[glosalist] Sound "U" in Glosa

On 7/14/05, Robin Fairbridge Gaskell <drought-breaker@…> wrote= :

At 09:50 PM 7/13/05, you wrote:

Except of flame, the only significic= ant thought in that esperanto-thread is that Llu=EDs offers to create an= alternative Glosa-branch ‘cause of the neat idea of the language and it= s strange realization. The words “strange realization” almost concern th= e English-like grammar of Glosa. *** Nothing strange about Glosa’s Englis= h-like grammar. Ron Clark with an encyclopedic knowledge of languag= e decided that the home team won on points, when it came to logical synta= x. So, Glosa does not have English as its main guide to grammar … beca= use the authors are English. Glosa was designed to be a language with mi= nimal grammatical morphology: it followed the minimal inflections of Engl= ish to end up with virtually NO inflections; thus it can be seen as havin= g a structure, which is a streamlined, standardised version of that of En= glish.

I’m not English native, sure…. and I can tell you that I consider=

English a ‘Troya’s horse’. I’m tired hearing people talking about its easy= ness! I consider that first steps into a language depends mostly on morphol= ogy, and a few vocabulary. Sure, English has very little morphology (compar= ed to Russian, or any latin language, for example), and there might be fe= w vocabulary (many mixing of words, as in phrasal verbs). Also, many meanin= gs come from metaphoric things. For example, you already exemplified by “gi= ve a laught”. BUT I found English syntax really really complex. In fact, = I know even no rules for its syntax. People always teached to me English “a= s-is”, by examples. Maybe I know some rules for very small sentences: “My h= ouse is near”, “I go to school”, … even adding some prepositions. But whe= n mixing a bigger amount of phrases, the result is always unpredictable to = me. I mean, I never know how good I write a good sentence. I sure don’t thi= nk that English syntax (t.i. the order of words, the function of each word = in a sentence) is easy.

So, people who learn English (and to me agree Russ= ian people, Spanish, Catalan (i.e. I could say people who speak latinic lan= guages), and Chinese) find a great unaffordable step when they come into “c= omplex sentences” of the English language. This gets shown when reading Eng= lish literature, and not scientific texts or similar. Those scientific text= s are quite easy to understand, specially if foreigners write them (IMO).

= Sure, I think that the way of teaching “no rules - learn by examples becaus= e of its easyness” is an example of the complexity. If it’s that easy, that= logical, please write the syntax rules. It’s nosense to me telling that: “= it’s much logical, you even don’t need rules to understand that”. To me tha= t becomes: “it’s that ilogical, that we even cannot write rules”.

From my = point of view, metaphorically, thinking about a “curve of learning”, I woul= d think about English by a “f(x)=3Dexp(x)”. About Spanish I would say that = it has a bigger difficulty at the beginning (a much complex morfology compa= red to English, and maybe more often found irregularities), but the syntax = is much simpler - that is, after knowing morphology and a simple amount of = vocabulary, you can write easily even complex sentences. The same about Rus= sian, but with a much more complex morphology - also, with a much simpler = and ruled syntax. Russian syntax even allows for a lot of freedom in word = order.

Therefore, IMO, the English syntax (and by extension, the Glosa syn= tax) is the most complex I’ve never found when learning languages. And by t= hat, it has no clear rules, and their speakers even “fieras” about that.