G
Gene Wirchenko
Consider the sentence.
He made a pot of Sumatran coffee.
She made a pot of Sumatran coffee.
I am constrained by English to specify the flavour of genitals of the
coffee maker even though it is completely irrelevant to the process of
making coffee. That I call obsession with gender.
English has another obsession. I discovered it when I learned
Esperanto which is even more obsessed. TIME. You can't talk about
anything happening without specifying past, present, future. You can
though say that something habitually happens, without specifying when.
And yet it misses a verb form for was and continues to be. e.g.
Q: At that time, who was the executive director?
A: It was Fred.
If Fred is still the executive director, you can say
A: It was and continues to be Fred.
but there is no one verb form for this. I would like it.
You can in Chinese. If tense is important to be explicit, you add some
adverb. E.g. I come tomorrow.
You notice Asian speakers, often say strange things like
my wife, he sick.
Frog die.
Please give 12 egg.
To them gender, tense, and plurality need not be specified. They are
implied.
AIUI, if the number is stated, then the plural morpheme is not
used. With plurality, it was already specified by "12".
Esperanto is like English in its concern with precise tense, gender
and plurality. It has some other obsessions of its own, roughly
equivalent to direct/indirect object though it has many other uses.
I prefer to be able to not specify. I have a private shorthand.
In it, "e" is the third-person, singular, animate pronoun. I can
specify the sex by adding a flag, but I rarely do.
I suppose Mandarin might become the next interlanguage as English
fades. Bahasa Indonesia was an early attempt at an interlanguage
devised by traders moving between thousands of islands. It is easy to
pronounce, and has a relatively simple grammar.
I don't know much about Mandarin other than the code I wrote at
http://mindprod.com/products.html#INWORDS to convert integers into
words, including Mandarin. It was the simplest of all languages I
tackled (Icelandic was the hairiest). I gather the difficulties are
pronunciation and the many many synonyms for the same word.
(Makes for great fun with puns).
There are approximately 1,600 Chinese syllables. That is
considering tone. If you do not consider tone, then there are about
500. English has about 144,000 different syllables.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko