🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <C14BzL.9B@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <1993Jan16.100356.46440@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>>However, E does violate some universals; at least it has features which no 
>>"natural" language, IE or otherwise, has.  
>
>Hmm, those are two very different statements.  Surely every language has
>*something* that distinguishes it from all others.  Whether that something is
>important or worth calling the UG Police in on is another question.

The UG police may sometimes point out that a feature which appears
exotic under one analysis doesn't appear so under a different one.

>Do any of the features of Esperanto you cite violate any "language universal"
>any linguist has formally claimed to exist?

Or can it be said to have any features which are so blatantly
unnatural (that is, un-NL-like) that no linguist has even bothered to
express their failure to occur in natural languages in the form of a
universal?  Such as the brackets and subscripts of Lojban?

>> For example it has a complete set of participles;
>
>For those not familiar with Esperanto, I'll slip in a gloss: the language has
>both active and passive participles in past, present, and future.

Rather, what matters is that its participles of both voices distinguish
between exactly as many tenses as its finite (synthetic) verb forms.
Remarkable, but not exactly disturbing.

I would, however, suggest that it is unusual for a language to have an
equal number of past and future tenses.  The default appears to be for
the pasts to strongly outnumber the futures.

>-- in how many Romance languages would _Esperanto_
>in "he speaks Esperanto" naturally appear as an adverb?

In none, unless we manage to prove that Hungarian is a Romance language
(which shouldn't be too difficult: to begin with, the `flea' words are
obviously related, so everything else follows).

>> it is completely regular in its inflection.  
>
>Is this *linguistically* significant?  If I'm not mistaken, Persian 
>approaches this ideal (to say nothing of languages which have no
>inflectional irregularities because they have no inflections).

I'm told that Aymara' comes closest to the ideal, but of course
Persian is fairly close too, as is Hindi.

>What I find most striking about Esperanto is its Victorianness, which can
>be seen not only in Zamenhof's inattention to non-European languages, but in
>his relative lack of interest in syntax.  (Would any modern linguist dream
>of fully describing the syntax of a language in 16 rules?)

Fewer, actually, because not all of those 16 are about syntax.

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