lavengro wrote:That is an extraordinarily generous offer on your part Sprachprofi. I would be very interested in taking up the challenge (to my detriment in life, I can rarely say "no" to a challenge, bet or dare), but I am in the process of learning Spanish and am still at a relatively early stage with that. Do you think it would present a disadvantage to my Spanish learning if I were to concurrently throw a couple of hours of Esperanto per week into the mix?
There will probably be some interference between Esperanto and Spanish vocabulary at first, but I have found that such interference goes away once one of the two languages reaches a good level. From your profile, I'm guessing that you haven't reached fluency in any foreign language yet? Then this Esperanto challenge can be really helpful for you, because you'll no longer be "stabbing in the dark" when it comes to developing fluency in your other languages; you'll know how it's supposed to feel and how to get there; your brain will have created the necessary pathways. The first language is always the hardest, so you might as well pick an easy one. If you embark on this, your Spanish will probably suffer until January because of the interference and then improve faster than before from February because of the synergy effects.
Iversen wrote:Esperanto may be more lenient on its users than most other languages, but I remember it was hard for me not to use an ungrammatical compound perfect (*Mi havas farito ion) when I first started to learn it. All the words exist, but you are told to use the simple past instead (mi faris) - so even Esperanto doesn't allow everything. I wonder whether it was Zamenhof's Slavic background that made him outlaw the compund perfect or he just thought that it didn't really fit into his triple layer temporal system with i, a and o (plus u).
"havas" is not an auxiliary verb, that's why it doesn't work. However, "estas" is an auxiliary verb and people can and do say "mi estas farinta ion", which is the compound perfect you were looking for, except that it's considered pedantic to overuse this. Just like deviating from SVO, there should be a good reason for using compound tenses, something extra that you want to draw someone's attention to, e.g. if you're telling your wife "stop nagging me, I've already done this!" that would be a perfect occasion to use "tio jam estas farita" or "mi estas jam farinta tion". It's still correct to use "faris" - complicated verb forms are optional and for emphasis only or for the odd cases where simple tenses are not enough to convey the order in which things happened.
And I'm not happy at all with the idea that mal- should be used to cut the number of adjectives down to less than half. The problem is that for me "juna" (young) stops at something like 20-25 years, and English "old" only starts at maybe 60 or so - so it grieves me to have to use "maljuna" for old, and "antikva" is for me older than old (and mostly relevant for things). I simply lack a word for old that doesn't include the 'mezaĝojn'. My feeling is that "maljuna" starts where "juna" ends, but that's apparently not something that bothers the samideanojn. I would prefer having to learn a few more words and then be able to be more precise.
I wouldn't say that "maljuna" starts where "juna" ends, neither in Esperanto nor in English. This is the scale I'd use:
junega, juna, juneta, nejuna, [mezaĝa,] maljuneta, maljuna, maljunega
The same scale exists for every adjective and every standard textbook of Esperanto teaches this kind of scale (often with a continuum from malvarmega via nevarma to varmega). The ne- prefixed word is the true neutral: neither young nor old.