif finit toujours par o. Pour former le pluriel on ajoute j au singulier. La langue n’a que deux cas: le nominatif et l’accusatif. Ce dernier se forme du nominatif par l’addition d’un n. "The substantive always ends by o. For forming the plural one adds j to the singular. The language has only two cases: nominative and accusative. The latter is formed from the nominative by addition of an n."
DE: Das Hauptwort bekommt immer die Endung o. Der Plural bekommt die Endung j. Es gibt nur zwei Fälle: Nominativ und Akkusativ; der letztere entsteht aus dem Nominativ, indem die Endung n hinzugefügt wird. "The substantive always receives the ending o. The plural receives the ending j. There are only two cases: nominative and accusative; the latter arises out of the nominative, to which the ending n will be added."
EN: Substantives are formed by adding o to the root. For the plural, the letter j must be added to the singular. There are two cases: the nominative and the objective (accusative). The root with the added o is the nominative, the objective adds an n after the o.
The sandwich-bot attempts to parse these instructions.
FR: SUB always final o. NOM marker not identified. PL -j to SG. ACC -n to NOM. *pom'j'n'o "pommes"
DE: SUB always final o. NOM marker not identified. PL -j to (undefined.) ACC -n to NOM. *pom'n'j'o "Äpfel"
EN: SUB -o to root. NOM marker is SUB. PL -j to SG. ACC -n to -o. *pom'o'n'j "apples" (it can't be -ojn because the -n is added to the -o, not to the nominative.)
I'd be interested in finding out whether the Hungarian version of Fundamento includes a footnote (to a probable literal translation from the German or Polish) saying that that the rules for applying plural and accusative markers are exactly as in Hungarian.
2. For adjectives, the French and German are told "the comparative is formed with the aid of the word pli," while the English are told that "the comparative is formed by prefixing pli:" *mi vidis la plejblankanj hundonj "I saw the whitest dogs!"
3. Why do adjectives always have agreement? Consider the following:
EN "The apples are red; the red apples" No agreement.
FR "Les pommes sont rouges; les rouges pommes" Written agreement but elided in speech.
DE "Die Äpfel sind rot; die rote Äpfel; ich sah den roten Apfel" Complex systems for agreement.
HU "Az almák pirosak; a piros almák(at)" Agreement in predicate but not in attribute.
JP "Ringo ga akaku; akai ringo" In a predicate construction, the adjective becomes the verb "(to be) adjective!"
-----
-Numbers:
1. Why is zero missing?
2. By definition, an adverbial number indicates a number of repetitions of the verb, not an adverbial usage of the ordinal. Thus, nur trie; DE nur dreimal; EN only thrice; HU csak háromszor.
3. When spoken, how do you distinguish 103/12, 130 halves, 132 fractions, and 100/32? In writing, these are cent tri dek-duonoj, cent tridek duonoj, cent tridek du onoj, and cent tridek-duonoj; all pronounced /tsent tri dek du 'on oj/! (And is the simplified form of the last tri okono, or tri kaj okono? I'm sure there's an answer, but why doesn't Fundamento explain this?)
----
-Pronouns:
1. Why, of all systems, does Esperanto lean on the crappy English pronominal system? I know inclusive/exclusive 1pl. isn't all that common; but 2pl. is reasonably common in languages not called English. As for third person, why does singular distinguish animacy (well, HUMANITY in Esperanto: la hundo and la hundino both take ghi as their pronoun!) and gender, while the plural does neither?
2. Why do they look like verb infinitives?
3. Since they decline as nouns, why do we need the plurals? English first person:
*mi'o I; *mi'o'n me; *mi'o'j we; *mi'o'n'j us. *de mio "my." *vioj "y'all."
----
-Verbs:
1. Why is there a future tense?
2. Why are English-speakers told that -us marks the subjunctive, and everyone else told that -us is a conditional?
3. Why are German speakers told that -us is a conditional, but then shi farus "sie würde machen" which is in subjunctive-II FUTURE tense?
4. Since aspects are marked, and many of them have definitions that bake in the auxiliary, why do they need the auxiliary anyway? Why couldn't these "participles" take verb conjugations; *La hundo frap'ant'is la katon "The dog was hitting the cat."
----
-Prepositions:
Wrapping up the parts of speech, we'll tackle prepositions.
1. Why are their rules spread out between rules 2, 8 and 14?
2. Why again do we have different information for different mother-tongues?
-English: Kun is instrumental and ablative...
-German: Kun is ablative...!
-French: Per is ablative!
-Polish and Russian: Per is instrumental.
Thanks to the Latin ablative being overloaded, this confusion is understandable; the Latin ablative absorbed the instrumental, as well as some aspects of the locative. But let's look at each of these.
-English: English only has nominative, objective (virtually all prepositions govern this,) and genitive-in-denial. So we need to look at other systems' cases. With is a word that encodes two meanings: one instrumental (synonymous with by means of,) and the other comitative (which is fused with instrumental in Hungarian and Polish.) It's not ablative, however.
-German: German has nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Mit is used in the same senses as English, and governs the dative; durch is another way of expressing the instrumental, and governs the accusative. Ablative aus governs the dative.
-French: Like English, French generally lacks cases (though there is an "interrogative" case marked on pronouns.) Both of the senses of per given for French translation (par, au moyen de) are instrumental.
-Polish: What's sad is this. Polish HAS an instrumental case; yet przez (per,) despite having most of the definitional functions of an instrumental case, governs the accusative. Meanwhile, z (kun) governs the instrumental, and so Polish Fundamento should be presenting kun as marking the instrumental. Though, in Zamenhof's defence, he was mostly right. :)
-Russian: /cheer!
3. As for je...
-If every preposition has a definite fixed meaning, then how can je be a preposition yet not have one?
-Why does de have more than one (the genitive and the passive agent marker?) For that matter, if per = FR au moyen de, why isn't per the passive agent marker?
-If you can just put its object in accusative, why do you need it? If it's to avoid Doppelsinn, then je itself may fail to avoid the rule: la kato saltis je la tablo. Did the cat jump onto the table, off the table, under it, over it, in front of it, or behind it? (Finnish and Hungarian have no problems here; all those cases have you covered.)
Before I begin, though: this is actually a much better take than that which I declared "fucked up" so long ago. The tapping of German 1-2-3 for the legendary birds is an especially interesting touch that I didn't expect. :)
Since my interest in languages is on the rise again, I thought I'd revisit the language, from more of a look at the language's properties themselves. Starting with the Fundamento itself:
SRC: http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_angla.html
A) The Alphabet
Others have covered the fact that Esperanto's phonology is, for the most part, that of Białystok, Poland; this is understandable given Zamenhof's origins there, and his desire to knit together the four local tongues. That will not be my focus here. Rather, a few questions follow.
1. Why are there unique letters? Granted, in the modern day, computers can produce them fairly easily; but this was not true in 1905 when Fundamento was written.
2. Why is s^ paired with j^ as the voiced affricate forms of s and z, when Polish uses s' and z'?
3. Why does c continue to exist as /ts/ without being paired with Latin-Slavic dz? Dropping c for ts allows the Czech-style pair ts^ and dz^ for /tS/ and /dZ/.
4. Why are s^ and c^ affricates of s and c, but g^ and j^ to shift these letters into their French values as attested in géant and jardin? Also, why h^ (instead of k^ is understandable, k^ is ugly) but not its voiced counterpart, the Greek gamma?
5. Why is u-breve, a uniquely Belarussian letter, in the inventory, serving its main function of allowing u to be a diphthong, while i-breve (same function) is ignored in favour of j?
6. Since u-breve creates a /w/ phoneme in Esperanto, why is it invariably shifted to /v/ outside of diphthongs, creating (amongst other things) a sizable list of kv strings that must be pronounced /kv/ with no stop-fricative or unvoice-voice assimilation?
---------------------
B) The eight parts of speech.
Summary of Fundamento: The parts of speech are as follows.
Definite article, noun, preposition, adjective, cardinal number, pronoun, verb, adverb.
-Article:
I'm guessing that Dr. Z chose the Hebrew usage because it's the Hebrew. However, two- and no-article systems are far more common than definite only, owing to the origin and nature of articles. (The is cognate with that; a(n) with one, an arrangement which is common in article-using languages; compare Hungarian a cseresznye "the cherry" and az cseresznye "that cherry", and az alma (both "the apple" and "that apple!"))
They, or the complete lack, also supply a neater grammar: "I saw a ghost" (I saw ghost) vs. "I saw the ghost."
-----
-Nouns, adjectives, and adverbs:
1. How do you form the accusative plural?
FR: Le substantif finit toujours par o. Pour former le pluriel on ajoute j au singulier. La langue n’a que deux cas: le nominatif et l’accusatif. Ce dernier se forme du nominatif par l’addition d’un n. "The substantive always ends by o. For forming the plural one adds j to the singular. The language has only two cases: nominative and accusative. The latter is formed from the nominative by addition of an n."
DE: Das Hauptwort bekommt immer die Endung o. Der Plural bekommt die Endung j. Es gibt nur zwei Fälle: Nominativ und Akkusativ; der letztere entsteht aus dem Nominativ, indem die Endung n hinzugefügt wird. "The substantive always receives the ending o. The plural receives the ending j. There are only two cases: nominative and accusative; the latter arises out of the nominative, to which the ending n will be added."
EN: Substantives are formed by adding o to the root. For the plural, the letter j must be added to the singular. There are two cases: the nominative and the objective (accusative). The root with the added o is the nominative, the objective adds an n after the o.
The sandwich-bot attempts to parse these instructions.
FR: SUB always final o. NOM marker not identified. PL -j to SG. ACC -n to NOM. *pom'j'n'o "pommes"
DE: SUB always final o. NOM marker not identified. PL -j to (undefined.) ACC -n to NOM. *pom'n'j'o "Äpfel"
EN: SUB -o to root. NOM marker is SUB. PL -j to SG. ACC -n to -o. *pom'o'n'j "apples" (it can't be -ojn because the -n is added to the -o, not to the nominative.)
I'd be interested in finding out whether the Hungarian version of Fundamento includes a footnote (to a probable literal translation from the German or Polish) saying that that the rules for applying plural and accusative markers are exactly as in Hungarian.
2. For adjectives, the French and German are told "the comparative is formed with the aid of the word pli," while the English are told that "the comparative is formed by prefixing pli:" *mi vidis la plejblankanj hundonj "I saw the whitest dogs!"
3. Why do adjectives always have agreement? Consider the following:
EN "The apples are red; the red apples" No agreement.
FR "Les pommes sont rouges; les rouges pommes" Written agreement but elided in speech.
DE "Die Äpfel sind rot; die rote Äpfel; ich sah den roten Apfel" Complex systems for agreement.
HU "Az almák pirosak; a piros almák(at)" Agreement in predicate but not in attribute.
JP "Ringo ga akaku; akai ringo" In a predicate construction, the adjective becomes the verb "(to be) adjective!"
-----
-Numbers:
1. Why is zero missing?
2. By definition, an adverbial number indicates a number of repetitions of the verb, not an adverbial usage of the ordinal. Thus, nur trie; DE nur dreimal; EN only thrice; HU csak háromszor.
3. When spoken, how do you distinguish 103/12, 130 halves, 132 fractions, and 100/32? In writing, these are cent tri dek-duonoj, cent tridek duonoj, cent tridek du onoj, and cent tridek-duonoj; all pronounced /tsent tri dek du 'on oj/! (And is the simplified form of the last tri okono, or tri kaj okono? I'm sure there's an answer, but why doesn't Fundamento explain this?)
----
-Pronouns:
1. Why, of all systems, does Esperanto lean on the crappy English pronominal system? I know inclusive/exclusive 1pl. isn't all that common; but 2pl. is reasonably common in languages not called English. As for third person, why does singular distinguish animacy (well, HUMANITY in Esperanto: la hundo and la hundino both take ghi as their pronoun!) and gender, while the plural does neither?
2. Why do they look like verb infinitives?
3. Since they decline as nouns, why do we need the plurals? English first person:
*mi'o I; *mi'o'n me; *mi'o'j we; *mi'o'n'j us. *de mio "my." *vioj "y'all."
----
-Verbs:
1. Why is there a future tense?
2. Why are English-speakers told that -us marks the subjunctive, and everyone else told that -us is a conditional?
3. Why are German speakers told that -us is a conditional, but then shi farus "sie würde machen" which is in subjunctive-II FUTURE tense?
4. Since aspects are marked, and many of them have definitions that bake in the auxiliary, why do they need the auxiliary anyway? Why couldn't these "participles" take verb conjugations; *La hundo frap'ant'is la katon "The dog was hitting the cat."
----
-Prepositions:
Wrapping up the parts of speech, we'll tackle prepositions.
1. Why are their rules spread out between rules 2, 8 and 14?
2. Why again do we have different information for different mother-tongues?
-English: Kun is instrumental and ablative...
-German: Kun is ablative...!
-French: Per is ablative!
-Polish and Russian: Per is instrumental.
Thanks to the Latin ablative being overloaded, this confusion is understandable; the Latin ablative absorbed the instrumental, as well as some aspects of the locative. But let's look at each of these.
-English: English only has nominative, objective (virtually all prepositions govern this,) and genitive-in-denial. So we need to look at other systems' cases. With is a word that encodes two meanings: one instrumental (synonymous with by means of,) and the other comitative (which is fused with instrumental in Hungarian and Polish.) It's not ablative, however.
-German: German has nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Mit is used in the same senses as English, and governs the dative; durch is another way of expressing the instrumental, and governs the accusative. Ablative aus governs the dative.
-French: Like English, French generally lacks cases (though there is an "interrogative" case marked on pronouns.) Both of the senses of per given for French translation (par, au moyen de) are instrumental.
-Polish: What's sad is this. Polish HAS an instrumental case; yet przez (per,) despite having most of the definitional functions of an instrumental case, governs the accusative. Meanwhile, z (kun) governs the instrumental, and so Polish Fundamento should be presenting kun as marking the instrumental. Though, in Zamenhof's defence, he was mostly right. :)
-Russian: /cheer!
3. As for je...
-If every preposition has a definite fixed meaning, then how can je be a preposition yet not have one?
-Why does de have more than one (the genitive and the passive agent marker?) For that matter, if per = FR au moyen de, why isn't per the passive agent marker?
-If you can just put its object in accusative, why do you need it? If it's to avoid Doppelsinn, then je itself may fail to avoid the rule: la kato saltis je la tablo. Did the cat jump onto the table, off the table, under it, over it, in front of it, or behind it? (Finnish and Hungarian have no problems here; all those cases have you covered.)