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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto
Message-ID: <2188@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Oct-86 10:17:07 EST
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2188
Posted: Thu Oct 30 10:17:07 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Nov-86 00:38:26 EST
References: <102@ritcv.UUCP> <2808@watmath.UUCP>
Reply-To: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady)
Distribution: net
Organization: Datalytics, Inc.
Lines: 53
Keywords: esperanto
Summary: More corrections

In article <2808@watmath.UUCP> credmond@watmath.UUCP (Chris Redmond) writes:
[in an otherwise quite accurate article]
>Esperanto ("hope") is an artificial language, developed early in the
>20th century by a man named Zamenhof.

"Esperanto" is the noun form of the present active participle of esperi
- to hope, and as I noted before the first work in Esperanto appeared in
1887.

>All verbs end in s -- I believe it's as for present tense, os for past
>tense, is for future tense, but I may have those turned around.

Close:  indicative mood is -as for present, -is for past, -os for
future.  To form a passive participle from the indicative, drop the s
and add a t and either an o (for a noun) or an a (for an adjective) or
an e (for an adverb).  For an active participle, prefix the t with an
n.  The infinitive ends in i, the imperative in u, and the conditional
in us.  That's the whole of the law, everything else is commentary.

>There are other artificial spoken languages, by the way, including
>Interlingua (something like Esperanto, I believe -- years ago I used
>to subscribe to some scientific journal which for some reason published
>abstracts of all its articles in Interlingua) and Babm (a bizarre
>construct produced by a Japanese enthusiast).

There are (at least) two interlinguas.  The one you're talking about
was developed by a team of linguists working under (I think) a grant
from somebody's will.  My recollection is that it was intended purely
as a written language, and it is quite easy to read for anyone who
knows some romance language.  The other was invented by the
mathematician Peano who converted Latin into an analytic language on
the order of English.  (This is sometimes called Latina sine flexione -
Latin sans inflections - for obvious reasons.)  Babm, if I remember
correctly, was distinguished by a syllabary instead of an alphabet (not
surprising, considering its Japanese origins).  There have, of course,
been many, many others, including Hogben's Interglossa, created by
shoving Graeco-roman root words into Chinese grammar (sort of Peano
gone berserk).

Most of the international languages have been attempts to improve on
Esperanto.  (Little known is the fact that Zamenhof himself offered a
revised Esperanto!)  To my knowledge, none of them is actually spoken,
although some show up in print on occasion.  One possible exception is
Ido ("offspring") a "naturalized descendent of Esperanto in which "ke"
is spelled "que" and direct objects take the accusative only when they
precede the verb, etc.  I heard a couple of years ago that there was an
Ido club still in business in Switzerland, although its members are all
quite old.
-- 
D Gary Grady
(919) 286-4296
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