Komentarze na temat esperanto nie warte odpowiedzi (i tłumaczenia na polski)

mal- doesn't mean "badly" or "wrongly", but forms opposites – a device esperanto overuses to a ludicrous extent, for which reason it's probably the most hated affix in the language (certainly by me!). Thus common words like "small, short, narrow, old, left, bad, different" have to be mal-granda, mal-longa, mal-largha, mal-juna, mal-dekstra, mal-bona, mal-sama; and "loud" is the ridiculous malkvieta. Not only do these words require unnecessary mental gymnastics, they also gets monotonous if you have to use more than one or two of them. Even a basic meaning like "to open" is not exempt; it's mal-fermi, i.e. the opposite of fermi "to close"!!! As ever, there are unexplained exceptions: "left" and "right" are opposites (dekstra, mal-dekstra), but "north" and "south" aren't (norda, suda); why? And David Peterson informs me that some people like to say trista for "sad" anyway, rather than the malfelicha you're supposed to use.
 The augmentative -eg- and its opposite -et- reduce many possible degrees of size to just three. Thus the triplet vento, vent-eto, vent-ego "wind, breeze, gale" replaces the entire Beaufort Scale, and arb-eto (from arbo "tree") turns out to be "small tree, shrub", requiring the desparate-looking contrivance arb-et-ajho for "bush". Note also the typically idiomatic derivation rid-eti "to smile" from ridi "to laugh", which is clearly a lame attempt to keep the number of roots down; it would better mean "to chuckle".
eta, derived from the suffix, seems to be a synonym for malgranda "small" – but if it isn't, as many sources imply, why is the distinction necessary? Is mal-eta the same as ega? Can you use -et-eg-a and -eg-et-a to make finer distinctions of size? Together with the vagaries of derivation and conversion, these suffixes provide further scope for ambiguities: if rugh-eta (derived from an adjective) is reasonably "reddish", then shtoneta (derived from a noun) is equally reasonably both "a bit like a stone" (shton-eta) and "like a pebble" (shtonet-a).
And, for a language with supposedly high ideals and no grammatical genders, there's no excuse for the excusively feminine suffix -in-, which requires "woman" to be vir-ino "a female man" (not, strangely, the more neutral homino "female human"); the hypothetical converse, fem-ula for "man", is equally absurd.

 

-ec- "quality" is necessary to make abstract nouns from nominal roots. Thus homo, hom-eco "man, manliness"; but compare the inconsistent firma, firmo "firm, firmness". blanko, blank-eco probably both mean "whiteness"; a correspondent informs me that blanko is used in phrases such as "the white of the eye", for which something like blankajho would be better.
 -an-, -ist- and -ul- all represent various types of people; note the inconsistency with mistiko "mysticism", mistik-ulo "mystic", but katolik-ismo "Catholicism", katoliko "Catholic". (There are further perils here: you might think that katoliko could be a compound with kato "cat", before consulting your dictionary and discovering that liko doesn't actually mean anything.)
 Brendan Linnane points out that the suffix -on-, which is used to form fractions (e.g. ses-ono "a sixth"), is also used on the word for "million", miliono, which is not a fraction; note its similarity in form to "thousandth", which is mil-ono, and in sound miljono, which could be anything.

 

Because the affixes are short and arbitrary, many of them appear as parts of longer roots and so give rise to words with several possible meanings. An example for now is sukero, which means both "sugar" and suk-ero "a drop of juice"; more such words may be found in  Appendix 2. (unfortunately no longer available).
 Further ambiguities also arise when you mix affixes together, since there is no indication of what affects what. The classic example is mal-san-ul-ej-o, ultimately from the root san- "health" with the affixes mal- "opposite", -ul- "person" and -ej- "place". You're supposed to work out that this means "hospital", literally "place for a person the opposite of well"; even with this derivation it could also mean "private hospital room", "epidemic zone", and so on. If instead you parse it as malsan-ulejo, you get something like "sick building syndrome". Likewise, malgrandeta is both the opposite of grandeta "largish" and the diminutive of malgranda "small".
 There are at least nine ways of constructing something which looks equivalent to English "different", but probably isn't: alia, malsama, nesama, malsimila, nesimila, neidenta, malidenta, neegala, malegala.

 

Worse, some affixes mean different things at different times; thus the prefix eks- "former" has its meaning changed to "out of" (which should be el) in words such as eksciti "excite", ekstrakti "extract", ekstrema "extreme" and eksporto "export".
Similarly, many words begin with pre-, which seems to mean "before", however there is no such prefix; the actual esperanto equivalent is antaw-, which should really have been left as ante-. And a lot of words derived from Latin begin with kon- or its assimilated form kom-, retaining its meaning of "with" for which the Esperanto is actually kun; the unwary reader or listener must therefore wonder if the word is a compound with some form of koni "to know", or perhaps komo "comma".

 

The derivative apparatus is deficient in other ways too; one obvious omission is an affix meaning "the result of an action". Thus the nearest to "a piece of writing" or "something written" seems to be somewhere between skribitajho or skribajho, but the usual meaning for -ajh- doesn't imply this. Another try is skribito, but this properly means "a person who has been written", which is nonsense even in Zamenhofese. There's always skribo, but that could be something else again; although, in Ido, we can be sure that it's what we're looking for.