What stresses a grammarian?
There's a place deep in the bowels of the PMEG where I stumbled into a section that felt almost emotional. Its author Bertilo Wennergren's passionate rant about the folly of Da-ism. I felt compelled to spread the word!
The Esperanto word da is one of the words meaning "of". It's used after quantities of things:
skatolo da skaraboj
a box(ful) of scarabs
See my previous post on da and the power that you get when you really know the difference between da and de (another "of").
Da-ism in particular is the unnecessary lingering of da in informal speech, stemming perhaps from a belief that da is needed to convey the full unshortened meaning:
mi havas multe da
I have a lot (of)
When in actuality the following is entirely sufficient:
mi havas multe
I have a lot
The idea being that, much like that English usage, this could stand in as a snappier response to questions like:
kiom da drakoj vi havas?
how many dragons do you have?
Rather than having to spell out in full: mi havas multe da drakoj.
By this point, I was already convinced of the clear logic and of the accusation that such superfluous da usage uglifies1 the language. But then the PMEG raises an interesting exception:
... mi volas skatolon
... I want a box
Is that a boxful of something? Or just a box? Hm?
Here, da could actually help to distinguish between the two possible interpretations, because it always has that quantity meaning:
mi volas skatolon da
I want a box(ful)
Makes me wonder about other shortenings. The most obvious place where I can think of English being economical is the usage of "do" to imply a verb without saying it again:
Do robins have a secret and malicious motive? They do
You could resort to saying just "yes", but that feels like a wholly different tone. How would you feel at the wedding if your partner declared "yes" instead of "I do"?
So do you just repeat the verb in Esperanto?
ĉu rubekoloj2 havas sekretan kaj malican motivon? Ili havas
Does that work? The googling begins.
1 From mal- (a prefix making the opposite of the word it attaches to), bel- "beautiful", and -ig "cause to be / make [root]":
malbeligas
uglifies
2 On a side note, vortaro.net suggests that ruĝgorĝulo is a synonym for rubekolo, from ruĝ- "red", gorĝ- "throat", -ul "member (of species)". Quite the mouthful, eh?
