Adventures in funny old phrasebooks

Some time ago, back in March, I bought this cute little 'universal phrasebook' in the massive second hand bookshop in Rochester. 

As you can see, it covers 25 European languages (not all, and not only), and each section has the same phrase given in each language across a double page spread. So I can tell you that luggage is les bagages, il bagaglio, el equipaje, a bagagem, and bagajul in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian (Rumanian, in this book, as it's old) just by running a finger across one of the pages. 

Like me, you might have spotted the anomaly that is Esperanto (an invented language, unlike the others), and being a language nerd I immediately turned to the grammatical description of the language that's helpfully provided at the start of each section (for languages associated with a particular country, it also has useful traveller advice such as what side of the road to drive on and how to address letters). 

There, it informed me that the language has suffixation to indicate many meanings, including -ino for feminine, and -ido for juvenile - I inferred this from the examples: 

hundo - a dog

hundino - a bitch

hundido - a puppy

There's ones for big and small and many and so on:

hundeto - a little dog

hundego - a big dog

hundaro - a pack of dogs

And even one for a kennel, hundujo. Being a language nerd, I was of course immediately infuriated: nowhere does it tell me how to say 'a young female dog'. Is it hundinido or hundidino? Does one indicate gender or age closest to the noun? I just did it in English: gender was closer to the noun, which we normally attribute to it being more 'inherent' (this is a bit of a fuzzy notion sometimes), and I didn't say a female young dog. So if Esperanto follows this rule of more inherent characteristics being closer to the noun, it should be hundinido. But then I found this on a forum which seems to say the opposite: 

For instance, if we want to say "a tiny female kitten," we commence with the root kat-, giving the idea only of "cat"; then add -id- (suffix for "offspring of") kat-id- = kitten; then -in- (female suffix) kat-id-in- = kitten, female; then -et- (diminutive suffix) kat-id-in-et- = kitten female tiny; we have now got the root and all of the suffixes, and we might want a noun, so add O, kat-id-in-et-o = a tiny female kitten. If we place -et- after kat-, we commence by speaking of a "tiny cat", for kateto has that meaning, so katetidino would be the "female offspring of a tiny cat." If we reversed the three suffixes, we should get kat-in-et-id-o = offspring of a tiny female cat. This exaggerated example of building up suffixes will show the importance of placing them in their natural order. The student cannot make a mistake if he commences with the root and forms a word of each suffix in succession; for instance, hund-o = a dog, hund-id-o = a puppy, hundid-in-o = a female puppy, hundidin-eg-o = a huge female puppy.

Notice that the English word kitten has the meaning 'offspring' built into it, so there's no way to express this any other way than with that meaning closest to the noun. I think this might be a case of an English-speaking mindset obscuring the alternative options that are logically possible. 

But also, it's interesting that katetidino ('cat-small-offspring-female') doesn't apparently mean 'a small female kitten' (katidineto) and that presumably katinideto ('cat-female-offspring-small') would mean 'small offspring of a female cat', as there is no possessive marker in this word. Anyway, all this talk of 'natural order' is very reminiscent of the way that Latin grammarians would talk of the parts of the sentence being in the 'natural order' - which, of course, is only natural if that's what you're used to. 

My favourite translation of them all, though, was hundaĉo, translated as 'cur'. Clearly this is another suffix, but what does it mean? It doesn't help that I don't really know what 'cur' means. I've only ever heard it as an insult, not as its literal meaning, so the best I could infer was that it's some kind of dog-negative meaning. I looked up the suffix elsewhere and it means 'of low quality', so you find it in the words for 'scrawl' and 'shack', and now I'm very happy to learn that this useful suffix exists and that a 'cur' is a low-quality dog. 

German suddenly makes Esperanto make sense

As you know, I'm learning German and dabbling in Esperanto. Esperanto is primarily based on romance languages as far as the vocabulary goes, with a bit of English and German thrown in, and its cases are a bit like German. One thing that was bugging me about Esperanto was that when I learnt about subordinate clauses, there was always a comma after the main verb. Like this:

I hope, that I get something nice for Xmas. 

This is weird to me, as it's just not the way we do it in English and I can't help reading it with a strange Shatneresque style. But I have discovered that German does this (romance languages do not, at least in my experience), so it appears to be another aspect of Esperanto borrowed from German rather than the romance languages.

Esperanto 2: Warning, contains meat

Esperanto has certain suffixes for various grammatical purposes, and others that add some extra meaning. One of the latter is -aĵ, which you add to the name of an animal in order to get the word for its meat. Some examples:

Chicken (the bird) - koko, chicken (meat) - kokaĵo

Cow/bull - bovo, beef - bovaĵo

One of the sentences I had to translate was kokaĵo estas viando, which means 'chicken is meat'. Now obviously the word for 'chicken' in that sentence has the 'meat' suffix already in it, so there's a certain redundancy here. It's a bit like saying chicken meat is meat in English. (Incidentally, I don't know if any other language has a suffix specifically for 'meat', and I don't know if it can be extended to fruits, for instance, as in the flesh of a peach, which I'm sure does exist in other languages.)

I was thinking about this redundancy and its counterparts in English. We don't have exactly the same thing, of course, as our words for meat are either the same (chicken, fish) or a different word entirely (beef, pork). So I suppose what we have is a kind of semantic redundancy: 'meat' is part of the meaning of beef. In other words, beef is a hyponym of meat. But someone might not know that beef is a meat (say they were learning English and you were explaining what the word meant, for instance). That wouldn't happen with Esperanto because the meaning is right there in the word if you know what the parts mean. It's 'compositional'. 

That said, people are not always that conscious of the grammatical parts of words, especially if the word is common. It's pretty usual for me to discover that many of my second and third year students can't correctly identify clauses as past or present tense, for instance. (Sorry students, if you're reading, but it's true.) They know as a native speaker what it means, but it's subconscious knowledge. 

And we have comparable redundancy in English. Imagine if you said I've been hurt in the past. Well, I've been hurt is past tense so in the past isn't necessary. It is possible that it might remove the 'immediate past' meaning that we would normally understand from the perfect tense if it's uttered out of the blue, but in context it is definitely redundant and still perfectly fine to say. Similarly, a little duckling doesn't normally mean a duckling that is particularly small compared to other ducklings, and the -ling tells us it's little anyway. 

I might need to find a fluent Esperantist to give me some 'native' speaker judgements on whether the sentence I had to translate has the 'explaining the meaning of the word' interpretation or not. 

Incidentally, Esperanto is literally the only language that uses the character ĵ, which means it's not on my computer's keyboard and is hard to type and that's annoying. 

Esperanto 1: Duolingo

I've been learning Esperanto. I'm doing this not because I have too much free time, but because I'm a big language nerd but don't feel like I have time to practice languages as much as you need to to get good, so Esperanto allows for quick progress and no need to actually speak it.

I'm also interested in it because I'm interested in invented languages generally: given that they can have any rules their inventors choose, why do they have the rules they have? So I'm keeping one eye open for the grammar quirks as I learn it.

You'll notice I've put a numeral in the title of this post; that's normally a death knell for a series of blog posts but I will attempt to follow it up with more.

I'm using Duolingo to learn it, as the much awaited option to do so became available a while ago. I find Duolingo pretty good. It's not perfect, but it's easy to use and does the trick well enough, and is free on all my various devices. I'm supplementing it, though, when I feel that it doesn't give me enough information. It likes to drip-feed grammar, but I like having the full paradigm so I can see the patterns more clearly. And sometimes something it teaches me raises a question: it told me, for instance, that the -in- suffix marks a noun as feminine, and bebo means 'baby', but it didn't tell me if bebo has a feminine form or is used for any kind of baby (cultures differ over whether a baby can be an 'it' or not). I looked it up and in this case, bebino does also exist.

So, for now, just my first impressions: I like it, I suppose, as an intellectual exercise, but I'm not loving it. Maybe because I'm not actually using it? Or maybe I haven't got into it yet - so far it seems more like a cobbled-together mishmash of Italian and English than its own language, which I'm certain is not the case.