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