Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ut-sally.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!genrad!teddy!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!ut-sally!riddle
From: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Problems with Esperanto
Message-ID: <633@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Jan-85 01:52:19 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.633
Posted: Tue Jan 15 01:52:19 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Jan-85 03:46:46 EST
References: <37@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Tx. at Houston-in-the-Hills
Lines: 78

John Allen (allen@ohio-state.csnet) has come up with a number of quite
reasonable complaints about Esperanto.  Neverthless, I don't think that the
problems he raises are serious enough to justify dismissing Esperanto
entirely.

Allen is on the mark with his chief gripe, namely that Esperanto is not as
truly international as some of its proponents claim.  Its vocabulary is
almost entirely European (mostly Romance, with quite a bit of English and
German and a dash of Slavic and Greek thrown in).  Furthermore, its grammar
is based on a simplified Indo-European model using concepts and categories
(subject and object, noun and verb, number and tense) which may be familiar
to us but are radically different from those expressed by the grammars of
many languages.  It's true that someone who speaks a European language can
learn Esperanto much more easily than someone who does not.

However, this in itself does not disqualify Esperanto as an effective
interlanguage, because it is also the case that a non-Indo-European speaker
can learn Esperanto much more easily than any "natural" Indo-European
language.  Unfortunately, the differences between language families are so
wide that no language, artificial or not, could be expected to bridge them,
and any interlanguage we propose is going to be quite foreign in its grammar
and vocabulary to people who speak nothing related to it.  The Indo-European
language family from which Esperanto is drawn is numerically and
geographically more widely used than any other, thus limiting as much as
possible the number of people to whom Esperanto will be totally foreign.  An
even more important factor is that it is built on a   s i m p l i f i e d
European base; a speaker of Japanese, Swahili, or Guarani would encounter
fewer unfamiliar words, fewer strange concepts, and fewer confusing
exceptions in learning Esperanto than English, French, Russian or Chinese.

Allen's second complaint about Esperanto is that "most people don't go to
the trouble of learning something unless they need it for some reason."
Well, most educated people in the world today have a definite need to learn
a language other than their native tongue.  (North Americans may tend to
forget this, but it's true nonetheless.)  Unless they're lucky enough to be
native speakers of one of the more popular languages, they probably have to
learn several.  How much simpler would it be if everyone learned the same
common second language?

Allen is correct that the languages of international communication of the
past were thrust on people rather than chosen by them, and that Esperanto
doesn't have the political, military, economic or scientific might behind it
that Latin, French, English or Russian have had.  True, but that is one of
Esperanto's chief advantages as a potential interlanguage: it is politically
neutral.  If it is ever adopted for wide-scale use, its adoption will be a
matter of mutual decision, not of force.

Allen's third objection seems to me to be contradictory.  On the one hand,
he predicts that Esperanto, if widely used, would split into dialects; on
the other, he complains that it would wipe out the local languages.  How
could the Esperanto language community ever be so strongly unified as to
displace national languages and at the same time suffer from such disunity
that it would break into fragments?  I don't believe that either of these
things would ever happen.  Remember, Esperanto is intended to be a universal
second language used primarily for international communication; worldwide
contact among Esperanto speakers reinforced by its being a language of "book
learning" would keep it reasonably unified.  Esperanto has been spoken for
nearly eighty years now and hasn't shown signs of splitting into dialects
yet.  And no one is suggesting that Esperanto should be written or spoken in
place of local or national languages.  If anything, increased use of
Esperanto should improve the health of small linguistic communities by
reducing the pressure on, say, Gaelic, Flemish or Catalan from major
languages like English, French or Spanish.

Personally, I'm not very optimistic that Esperanto will ever catch on the
way its inventor intended it to.  There may have been a time (between the
world wars?) when it stood a chance, but now I tend to be skeptical.  Still,
I think it offers educational and recreational opportunities that make it
worth my trouble to learn it.  (After all, I   d o   speak a couple of
European languages, and for me Esperanto is pretty easy.)  Shortly I plan on
picking up a couple of pen-pals from places I'd otherwise have no contact
with, perhaps China and Finland.  If I someday find out that the Common
Market or the U.N. has adopted Esperanto as an official language and I get
some practical use out of it, then so much the better.

--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle
--- riddle@ut-sally.UUCP, riddle@ut-sally.ARPA, riddle@zotz.ARPA