Re: [glosalist] Sound "U" in Glosa

Llu=EDs Batlle pa grafo:

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 easyness! I consider that first steps into a language d= epends mostly on morphology, and a few vocabulary. Sure, English has very= little morphology (compared to Russian, or any latin language, for examp= le), and there might be few vocabulary (many mixing of words, as in p= hrasal verbs). Also, many meanings come from metaphoric things. For examp= le, you already exemplified by “give a laught”. BUT I found English syn= tax really really complex. In fact, I know even no rules for its syntax. = People always teached to me English “as-is”, by examples. Maybe I know so= me rules for very small sentences: “My house is near”, “I go to school”, = … even adding some prepositions. But when mixing a bigger amount of phr= ases, the result is always unpredictable to me. I mean, I never know how = good I write a good sentence. I sure don’t think that English syntax (t.i= . the order of words, the function of each word in a sentence) is easy.

= In general, I very much agree on your remarks about the english language an= d about the problems on learning it. It starts being very easy, but ends b= eing a nightmare. Well, sort of, maybe I’m exaggerating quite a bit.

So= , people who learn English (and to me agree Russian people, Spanish, Cata= lan (i.e. I could say people who speak latinic languages), and Chinese) f= ind a great unaffordable step when they come into “complex sentences” of = the English language. This gets shown when reading English literature, an= d not scientific texts or similar. Those scientific texts are quite easy = to understand, specially if foreigners write them (IMO).

Sure, I thi= nk that the way of teaching “no rules - learn by examples because of its = easyness” is an example of the complexity. If it’s that easy, that logica= l, 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 that b= ecomes: “it’s that ilogical, that we even cannot write rules”.

Well, thi= s is not exactly the case in glosa. I think that the rules are pretty easy= , as Robin explained in other message. You can consider these rules as a s= mall subset of the rules of english. The (current) rules also compel the l= earner to speak in a way as simple as possible, and I think that this is a = good point about Glosa.

But I also think that the Glosa rules/grammar are= not so close as they seem. There is still a lot of room for small changes= and improvements, but for them to happen we must speak as much Glosa as p= ossible. Of course there are still some things that need to be changed, bu= t they are just details. On the remark that seems that Glosa has no rules,= it is plain false. What happens is just that since only very few people c= ommunicate in Glosa, it does not seem to have a definite form, which is so= rt of true. Some parts of the language will be in a kind of void state unt= il speakers start to interact which each other and a common expression app= ears for those currently void parts. Anyway, most of the complains about t= he lack of a Glosa grammar come from people who would like to have a stand= arized and canonical description of the language, which is neither avaible= at the moment, neither possible for some language details, as I explained= some sentences before.

Therefore, IMO, the English syntax (and by exten= sion, the Glosa syntax) is the most complex I’ve never found when learnin= g languages. And by that, it has no clear rules, and their speakers even = “fieras” about that.

Hey! Glosa syntax is really easy. It’s just (i) the= modifiers go first (ii) Subject-Verb-Object order (iii) Use the “-co” stu= ff for most subordinate sentences, or just attach them “as-is” for other c= ases (like “I think (that), I believe (that), I say (that), etc”) (iv) Som= e other minor stuff for relative sentences (v) when the previous rules do = not apply, try to reexpress in a simpler way. And of course (vi) try to us= e too as easy words as possible.

So pleasy, try to understand that English= syntax is not Glosa Syntax, although in the simple cases it may seem so. =

Regards, Manolo.