Logic?

LOGIC — I . . . .

One of the reasons which Esperantists give for what they describe as the superiority of their language over the naturalistic auxiliaries is its autonomy.

That is, they say, you have a somewhat limited number of roots and some forty or so affixes with fixed meanings and you are then free to combine them logically to give you any number of derivatives. If you come across a word like sinintermetema you can build up the meaning logically from its component parts, or if you are ever stumped for a word like inauspicious you should be able to make up your own Esperanto word from the simple roots and affixes. Thus, they say, with a little knowledge you can read a very great deal and cope successfully with words, which, if they were in a foreign tongue, would have to be looked up in a dictionary.

This sounds very good and there is no doubt that it works for quite a large number of cases. But does it work all the time? To tell the truth there are a great number of words where the logic has just oozed out of the Esperanto word, and if we come across such words as alplando, alsidanto, alservistino we shall never get their meaning without looking them up in the dictionary.

Can you or anyone understand the following from their component parts?

al (to)

fari (to make) ……………….. alfari?
milito (war) ………………….. almiliti?
nomo (name) ………………… alnomo?

el (out)

devi (must) -ig ………………. eldevigi?
krii (to cry) ………………….. elkrii?
lasi (to let) -il (instrument). ellasilo?
paroli (to speak) …………….. elparoli?

Even the expert Esperantist would probably go astray with some of these and others they might get right only because they have already been learned from the dictionary. We invite you to put down on a piece of paper what you take these words to mean and then look at the foot of page four to see how many you got right. [We will place them at the bottom of the page, please don't look till you try.]

There are many other cases of illogicality.

If vagono means “railway carriage” and -ar a “collection”, vagonaro means a “train”: so hom-aro should therefore mean a collection of human beings or “crowd” but yet it means “humanity”. Why should subbruli (underburn) mean “smoulder” or subridi (under-laugh) mean “smile”?

There are a great many others where the logic is weak, but where in the context the meaning becomes tolerably clear; these are all right in reading but how often can the Esperantist form them for himself when he is speaking the language? Who for instance wishing to use the word “direct” would think of senpere (sen “without”, per “by means of”)?

It must not be thought that we demand an absolute and strict logic. On the contrary we maintain that this is both unattainable and undesirable. Perhaps the most logical language we have is Ido, where a high degree of logical formations is attained, but only at the cost of such cumbrous forms as martelagar “to hammar”, limitizar “to limit”, legifistaro “legislature”, and even Ido sometimes falls down on simple points of logic. No, we do not object to illogical forms. Logical structure is desirable up to a point but there are other considerations such as simplicity and naturalness.

We will give a few illogical forms in IL [Occidental]. For example station is regularly derived according to form from star “to stand” but the meaning has been extended quite a lot; constant is not just constant; ínvalid is not the semantic opposite of valid; passar, passage, passagero are only loosely connected by meaning; and familiari from familie has acquired a special meaning of its own.

There is however one thing about these and practically all other illogicalities in IL, that they are used and known by millions of people throughout the countries of Western culture, so much so that they are used without any feeling of illogicality at all. On the other hand the Esperanto illogicalities are for the most part peculiar to that language and are therefore enigmas to everyone.

It is interesting however to observe that in a few cases Esperanto forms have been influenced by international usage — regula, “regular” in the sense of “at repeated intervals” is in fact an irregular form.

Which then is the better course? To accept forms, illigical indeed and therefore difficult to non-Europeans, but already known to millions of Europeans, uneducated as well as educated; or to fabricate strange derivatives that even the most erudite will not understand?

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LOGIC - II . . . . .

The development of a wide vocabulary is often made by means of affixes or again by compounds where two elements or more are joined together. It is a fundamental rule that in such compounds the last indicates the basic idea which is modified by the preceding root or roots.

Many of these compounds in the existing auxiliaries are easily understood even though the logic may be a bit astray. If however we are definitely striving after logic and proclaim our system as logical we must apply the rule strictly. In actual fact as the “naturalists” are always averring, logic cannot be accepted as an absolutely binding rule. If we proclaim our belief in logic we must abide by it and this is where Esperanto does, not infrequently, fall down.

For instance in “Esperanto” March 1955 (and elsewhere) we find the words tagordo, librotenado, subskribo. None of these are logical at all and have to be learned to be understood. Tagordo (day, order) might mean all kinds of things, e.g. “the tagordo is Sunday, Monday, etc.” represents perhaps the really logical meaning and not “agenda” its Esperanto equivalent.

Again librotenado answers exactly to the English “book-keeping” but a bookseller or library keeps books equally well.

Subskribo is literally “a writing under” and its logical meaning would surely be something like “footnote” or “postscript” but certainly not “signature”, which in some documents may in fact be written at the top.

We must also doubt the logic of such forms as egalanimeco (equal, soul, “quality”) for “equanimity” and artefarita (art, made) for “artificial” though both are the exact Latin counterparts, and kromvirino (apart from, woman) for “concubine” (although konkubino is also used).

Ido the most logical language of them all evades these pitfalls with agendo, kontado, signaturo, sereneso, artificala, konkubino.

In the “linguist” October 1953 there were two words close together showing how precarious is the hold of the human mind on logic. There was teršovilego “a big instrument for pushing earth”, an excellent description of a bulldozer.

Almost next door to it and constructed on exactly the same model was the word vaporrulilage, “a steamroller” although logically it should mean “a big instrument for rolling steam”.

Wilfrid E. Reeve
INTERNATIONAL MEMORANDUM
Revuette de British Interlingue Association
Jan.-Marte 1955, Juli-Sept. 1955

The Answers:

to adapt; to conquer; surname; to extort; to blab; trigger; to pronounce.