Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: Notesfiles $Revision: 1.6.2.17 $; site uokvax.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uokvax!emjej
From: emjej@uokvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Problems with Esperanto
Message-ID: <4500010@uokvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Jan-85 16:41:00 EST
Article-I.D.: uokvax.4500010
Posted: Tue Jan 15 16:41:00 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Jan-85 02:33:02 EST
References: <37@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Lines: 38
Nf-ID: #R:osu-eddie:-3700:uokvax:4500010:000:2066
Nf-From: uokvax!emjej    Jan 15 15:41:00 1985

/***** uokvax:net.nlang / osu-eddie!allen /  5:49 pm  Jan 12, 1985 */
>While this is true for probably all the native speakers of Indo-European
>languages, anyone who is not a native speaker of any of these languages
>would have a lot of trouble.  This is because the vocabulary is almost
>entirely, if not entirely, based on Indo-European.  Not only that, but the
>syntax is based on Indo-European syntax. 

Yes, this is quite true. This hasn't stopped what appears to be a quite
healthy group of Esperantists in the "People's" "Republic" of China from
forming--I'll send you a back issue of *El Popola ^Cinio* ("from (more
precisely, 'out of') People's China") if you wish. I'm told that there
are Esperantists in (post-Shah) Iran as well. It seems that Third World
countries are interested in Esperanto as a way to avoid "linguistic
imperialism."

In any case, those interlanguages that try to avoid bias by pulling
words from many different languages tend to wind up like Loglan, which
figures that since "blanu" has x[i]% of the phonemes in whatever "blue"
is in English, Hindi, Chinese, and whatever other languages they chose,
"blanu" is sum (x[i] * p[i]) % "intellegible", where p[i] is the fraction
of the world that speaks language i, and ends up equally incomprehensible
(in the sense of having individual words recognizable) to everyone.

Also, is there anything that stops Esperanto from choosing roots from
whatever native language people wish to agree on?

As for the loss of all those picturesque natural languages--well, as a
programmer, I suppose that using 
does eliminate the regional charm of using X, Y, and Z assembly language,
but my job is to write programs, just as the "job" of the language user
is to communicate. An interlanguage widens the range of people with which
one can communicate, just as high-level languages, or perhaps standards
for programming languages is the better analogy, make it possible for me
to write programs that run on more machines.

						James Jones
/* ---------- */