* like Chinese

Indo-European

http://books.google.fr/books?id...hinese&f=false

I don't see where "likewise Chinese" appears.

then you should consider buying new glasses...

I found it (you didn't highlight it for me). These are different uses, though.

Could another English speaker check?

No they're not. They're exactly the same use with the exact same words...

@NNC

Would you mind my tagging this 'Lie'?

Isolating languages have low morpheme/word ratio (the lower, the more isolating it is). Esperanto requires most words to have a desinence (-o, -a, -as, -is, etc...), i.e. most words have at least 2 morphemes.

If it were isolating, 'o', 'a', 'as', 'is', etc. could be used by itself. Which is not the case.

[I've deleted a message by sacredceltic]

@demetrius : he wanted you to take a look at this
http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...rom=epo&to=und
and to read this
http://claudepiron.free.fr/arti...norasiatic.htm

@sacredceltic, pas de procès d'intention, merci

I've also deleted the tag lie,

please first discuss about it, thanks both of you for capability to debate.

Esperanto can be described as "a language lexically predominantly Romance, morphologically intensively agglutinative, and to a certain degree isolating in character".[Blank, Detlev (1985). Internationale Plansprachen. Eine Einführung ("International Planned Languages. An Introduction"). Akademie-Verlag. ISSN 0138-55 X.]

also note that we have a nice "controversial" tag, that may be suitable here,

Personal note: 'o', 'a', 'as', 'is', etc. can be used by itself. If this is done so far almost exclusively in poetry and not in general language use, this is a matter of convention. As the above mentioned linguist pointed out the morphology of Esperanto divides characteristics of a agglutinative language as well as those of a isolating one, not completely fitting with the "prototype-picture" of one of them. By the way: we should keep in mind that "agglutinativ language", "isolating languages", "inflecting language" and so on are in the first place theoretic modells, and we can find many languages who combine characteristics of more than one type and not are an exact match of these models.

> http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...rom=epo&to=und

Wonderful, and can you give examples of sentences with this word used on its own?

Can I replace arbitrary "tio, kio estas" with "o"?

Can I add "Kio estas saĝo? Diri « jes » al o!" as an alternative translation to http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/539835 ?

If the answer is NO, "o" is not a word meaning "tio, kio estas". :P Well, quod erat demonstrandum.

BTW, http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentence...rom=epo&to=und is yet another candidate for a "Lie" tag.

> and to read this
> http://claudepiron.free.fr/arti...norasiatic.htm
Piron's contradicts himself.

Take a closer look at this paragraph:
> Affixes indeed are found entirely by themselves
> (with, of course, the final vowel): aro, ebla, iĝi, eco,
> and so on, and in combination with each other: ebliĝi,
> arigi, ebleco, aĉularo, and the like.
See the parentheses text?

Translated into plain English, it means: affixes CANNOT be used by itself except when followed by a desinence (the final vowel).

Indeed, aro, ebla, eco etc. can be used as roots. But what structually differentiates Esperanto and Chinese are not -aro-, -ebla-, but -a, -o, -as, etc.

> Esperanto can be described as "...to a certain degree
> isolating in character".
Note "to a certain degree". Even according to the authors of this books (BTW, it would be nice to check their arguments, if there are any), it is definitely not isolated without reservations, so "likewise Chinese" is definitely a lie.

Your interpretation of "likewise" is probably erroneous, then. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, it means "in the same way", which is not "exactly similar"...

> Personal note: 'o', 'a', 'as', 'is', etc. can be
> used by itself. If this is done so far almost exclusively
> in poetry and not in general language use
Can you give some examples? I'm really interested.

> not completely fitting with the "prototype-picture"
The view on languages as fitting some prototype is quite obsolete.

Greenberg suggested a much better systems of language classification using the indexes (ratios). The most important ones are synthesis index (morpheme/word ratio, to distinguish synthetic and analytical languages; isolating languages are just highly analytical ones) and agglutinativity index (number of regular morpheme boundaries without illogical variants/number of morpheme boundaries; to distinguish fusional and agglutinative languages)

http://tatoeba.org/fre/sentences/show/700971

I agree with Demetrius. Esperanto is most definitely NOT an isolating language. It's actually highly agglutinative (i.e. more so than most Indo-European languages).

I won't answer all question at once, this would be a long essay, but let's beginn with o.
Some poets used "o" isolated, for instance William Auld wrote "l' o bela" instead of belo / io bela / bela io. Aliaj uzis "mi is, as kaj os" (I was, I am and will be). That this remained inside of the realm of poetry may have it's reason in the fact that the general public didn't see a practical reason or necessity to adopt this usage, which in addition is felt of many of them as rather exotic. It simply became a tradition in Esperanto not to use "a" "o" and so on isolated, and this may support you opinion. Nevertheless in Esperanto principally every semantic unit has it's own clearly defined meaning, independent from the fact whether it is connected to this or that other unit, or standing alone.

>The view on languages as fitting some prototype is quite >obsolete.

You are welcome.

>You are welcome.

Bienvenue au club !

@sysko

Someone has again added a tag that has been solved a long time ago...

This sentence is correct!

@Zifre , concerning tag , please read this http://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/sho...#message_10965

@al_ex_an_der: Just because it can be done, doesn't mean that the language normally works that way. Sure, you can analyze "iris" as "ir is", but I highly doubt that native Esperanto speakers would see it that way in everyday speech (i.e. not poetry). You can't really leave off the tense marking and just say "Mi ir al la lernejo." In contrast, 去了 in Chinese is very clearly two words, and you can leave off 了 in many cases even if it is past tense.

And since Zifre is a native English speaker, why does he set @needs native check tags on English sentences, without explanation?

@sacredceltic: I added the NNC tag. This sounds wrong to me, but I want to get other native speakers' opinions, as this may be dialectical.

@sysko: I was going to add a comment explaining the tag, but then I decided to reply to al_ex_an_der first...

@Zifre, I know the message on the wall was not really highlighted and we had in the meantime a lot of debate about other subject, so you may have not read it. But from now I would prefer people who tag to precise in comment when they add a tag, this in order to remove the impression that some are tagging "in the dark".

@Zifre, my bad, then maybe adding the comment before tagging may be better :)

[deleted a comment of SC], please do this by private message, thanks

Zifre is abusing his privileges in public, I retort in public...

@sysko: Yup, I'll do that next time.

@sacredceltic, la loi du talion ne fait pas loi ici

A similar tag had been inserted there by FeuDRenais and subsequently lifted, obviously by a native corpus maintainer.
The one who's got an agenda here is you, obviously!

a reason more in favor of commenting when tags are added and removed, this way we could have known who removed it.

@sysko: Is there any way to know who originally removed the tag? Somehow I doubt a native corpus maintainer would remove the tag, not add an OK tag, and not leave a comment.

@zifre, no action on tags are not logged. that's the reason why this feature is not granted to everyone.

You perfectly know that no English native corpus maintainer would put an OK tag on one of my sentences...

Actually I've put a lot of OK tags on your sentences. Most of the time, your English is just fine. I can't speak for the others though.

@sacredceltic: Regarding "likewise", dictionaries seem to define this as an adverb, and anecdotally, I have never heard it used as a preposition like this. Can you provide an example of "likewise" being used this way?

> You perfectly know that no English native corpus maintainer would put an OK tag on one of my sentences...

you have 104 English sentences tagged as OK, most of them by CK

actually except the sentences that you've added in the previous weeks, nearly all (around a hundred actually) sentences in English that you have added before have been tagged as OK, so well not bad for a non-native speaker.

@Zifre I already provided a reference earlier in the thread.

That's not the same usage. In that book, "likewise" is used as an adverb. This can be proved by the fact that you could replace it with "similarly" but not "like". Here you are using "likewise" as a preposition to mean "like".

I see no difference...the use is exactly the same....

Another one that is not an adverb http://books.google.fr/books?id...nch%22&f=false

*facepalm*

Double face palm...

According to your own standard, here, "similarly French" would have no meaning at all...

And what would mean "similarly love,"? http://books.google.fr/books?id...ove%22&f=false

I'm going to try to explain this one last time, but I'm beginning to think it won't work.

In the example with "French", try replacing "likewise" with "also" (but "similarly" works fine too). It is saying that the soldiers are also French, as are the officers. It is NOT a preposition. It IS an adverb.

In the last example, "love" is the subject of the sentence, so it is obvious that "likewise" cannot possibly be a preposition. Again, it is an ADVERB, specifying that love works similarly to knowledge, which was just discussed.

If you can't understand this, I'm not going to argue further.

> for instance William Auld wrote "l' o bela"
> "mi is, as kaj os"
This is interesting. :)

However, even if "o" is (undoubtedly) a word in "l' o bela", the idea that "belo" is two words is still to be proven.

If "o" is a word, why does "belo" behave like a single unit (and not two words) regarding stress patterns?

> You are welcome.
?

> And what would mean "similarly love,"?
You should try reading the whole sentence, not just 2 words. You'll see that it makes perfect sense:
"Similarly love, which is in a way 'credited' to us, given by nature or favourable destiny, should not be recieved by us simply as a gift offered for our amusement or enjoyment, but rather as a duty to be fulfilled or a 'problem' (_Problem_) to be solved".

> I'm going to try to explain this one last time, but I'm beginning to think it won't work.

Tatoeba is a community whose method is to encourage debate through comments on sentences. If you do not understand this purpose, I find extraordinary that you are one of its corpus maintainers.
Now if your intent here is just to be rude, I never asked you for anything so I suggest that if you have no patience,you just abstain from comments on my sentences. There are English native corpus maintainers galore, although native English contributors represent only the 5th largest group of contributors behind German, Spanish, Portugese and French. And a few are even, believe it or not, patient and polite...

I acknowledge I misread my 3d reference. However, I'm still convinced I've read "likewise" being used that way more than once.
I find also curious that the former tag had been lifted. I request Nero's advice, who I trust. I will provisionally conform to his view, until proven incorrect...