Esperanto: european or asiatic language? - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Claude Piron (ч. notes)

Notoj

[1]

The reader with a high level of linguistic competence will rightly criticize the use of only one criterion. But he should remember that this text is directed to laymen. It would not be possible in so short a compass to treat the very complex question of criteria for linguistic typology. For example, many take the prime criterion of isolation to be the fact that in an isolating language the majority of the words are monomorphemic. But if we applied this criterion, Chinese would cease to belong among the isolating languages and would become agglutinative. That would be an interesting and defensible thesis, although presumably surprising for many. But since linguists generally continue to class Chinese among isolating languages, we limit ourselves to a single, if fundamental, characteristic, enabling us to retain the traditional divisions of languages. The typological considerations presented in the present work should be regarded more as a device for clarifying the position of Esperanto in relation to other languages than as a new way of approaching the problem of typology. We are well aware that our criterion would raise difficult problems if one were to apply it, for example, to situating the Bantu languages. For the same goal of simplicity and the same limitations of time, we have not considered the so-called “polysynthetic” type, into which some American Indian languages, among others, may be classified.

[2]

E.g. Mr. Ric Berger in Historia del Lingua International, Morges: Editiones Interlingua, 1971, p. 2.

[3]

In this regard Esperanto differs significantly from the Esperanto-derived project Ido. The transition in Esperanto from infano ‘child’ to infanoj ‘children’ is not-inflectional; it is an additive process: infan-o-j (child-noun-plural) exactly identical to the Chinese hái-z-men. The Ido plural is formed not by addition but by substitution of -i for -o: infanto ‘child’, infanti ‘children’. Structurally, this is quite a different matter.