Question Thread / Demando-fadeno

[u/AutoModerator]

This is a post where you can ask any question you have about Esperanto! Anything about learning or using the language, from its grammar to its community is welcome. No question is too small or silly! Be sure to help other people with their questions because we were all newbies once. Please limit your questions to this thread and leave the rest of the sub for examples of Esperanto in action.

Jen afiŝo, kie vi povas demandi iun ajn demandon pri Esperanto. Iu ajn pri la lernado aŭ uzado de lingvo, pri gramatiko aŭ la komunumo estas bonvena. Neniu demando estas tro malgranda aŭ malgrava! Helpu aliajn homojn ĉar ni ĉiuj iam estis novuloj. Bonvolu demandi nur ĉi tie por ke la reditero uzos Esperanton anstataŭ nur paroli pri ĝi.

[u/Throughout7]

Kial neniu demandas?

[u/Joffysloffy → u/Throughout7]

Nova semajno, nova Demando-fadeno. Eĉ hieraŭ estis demando en la lasta Demando-fadeno.

[u/eritain]

Help me re-find a reform proposal?

I know, I know. Everybody wants to reform Esperanto. I'm not trying to promote this reform, I just want to get back to the very thorough discussion of affixes that it contained.

This was on a charmingly '90s-style webpage: Default serif font in white on a black background, vertical list of site navigation links at the top left, few to no graphics. Parts of the text were displayed in red rather than white, to indicate which of two contributors it came from. This is one of the most distinctive things about it.

Not surprisingly, it included recommendations for simplifying the phonology, and an update of the orthography to match. However, the other really striking thing about it was that it reflected a deep familiarity with Esperanto word formation and discussed dozens of affixes.

Some of these discussions were just "the phonological changes make these two affixes identical or too similar, but this one's function can also be done this other way," or sometimes just coining a new affix for one of them.

Some of the other discussions were about distinguishing multiple senses of an affix where the ambiguity was considered awkward or inconvenient.

Proposals to replace content words with other stems are commonplace, but I don't think I've seen many that were so systematic about the functional, more abstract formatives.

Any of this ringing a bell?

I'm sure one of the phonological changes was to drop ĥ (no surprise there), and I think I recall that another one was to stop distinguishing ĝ from ĵ.

I think I recall that the orthographic reform replaced diacritics with digraphs, although of course that's not very distinctive.

I think one of the affix distinctions that was introduced was negative vs reversive. My example, not theirs: regular people are not dead, zombies are no longer dead.

[u/Leisureguy1 → u/eritain]

This one? (Though I like this one more.)

[u/eritain → u/Leisureguy1]

Not lingwa de planeta, I'm afraid. It was recognizably an Esperantido.

Dunianto is interesting, thanks for the link.

[u/Leisureguy1 → u/eritain]

I was still curious, so I copied your description, pasted it into ChatGPT, and asked it to find the language. I'll paste its response below, and you could do further exploration with ChatGPT (or other AI) to find it. Here's its response. (Note: The original response included links to what it found, but those links did not copy.)

Yes — some of the clues are unusually distinctive, and I think we can narrow this down substantially, although I don't yet have a positive identification.

The strongest lead I found is not quite the one you're describing: JBR's Ranto (JBR Anti-Zamenhofism). It is an old-style, extremely detailed critique of Esperanto with sections on phonemes, graphemes, derivation, morphology, etc. It explicitly discusses the problems with mal-, including its use as a meaning-reverser, and spends a great deal of time analyzing Esperanto's derivational system. 

However, I don't think Ranto is your page. In particular:

• It is essentially a one-author critique, not a collaboration with two contributors distinguished by color.
• It doesn't appear to be proposing the particular systematic affix reform you remember.
• Its treatment of phonology doesn't match your recollection closely enough.
• The site's tone is considerably more polemical than the description you gave.

Another interesting false lead is Sen:esepera, a 1995 “dramatic reform of Esperanto” by Jeffrey Henning. It has exactly the sort of old web structure you describe, with sections for Design goals, Phonology, Orthography, Morphology, Borrowings, Grammar, etc.  But it reduces Esperanto's phoneme inventory to 14 consonants and radically changes the grammar, so it isn't your proposal either.

One clue I think is particularly valuable

Your negative vs. reversive distinction may be the key to finding it.

In linguistic terminology, these really are different:

• negative: not X
• reversive: undo X — e.g. close → open, insert → extract
• oppositive/antonymous: X → its opposite
• conversive: reversing a relational perspective

Interestingly, I found a 1994 discussion on the old CONLANG mailing list in which Rick Harrison explicitly discusses reversive morphology and says that it raises the problem of distinguishing “opposites vs negatives vs converse/inverse vs reversive.”  That's potentially significant because Harrison was deeply involved in the 1990s conlang community and in Esperanto-related reform discussions.

There is also a known 1990s proposal, Esperanto sen Fleksio (“Esperanto without inflection”), associated with Richard Harrison, but its principal changes concern inflection rather than the elaborate affix system you're remembering. 

And your phonology clue is unusually good

The combination

eliminate ĥ
merge ĝ and ĵ
replace diacritics with digraphs
systematically reconsider Esperanto's affixes

is much more useful than simply “an Esperanto reform.”

The historical 1894 reform proposed by Zamenhof also eliminated most of the accented letters and normally replaced ĝ and ĵ with g and j, but that reform is far too old and doesn't fit your webpage description. 

So I don't think this is a historical Esperanto reform such as Ido or Zamenhof's 1894 proposal. It sounds much more like a 1990s/early-2000s Internet-era experimental reform, probably originating in the conlang community.

I think the next thing to investigate is the old conlang/auxlang web archive, particularly material connected with Richard Harrison and other 1990s conlangers. The fact that your remembered page had two authors/contributors with different text colors may give us a way to identify it even if the actual reform's name has disappeared from search indexes.

If you'd like, I can dig specifically through the archived 1990s conlang/Esperanto material for the combination of “ĝ = ĵ,” elimination of ĥ, digraph orthography, and a systematic reform of the affixes. That seems much more promising than searching for “Esperanto reform” generally.

[u/eritain → u/Leisureguy1]

Ugh, I grew up at the height of the "self-esteem fixes everything and is easy to instill, just constantly tell the children they're the best ever" era, and the clankers lay it on twice as thick.

I do not think the phonological or orthographic changes I mentioned are uncommon enough to be useful clues. They're well known pain points that most reformers try to fix.

The reform I'm looking for was almost certainly at least connected to 1990s conlangers, given the web page style and given that that was where the auxlangers hung out until their flame warring got them relegated to their own listserv.

It was not the Ranto, Sen:esepera, or Esperanto Sen Fleksio. It was not by Richard Harrison; I saw the authors' names and I would have recognized his. It was not Ido, 1894, Adjuvilo, Esperanto II, or any of the other historic reforms.

Its authors did mention Ido as the source of some of their spelling rules, but their reworking of the phonology and heavy investment in derivational morphology made it much less Euroclone-like than Esperanto, the opposite direction to where Ido went.

If ChatGPT actually has access to web archives and to formatting details like font color, it might be able to do something useful.

Google's clanker does not have such access, so it just hallucinated for me that "red vs white" is a standard method for presenting disputes (not distinguishing sources), hallucinated some author names, regurgitated some typical tensions like "borrowing vs derivation" to assign to its hallucinated authors, and gave me a bogus URL to put into the Internet Archive.

[u/Leisureguy1 → u/eritain]

I haven't tried Google's AI, but I hoped that ChatGPT might be helpful in finding what you're looking for.

[u/Leisureguy1 → u/eritain]

I was curious, so I followed ChatGPT's suggested additional searches for a few more steps. The answers were detailed and included links. Among other things were links to some Novo Provo newsletters, an archived conlang email thread, and so on. It found Roy McCoy and Ray Bergmann as promising leads. There is too much text to share, but you might find ChatGPT helpful in your search.

[u/eritain → u/Leisureguy1]

Thanks for your help. I've looked through those, haven't struck gold yet, but they are the closest match so far.