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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-04-10
I got a nice e-mail recently from a user called monerulo regarding my recent posts about the FSF and Ido. The topics were good enough that I thought I'd make a post about it in my log.
First, regarding the FSF, I made a comment in my post that was propably poorly worded where I said the movement needs "corporate types". In some way, I did not mean this literally, but my response for clarification is hopefully adequate:
I probably worded my post poorly at that part, and I didn't meant to say that the movement is or should be aligned with corporations or otherwise overly commercialized. I think I meant that part more in the sense that corporations tend to be good at PR, where regardless of how good or bad the business is on the inside, they know how to present people and an image that seem nice. Like how businesses can pretend to care about social movements and stuff in order to entice customers.
So I thought, it's like the PR problem of the free software movement, that the organizations need to project the image of being nice/good people, so to speak. They would need to know how to navigate social issues adeptly, so by using the word "corporate types" I meant something like skilled or professional PR reps and stuff like that. People whose job it is to be social and personable rather than programmers or have technical skills.
The goal with my post was not really to express what I want, but just give in to a reality that a growing and organized movement involves politics by necessity.
This person also shared their review of Ido:
gemini://tilde.pink/~monerulo/210329-ido.gmi
I recommend giving it a read especially if you already know Esperanto. I'd like to respond to some parts of it with my own knowledge, and hopefully monerulo won't mind.
Regarding the meaning and formation of certain words in Esperanto, I believe the word "akvi" has an obvious meaning in the language. Of course, the debate about what words mean exactly could get complicated, and I don't know if I'm really the chief expert in Esperanto semantics, but as a regular speaker of the language I feel quite confident in my ability to understand words or determine nuances in usage.
From what I know, it's true that Esperanto essentially has two kinds of roots, verbal roots and non-verbal roots. Non-verbal roots are not particularly distinguished by usually being nouns or adjectives, or so I was told. However, now that I think about it, words that are usually adjectives vs. usually nouns does seem to play a role in word formation. I suppose the significance of verbal roots lies in the fact that they have special meanings when inflected as verbs, whereas as monerulo pointed out, non-verbal words will generally behave some way when verbed.
The most obvious and common result in Esperanto of using a non-verb as a verb gives it the meaning of "to be", and this pattern is strongly affirmed in Esperanto's common usage. It's probably most obvious and comfortable with words that are normally adjectives. I would consider "ĝoja" to fit this pattern, whether its verb existed before it or not, it behaves as other adjectives would:
The example monerulo gave comparing "ĝoja" and "trista" (uncommon, compared to "malĝoja") suggested that they must be nouned differently, but I do not see any reason for "tristo" not to exist, and also "ĝojeco" itself is a valid possible construction.
Of course, like any language, many words might possibly exist but in practice don't. It can depend on how speakers feel, so in otherwords semantics is cultural too and not purely a morphological issue. Words are always colored with meaning that can't be perfectly communicated by morphology alone. Perhaps "tristeco" really is just more common or well-attested in Esperanto compared to "tristo", but I've not personally encountered it. Even if one is more common than the other, I think it is not rule-defining.
Anyhow, in my above example you see the verb form tends to mean "to be", which is extensively used in Esperanto. From the word "kato" (cat) there is "katas" which is attested to mean "is a cat". Some ambiguity is possible, yes, like it's unclear without context why/when anyone would want to say "akvas", but especially depending on the context the meaning can be totally clear.
Esperanto also has the special affix -um- which is actually intentionally ambiguous compared to simply verbing an adjective or noun. It's also one of the most fun things in Esperanto, because it means essentially "some kind of action related to" where you might need to use your imagination. The English word "to water" is standard in Esperanto in the form "akvumi" (therefore, "akvi" can't mean that), which sounds like it means "to perform some action that has to do with water", or perhaps more succinctly "the usual water-related thing". There are multiple interesting formations with this suffix like "brakumi" (to hug, ~= do the arm thing) and "plenumi" (to fulfill, non-literal compared to "plenigi", to fill).
A normal use of "akvi" would be, "La akvo akvas". (The water is being water.)
The -eco ending in Esperanto is frequently used to make abstract nouns, but it is not always necessary. It's much like "-ness" in English, so "akveco" would be like "waterness". You can have "ĝojo" and "ĝojeco" resembling "joy" and "joyfulness". Personally, I found its use to be somewhat technical, but speakers seem to know when it's necessary or desirable and use it then.
Of course, as I mentioned there's an organic quality of language that can't be reduced to rules, but both Esperanto and Ido are pleasantly regular. They both must have developed their own cultures of word formation as any two languages would. English speakers may form words a bit differently than French speakers, for example, but they both "work" so to speak. You might have to be a proficient speaker to know the culture or sense what the other person means.
Thanks for reading!