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Completely irrelevant to the sentence, but I wanted to mention that there have been recorded cases of fraternal twins with different fathers.
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And also different mothers would be theoretically possible when it comes to who bore the child. Two fertilized eggs by the same man and woman could be inserted into two different women. They would both bear genetical twins then.
Surrogacy and gamete donation complicates questions of parentage a lot, but arguably, even in that case, the mother is the egg donor, unless there's some kind of a contract with the woman who carries the child to term, as in the case of certain forms of IVF.
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I can only speak for Germany but as far as I remember the woman who carries out the child has mother-like rights for it. (like in the sense of 'she had to make the effort.')
There's also "parents" in the non-biological sense. If they were separated and adopted by different couples, they would be said to have different parents.
Two separate fertilised eggs from two separate pairs of parents could be carried by another women. This would result in birth twins, who were not genetically related in any way.
When I see absolute statements like this I often try to find exceptions to them, not quite enough to start a career in genetics to disprove it but I'm assuming you have the same reaction to these things?
It's so easy to learn Esperanto when you speak English and some Latin based language, in my case Portuguese. Every new word sound either like one language or another. In this case, Gemeloj sounds like gêmeo and samajn sounds like same. It's always familiar
But then there's KAJ from out of nowhere (Greek, I know, like I said, out of nowhere).
Mi pensas, ke tio ne estas vera!
I just wanted to say this sentence in Esperanto so no offense ;)
i thought that said "gemeloj" and thought "'melo' must mean 'twin' making 'gemoloj' twins of opposite gender."
No, "melo" mean "badger". "ĝemelo" comes from the French, Spanish, and Portuguese words for twin, each of which in turn come from Latin "gemellus", the diminutive form of "geminus" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ĝemelo I haven't seen "geĝemeloj" used much, but it does return some search results in Google
I heard 80% of the vocabulary is from Latin, with many grammatical similarities so in my opinion, it could be classed as a Roman language.
No. Romance languages are, by definition, descendants of Latin. Esperanto is not a natural language. It didn't evolve from any other language, so it wouldn't make sense to classify it in any language family.
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... perhaps you might class it as an Indo-European language, even though it is a constructed language. I’m quite happy to be shot down in flames over this statement.
Your comment is interesting; Esperanto is not classified as an Indo-European but it is not because it's a constructed language. The vocabulary is obviously Indo-European; however the criterion that allows us to discriminate Esperanto from the IE languages is its morphology. IE languages are synthetic langages, and most of them are fusional, whereas Esperanto is an isolating language. I won't try to define it here because I'm not an expert and I'm not very comfortable with English but I highly encourage you to look it up! An easy example: in IE language (I believe) there is no direct connection between the first person and its derived forms (I -> my, me; ego -> meus, me; ich -> mein, mich; je -> mon, moi; etc). In Esperanto however, mia and min are directly derived from mi. Same goes with one -> first; unus -> primus; eins -> erst; un -> premier; etc but unu -> unua. So it's not directly because it's constructed that Esperanto is not classified as an IE language but because the way it is constructed radically differs from the way IE languages are constructed.
Would it be normal to say "ĝemelinoj" if they are female twins? Or do people usually not bother?
Probably normal. In pt, for example, gêmeos are (male or mixed gender) twins and gêmeas are (female) twins.
That's what I thought so actually guessed the word 'twins' before I looked at what it meant. I was a bit chuffed with myself for a minute there :) I am starting to work out more and more words before looking at the meaning when I hover my mouse over the word, so something must be sticking.
Yes. Other romance languages have similar terms (Italian: gemello, Portuguese: gêmeo) because the Latin word for twin is gemellus.
However, the Latin adjective for "paired" or "twin/twinned" is geminus. The noun twin is gemellus because in Latin, you can create nouns by adding the suffix -ellus.
So even if the word ĝemelo is a bit of a jump from the word gemini, it still has its roots from there; it just took a little journey to get here.
Yep. Also similar to jumelles in French and gemelli in Italian. Probably a Romance language thing.
