On 11/16/05, Thomas Alexander <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I asked about the 10 lesson course because as I was
> doing e-mail last night, for some reason I started
> thinking about the guy who was my first tutor in
> Esperanto.  I have never met him and I could not
> remember his name.  Suddenly, I had a vague
> recollection  that his initials were JH.  It turns
> out that they are.  I hooked up my old computer to
> check.  Turns out, though, that it was Jim Howard,
> not Jim Henry.  Too bad.  That would have been a
> fun connection to finally make.  Looks like you
> started just after Dana and I took the course.

I know Jim Howard -- or a Jim Howard,
anyway; he lives in Augusta GA, & doesn't come
to our Atlanta Esperanto meetings very
often because it's a long drive for him -- about two
hours.  There are some pictures of him
and his family on our web site, though,
from the last meeting he came to (May
of this year).

http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/esp/esma/bildoj/bildoj.htm

I remember my own FEC tutor's name
well - Paul Hopkins; I met his wife Maria
at the kursaro in San Francisco in 1998,
and was looking forward to seeing
them at the KEA/ELNA kongreso
in Sidney BC, but they didn't attend.

> I consider myself fairly fluent in German, but I still
> find it useful to run documents through Google's
> language tools.  Sometimes its even readable.  Most of
> the time it saves me a trip or two to the dictionary
> for technical words which I don't know.  Other times
> it's just funny - like the title "Over the bungle he
> language of the pseudo Esperanto."

In looking up a few of the many words
I didn't know, I discovered the German cognate
of E-o "fusxi", so that's one reason
to consider the day not an entire waste.


> It might be interesting to point out that around the
> same time, Zamenhof went to lengths to explain that
> Esperanto doesn't have diphthongs.  In the same
> explanation he also had to point out that balau has
> two syllables after the L and baldaux has one.  I
> wonder if there was some fashion against diphthongs
> at the time.

Weird.  That seems totally disingenuous.

> > When talking about the sounds found in
> > Esp. and not Vp. he talks about how hard
> > they are for the French etc. to pronounce;
> > when talking about the front rounded vowels
> > in Vp. he says they allow for more short words.
> > (But I barely know German, so I
> > may well have misunderstood him.)

> That's more or less what he said.  I personally am
> struggling to keep "e" distinct from "ä".   This is a
> problem I never had in German.  BTW, it seems that

I sometimes find myself tending to pronounce
Vp. ä as /&/, like the same letter in Finnish (which
I've studied much less seriously, and less recently,
than German).

> others have this problem too, since varous
> explanations
> of how to pronounce them conflict with each other -
> leaving us with "Ä" pronounced "as E in 'mEt'" and
> "E" pronounced "as _e_ in English 'get'."  This is
> on top of my tendency to pronounce ö too much like ü
> (which I'm already working on.)

It's silly to give English examples without identifying
the dialect, and giving an IPA or X-SAMPA transcription.
Almost all of the online descriptions of Vp.
phonology suffer from this problem.
I think you mentioned that you rhyme "get" with "met";
for me "get" rhymes with "pit", both have /I/
while "met" has /E/, roughly the Vp. |ä|.

I don't have much problem with ö and ü
in isolation, or in most contexts, but in some
contexts they are hard to keep separate.


> Leo mentioned that many national languages have more
> than 5 vowels.  This is true, but are they the same
> more-than-5? ......

No.  French and German have a fair bit
of overlap but I think each has some vowels
the other doesn't have.  English has very
little overlap with either of them, considering
that the pure vowels scarcely occur
in English, /E/ is not in contrast with /e/,
and the retroflex or rhoticised schwa
is not really the same as /0/ (German
and Vp. |ö|).  I think Finnish uses
a subset of the German vowels, but
its |ä| is like "a" in my dialect's "hat" (X-SAMPA
/&/) rather than Vp. (& German?) /E/.
I don't know if the Finnish |e| is closer
to /e/ or /E/ or if (as seems likely)
it has both sounds as allophones.

> > but it does seem that Volapük could stand to
> > have some more specific affixes, the umecaj only
> > being used as a last resort.
>
> I don't know.  From a "what can an artificial language
> be like" point of view, this system has a certain
> charm.

Yes, quite.

> > Even funnier, in reason #24 he seems to
> > say (correct me if I've misread him)
> > that Vp's prefixes and suffixes have a
> > very narrow meaning, while several
> > of Esperanto's "infixes" (i.e. suffixes
> > which are always followed by a part-of-speech
> > ending), such as "ad", "ont", "ind" and "obl"
> > have a vague, confusing meaning.
>
> That's not how I read it - not that the way I read it
> hits any harder.  Google translates it with the word
> "involutions", a word I was not familiar with, but
> whose rhetorical meaning seems to fit.  My German
> dictionary supports my initial thought that he was
> just talking about how Esperanto's suffixes are
> "shoved in" to the middle of the word.
>
> "The many shovings in /involutions of suffixes into
> the middle of words makes the words concerned in
> Esperanto very difficult to understand and unclear,
> or easily confusable.  e.g. babilADo, farONTa,
> kredINTa, triOBLa... Volapük, in contrast, has just
> prefixes and suffixes with a specific meaning, without
> shovings-in/involutions in the middle of basic
> [simple]
> words."

It sounds like he is accusing E-o of using
infixes, then, though he doesn't use
the exact term (perhaps it hadn't been coined
yet?).

> I think the issue is that Esperanto is hard to use
> because you put the "suffixes" on before the
> grammatical endings.

That's assuming he understands the separation
between grammatical endings and roots in E-o;
given all his other mistakes about E-o grammar,
and his seeming oblivousness to the way
Vp suffixes can end up in the middle of
a word when more suffixes (esp. -ik
or the various verb endings) follow,
I wouldn't count on it.


> > Both are fairly interesting, but obviously
> > if you have to pick one, the original version
> >(or the whole range of early versions) is the
> > more historically important.

> Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that there may be more than
> one form of "volapük rigik."  That's a study for
> later on ... much later.

Yes; I don't know exactly where I read about it,
but apparently Vp went through several
changes (maybe all minor, maybe not)
between the first sketch published in
_Sionsharfe_, the first book in German,
and the later editions of the reference
grammar.  As far as I know the earliest
material online is Sprague's 1888
_Handbook of Volapük_, by which time
the language had already pretty much
settled down as it remained until 1931.
But the American Philosophical Society
has a collection of early Vp materials
-- not really close, but closer to you
than me.

> 30 reasons that Volapük is better than Esperanto -
> from a description from 1895 attributed to Schleyer:

> 7 - the sounds sx and cx are unnessary. Real languages
> use only jx and gx.

Is that what he was saying?  I read that as
objecting to superfluous circumflexed letters,
saying that Vp represents the same sounds
with plain Latin letters.

> 8 - Volapük doesn't have ablative.  (?)

And E-o does?

> 9 - Vp doesn't have words like fingrn, membrjn,
> schtrumpjn, orandschjn.

Sounds like he was working from a very
badly proofread textbook.


> 16 - Using prepositions instead of real cases is
> a waste of words.

But the Vp. case endings all add one syllable,
same as the equivalent prepositions in Eo.

> 17 - Vp has just one declenation.  Esperanto has
> two genitives - de and da.

Actually "da" is a partitive.  Does Vp have
a clear way of marking partitives?  I don't recall.

gjâ-zym-byn has different postpositions
for possession, ownership, property,
part/whole, and personal relationship
genitives, as against Vp's vague "-a"
and E-o's "de"; but I don't think I have
a partitive postpostion.  I need
to work on that.


> 19 - Esperanto has two female suffixes - in and nj.
> I don't know how to pronounce nj.  I also don't know
> whether I'm supposed to pronounce the G in -ing-.

The pronunciation of |ng| is often unclear
in modern Eo textbooks; it's not surprising
that a textbook with errors like "schtrumpjn"
would have gaps like this too.

> 20 - more wasted words.  It takes two words to say
> "bigger" in Esperanto.

But does it take any more _syllables_ than Vp.?


 > 23 - Volapük doesn't mix two kinds of us-case into
> one -us ending.

This is one of his strongest points, and I'm
surprised he doesn't make more points
along the same lines -- ballyhooing Vp's
concise tense/aspect prefixes, for instance.


> 26 - If you want to understand a word in Esperanto
> you have to know all the bits.  We don't have this
> problem in Volapük.

Um, right.


> 29  - Volapük is flee flom the lotten letter R.

Another good point, if it weren't vitiated
by the front rounded vowels, the initial
affricates |z| (/ts/), |x| /ks/ and |c| (/dZ/ or /tS/?).
Overall I guess that E-o and Vp. would be about even
as far as ease of pronunciation for
a speaker of, say, Japanese
is concerned.  Vp has more vowels,
E-o has some tricky diphthongs; E-o
has more and trickier consonant clusters,
but Vp has enough clusters to present
a real problem for someone whose
native language has none.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/esp.htm
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