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From: allen@osu-eddie.UUCP (John Allen)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Problems with Esperanto
Message-ID: <37@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 12-Jan-85 17:49:33 EST
Article-I.D.: osu-eddi.37
Posted: Sat Jan 12 17:49:33 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 14-Jan-85 01:15:18 EST
Organization: Ohio State Univ., CIS Dept., Cols, Oh.
Lines: 58


    I object to Esperanto for several reasons.  The first and most important
of these is that Esperanto is not as easy as they would have you believe.
For example, Prentiss Riddle says,

> Jes, multaj problemoj!  It's still easier than any national language I've
> ever seen...
> 
> --- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")

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.  There are many languages (eg.
Chinese) where a word can be translated as either verbs or adjectives
depending on the context.  (In fact there are some adjectives in English
which like verbs. "Eager" as in "John is eager to please" is one of these.)
Chinese also doesn't mark the distinction between singular and plural.
(Just like the English "one sheep, two sheep".)  Meanwhile there are
languages that mandatorially mark certain grammatical properties that they
consider important, but that can only be explained in English and other
Indo-European languages by long phrases.  (Some of the AmerIndian languages
 have a marking on each verb which shows one of three
conditions
                1) If the speaker witnessed an action theirself.
		2) If the speaker was told of the action by someone else.
		3) If there was direct evidence of the action.
.)  Since these things are different, they cause problems for a person
trying to compare Esperanto to his native language. (How many of you have
had trouble learning the case systems of languages like Latin, Greek,
Russian, or German.)
    Another major problem with Esperanto as a world wide language, is that
MOST people don't go to the trouble of learning something unless they need
it for some reason.  The reason that the languages that have come closest to
being universal have done so is that they were important for some reason.
(Latin for the Roman Empire, because it was the language of the government.
 English, because of the vast number of colonies of England and the
importance of first England and then the United States in world trade.)
Other reasons for learning a second language are to read the literature or
the scientific works written in that language.  As of this moment, Esperanto
doesn't have enough of literary or scientific publications of enough
importance to prompt people to learn it.  Also there is no government that
uses Esperanto, so that other people would be prompted to learn Esperanto in
order to improve trade relations with that government.
    Thirdly, even if Esperanto did become a world-wide language, there is a
tendency for languages to change, and eventually dialects would eventually
emerge and continue to grow apart until they became mutually unintelligible,
and we would be back where we started.
    Finally, speaking totally as a linguist, if there was a world-wide
language, then the regional languages would die out, until it was the only
language being spoken.  Now how much fun would linguistics be if you could
only get data from one language.

    Please, send all flames to
                                        allen%ohio-state.csnet@CSNET-RELAY

                                        John Allen