Steli wrote:First of all, I'm of German heritage, too, but that doesn't make me agree with German history or every German person either.
Glad to hear it, because there are a lot of people I've personally met online who won't have anything to do with Esperanto simply because of it's origins and their own anti-semitic stance. And your arguments sounded a lot like theirs, seeming to totally ignore and denegrate all opinions that didn't exactly line up with your own and making fun of them without rational argument.
Steli wrote:If you were offended by the word ridicoulous so I'm sorry, but I couldn't think of a better one that moment.
I was, in the extreme (in case you couldn't tell). It was tantamount to laughing in my face and calling me a fool ("ridiculous" is a synonym for "foolish",
http://webster.com/cgi-bin/thesaurus?bo ... ridiculous) and really pissed me off. Sorry for my knee-jerk reaction above.
Steli wrote:My point nevertheless is that if you would make a comparison of the grammatical structure of Latin and E-o you would get a very long list of differences. I had Latin lessons in school and most things I had to worry about at that time don't even exist in E-o. On the other hand Latin is lacking the complex suffixation system of Esperanto for instance.
Based on my experiences both grammar systems are as different as iron and ore. You may find the one in the other but you have to remove all the unnecessary bits first and the result is quite different.
All I said was "the base of the grammar is from Latin (with some Germanic and Slavic thrown in). The question word, ĉu, he took almost directly from Polish, the accusative case he took from German, etc.)". It is an accurate statement. The verb conjugations are Latin in structure, but EXTREMELY siimplified to make Esperanto easy to learn. About 60% of the root words of the language come from Latin. If Esperanto and Latin's gramatical structure were identical why would we give it another name? We would just be talking about Latin. Dr. Zamenhof said he originally considered reviving Latin to be the IL, but dismissed it as to difficult, so he chose to base his language primarily on Latin, but very simplified then take from other languages as well. Esperanto's grammar doesn't have to be identical to Latin's to be "based on" Latin. The movie "Bourne Identity" says at the beginning, "Based on the novel by Robert Ludlum", but if you've seen the movie and read the book you understand that there are few things even similar, yet the description "based on" is still accurate, although the end points widely diverge, doesn't dismiss the fact that the starting points were the same.
Steli wrote:The problem with definitions is that there is more than one. The wikipedia defines a pidgin as "a simplified language that
develops as a means of communication between two or more groups who do not share a common language,..." (yes, I know, wikipedia is not scientific, but I don't have many English encyclopedias around and the cited passage is taken from a scientific source, so I guess it's OK).
"Develops", not "is developed", but that's probably splitting hairs, because it doesn't change the result.
E-o can perfectly well fulfil the role of a pidgn, regardless if it is one or not.
If you think that Esperanto hasn't continued to develop, but is exactly the same as Dr. Zamenhof originally described in the "Unua Libro", then you haven't done much research into the language. Esperanto is a living language, with an official language academy to govern changes in the language (patterned after the french language academy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademio_de_Esperanto,
http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/. Here is a list of words that were added to the official dictionary of the language this year by the academy
http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/of ... _2007.html Dr. Zamenhof simply designed the base of the language and then gave it to the community to continue to develop it.
Steli wrote:By the way, if you want to make a point with the books you mentioned you should give us a little summary of the things you think are important, because you can't honestly expect us to buy the books just for being able to continue the discussion.
Thank you. You are proving my point that you are arguing without actually reading or seriously considering my arguments. With the exception of the etymological dictionary, which I didn't think needed such a summary, I did give a summary of the things I thought were relevant to the discussion from the recommended books.