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Re: [Latejami] General comment re endings

Well, in Latejami, the allocation of vowel to part-of-speech is in decreasing order of the importance of the part of speech in question. The verb is the most important part of speech, so it gets the first vowel, "a". The second vowel, "e", gets allocated to those words that can modify the verb, i.e. adverbs, which also happen to be able to be case tags. The third vowel, "i", denotes the next most important part-of-speech, the noun, and the fourth, "o", denotes the words that modify the noun, the adjectives. Finally, the "u" gets allocated to disjuncts, which come outside the general sentence structure again, as a sort of extra thing that modifies the entire embedded sentence. I find that order, if not logical, then at least definitely natural.
 
Whereas, Esperanto is more concerned about mimicking the sounds of Romance languages than illustrating general linguistic structure. Hence, adjectives end in "-a" because that is a typical (feminine) adjectival ending in Romance languages like Spanish. Adverbs end in "-e" just like adverbs that end in "-mente" (and, I'm sure, others) in Romance languages. Verb infinitives end in "-i" because of the "-ir"- or "-ire"- ending verb infinitives in Romance languages. Nouns end in "-o" because that is a common ending for a masculine noun in Romance languages. On the other hand, verb imperatives end in "-u" for no apparent reason whatsoever, just because Ludwig Zamenhof happened to have one vowel left over and that was as good a place to get rid of it as any.
 
Why, what other parts of speech are there in Latejami that do not require one of these five word endings? All the test sentences I have seen, or can think of, use only those endings for each of their words.
 
I don't give a damn about any of the other endings in Esperanto, only the vowels, in order to compare them with Latejami's. I'm not sure that they would fit in any more logically than the rest of the Esperanto endings anyway.
 
Anyway, that's my reason for thinking that Latejami does do better than Esperanto with its endings. And I certainly find my above explanation a good way of remembering what the endings are in Latejami, and what each of them is for.
 
Geoff
 
On 21/12/05, MorphemeAddict@hidden.email <MorphemeAddict@hidden.email > wrote:
In a message dated 12/20/2005 8:20:42 PM Central Standard Time, geoff.hacker@hidden.email writes:


I find it very elegant the way that you can always tell the part of speech of the word by the vowel ending on the word, similarly to Esperanto. Whereas, I find the allocation of vowel to part-of-speech more logical in Latejami:

a - verb
e - adverb/case tag
i - noun
o - adjective
u - disjunct

As opposed to the Esperanto:

a - adjective
e - adverb
i - verb infinitive
o - noun
u - verb imperative

Geoff


Why is one more logical than the other?  And what about all the other parts of speech in Latejami?  Or the other endings in Esperanto?  How do they fit in?

I've always felt that Esperanto's endings were not optimal, but I don't think Latejami does much better.

stevo

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