Why don't we all start to talk Esperanto?

Irregular verbs exist due to how often they're used. Verb groups cut deeper into the language than that. Just as der/die/das for nouns has an origin, verbs being placed in certain groups must've had an origin, too.

Rujiel wrote:

Irregular verbs exist due to how often they're used.

I read an interesting paper a while ago that studied the "regularisation" of irregular verbs, based on data such as their frequency of use. If I recall correctly extremely high-frequency usage verbs such as go-went-gone had such long lifespans that their regularisation date was predicted to be well after humanity's expiration date

Not entirely related to what you were saying, but I thought it was interesting.

Twitter kutime limigas afiŝojn al 140 literspacoj. Feliĉe ni ne devas enŝovi niajn fikcietojn en tiun ujeton. Verŝajne estas akcepteblaj noveletoj ĝis mil vortoj.  Balzambufo! promesas trankviligon de la milopaj zorgoj, kiuj plagas vin ĉiutage:

1)Nia nova modelo estas pli facile portebla sed same bonefika.
2)Vundita kruro, likanta nazo, kaj rebelema tempremento -- ĉion ĉi vi forgesos, karaj gepatroj, lekante vian balzambufon.
3)De via loka provizanto, aĉetu balzambufoberojn, kiuj nutras la balzambufon kaj helpas al ĝi resti tre efika.

Thora wrote:

"Twitter ordinarily limit posters to 140 literspacoj. Happily we do not must shove our slight fictions into that slight container. Probably is acceptable slight short stories until thousand words. Balzambufo! Promise a calm-ize of the 1000-tet cares, which plagues you dailily"

hehe. Somehow I thought Esperanto would lend itself well to automatic translation.

Esperanto allows you to combine roots in order to generate new words, and deriving meaning from those words require quite a bit of inference and intelligence.
you won't find "literspacoj" in any vortaro, but any speaker will understand litero(letter)+spaco(space)=space for a letter (as in, twitter allows only 140 characters per message), but i doubt we have computers that can understand things like that, yet...

slightly more on-topic.
i've been wondering... why are they called 一段 and 五段 verbs? were there 二段, 三段 and 四段 verbs in old japanese?

Thora wrote:

"Twitter ordinarily limit posters to 140 literspacoj. Happily we do not must shove our slight fictions into that slight container. Probably is acceptable slight short stories until thousand words. Balzambufo! Promise a calm-ize of the 1000-tet cares, which plagues you dailily"

hehe. Somehow I thought Esperanto would lend itself well to automatic translation.

Reminds me of the time I watched a movie with Japanese subs that were autotranslated into Chinese, and then autotranslated again into English.

Things like "Light River, why fret?"  and "I breezy White Moon" were the most sensical of the lines I read. Took me a while to realize their names were translated as well. A trip it was.

Last edited by ropsta (2009 September 06, 4:27 pm)

I'd say it's still relevant. For example, ふ still retains that sound (the f sound in ふ is quite special, it's not in many languages outside of Japanese).

Learning basic stuff about classic/old Japanese makes a lot of stuff in modern Japanese make more sense, why the godan verb conjugations look the way they do is just one example.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 September 07, 2:14 pm)

why is the one for replace written as 換える ? is there another form where the え isn't used?