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Habe-Es, mero bi
Gary Miller (Gary Miller <gmillernd@...>) on October 13, 2012
| > THE PROBLEM: DIFFERENT LANGUAGES, DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS OF BE |
Consider:
EN: I am cold. (GL: Mi este frigi.)
Translate directly, for example, into German:
DE: *Ich bin kalt.
But it doesn’t mean the same as the English! It means, “I am cold-hearted.” Instead German (and many other languages, including Esperanto) uses the structure:
DE: Mir ist kalt. EN (literally): “For me it is cold.”
Which structure is more logical? I hate to sound like President Clinton, but it all depends on your definition of IS. The English word BE simply does not have the same meaning as the German word SEIN.
To complicate things further, some languages (for example, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese) often omit the word IS, saying simply, “I student.”
How can we come up with a universal definition of the word BE? The last solution one wants to use in making an international auxiliary language is, “Just do it like in MY language.”
| > HOGBEN’S SOLUTION: MATHEMATICAL LOGIC |
In inventing Interglossa, Hogben defined ES (then EQUE) as “=.” Therefore saying:
GL: *An es pato.
is illogical, because a person does not equal a quality. However:
GL: An es u pato andro.
is logical, because here a person = a person.
Other possibilities using verboids logically produce:
GL: An habe (u) pato. “He has (an) illness.”
GL: An este pato. “He feels sick.”
The hope is that the more universally understood logics of mathematics will lead to a more universal use of ES.
| > THE SECOND MEANING OF ES |
In Euro-Glosa (the book 18 Steps) ES was also used to mean EXIST. For example:
GL: (Il) es poli speci farmako. “There are (exist) many kinds of drugs.”
(The IL was an impersonal pronoun borrowed from Interlingua, but has since been dropped.)
I have used this construction much in the past; a more logical structure, however- and I will pay more careful attention to this in the future- may be:
GL: Pe pote detekti poli speci farmako.
This would prevent the word ES from having two meanings.
| > IN CONCLUSION |
1) If you don’t want to use ES/HABE/ESTE in this manner, just realize that it may be misunderstood by peoples of different languages. I always say, “Expect variations.” Just keep using Glosa!
2) Applying a mathematical logic to the international language problem may help us to find a culturally neutral definition for the word BE.
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