Talk:Esperanto/Archive 4

message: If you speak Esperanto, or would like to, you might be interested in the Esperanto wiki JerryMuelver hosts at http://unumondo.com.
> It seems, that http://unumondo.com doesn't exist anymore. 
Esperanto's potential as a meta-language for machine translation is being explored by the traduki.  Other useful links include http://www.esperanto.org and, for US-ians, http://www.esperanto-usa.org.  The last can be contacted at ELNA, PO Box 1129, El Cerrito CA 94530; 1-510-653-0998 (real person), 1-800-ESPERANTO (automated info and information requests).
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Esperanto isn't an agglutinative language since it inflects: it has different cases as numbers distinguished by different suffices. Agglutinative languages can have inflections too; these aren't absolute categories...
Esperanto is fully agglutinative. Two or more grammar suffixes for the same word don't modify each other, and that's usual agglutinativity test. For example: -o + -j + -n is -ojn, it wouldn't have to be in inflective language. --Taw
It certainly looks agglutinative to me. Moreover, John Wells says, on page 27 of his book Lingvistikaj Aspektoj de Esperanto, "Ekzemploj de aglutina lingvo estas la turka, la japana, la zulua, kaj - kiel konate - la Internacia Lingvo Esperanto." ("Examples of agglutinative languages are Turkish, Japanese, Zulu, and - as is well-known - the International Language Esperanto.") There are not many people better placed to judge this than John Wells, so I've changed the article accordingly. --Zundark
Esperanto's grammar resembles that of a typical inflectional language better than that of a typical agglutinative one. The only reason people call it "agglutinative" is because its morphology was designed to be regular (no exceptions) and cleanly segmentable (a word can be divided into individual morphemes easily). A stereotypical agglutinative language (like Turkish), however, has a lot more morphemes per word.  I would just stay clear of claiming Esperanto is "inflectional" or "agglutinative".  Those words don't really mean that much. It's clearer to just say what I just did about how the morphology was designed. -- 171.64.42.82 06:58, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Character of E-o 

message: The Wikipedia article now says as a fact that there are 2 Million speakers. 2 million is also the number from the Esperanto FAQ (point 5, ) 
But I find very different numbers; 
*tens of thousands to over a million 
*Statistics shows there are about 10 million Esperanto speaking people in the world 
Is it not more correct to just say it is unknown? Walter 10:06, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Your first source, Omniglot, is known to be a very unreliable source. A friend of mine and I have spotted numerous mistakes on that site in the past. The second I don't know much about, but seeing as it's specifically trying to promote Esperanto, it might be exaggerating deliberately, or using a very forgiving definition of an "Esperanto speaker". — Timwi 21:00, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  number of people who speak Esperanto 

message: The following was at Esperanto etymology.  I was just going to add it to Esperanto as a section, but it's not well enough written.  Please incorporate the content into the article.  There is more on Talk:Etymology  — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 14:57, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Moved content.  Please incorporate

message: If there exist an Esperanto locale?  What are conventions for dates, time, numbers etc in Esperanto writing? — Monedula 06:19, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: One typically uses "." as the thousands separator and "," as a decimal point.  Usually but not always 24-hour time with colon between hour and minutes.  Dates - usage varies.  The typical advice is to use a four-digit year and write out the month name or abbreviation thereof. --Jim Henry 13:39, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Esperanto locale?

message: In this article, it the pronunciation of ŭ is incorrecly listed as [U]. This is incorrect. [U] is the sound of "oo" in book, and ŭ is clearly not that sound. The correct pronunciation of ŭ is [w]. Take the name of the letter, "ŭo," pronounced "woh." However, if ŭ were pronounced as [U] as said in the article, it would be pronounced as the "oo" in "book" followed by the "o" in "or." Try saying that, and I can assure you it does NOT sound anything like "woh."
: The word "ŭo" is a special case. In all other Esperanto words, ŭ is preceded by a vowel, e.g. aŭ, which is pronounced [aU]. Ŭ thus forms a diphthong with the previous vowel. [w] is not a vowel sound; like [j], [w] is generally followed by a vowel rather than preceded by one. [aw] is possible but hard to pronounce and sounds nothing like aŭ. — Timwi 10:46, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  Unfortunately, it's not as simple as either explanation here. [U], [u], and [w] are all basically the same sound, with varying degrees of closure. [U] and [u] are generally used as vowels, and [w] is used as a consonant; the implication is therefore that the difference in closure between [u] and [w] is concomitant with the difference in closure between vowels and consonants. The question then becomes one of phonetic versus phonological representation. Clearly, ŭ is used in Esperanto to mark back closing diphthongs, but what phonetic symbol should be used to represent the closed portion of that diphthong? If we look to the traditions used in phonetically transcribing English, we find use of the lax vowel symbols [U] and [I], as in the diphthongs [aU] as in 'cow', [oU] as in 'go', [eI] as in 'hay', and [oI] as in 'toy'. This is because acoustic analyses have shown that the off-glides of these diphthongs are acoustically most similar to the [U] and [I] vowels, which exist as separate phonemes in English. A brief survey of the web has shown that there is not a lot of detailed phonetic description of Esperanto phonemes. Most of the descriptions of the Esperanto diphthongs are in terms of English diphthongs, so unless it can be shown that Esperanto diphthongs are in fact more close than English diphthongs, the symbols for lax vowels should be used to represent Esperanto off-glides. Nohat 17:39, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sound of &#365; 

message: how does one add हिन्दी (hindi) to the "in other languages" navigation box on the main page of the article on esperanto? there is now a faq on esperanto in hindi at http://hi.wikipedia.org/esperanto. antaudankon :>) Giridhar 10:45, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Done.  Edwinstearns 13:31, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Oops! Now it's done. Edwinstearns 14:42, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  the "in other languages" navigation link 

message: I wonder if someone who knows more about this than me can explain what's going on with 'it even has some native Esperanto speakers' (first paragraph) and 'Total speakers: est. 2 million (estimates vary greatly); none of these are native speakers' (fact box)? mat_x 18:55, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Contradiction

message: Just wanted to say I realy enjoyed reading this article. Bawolff 06:12, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good article