NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/soc/culture/esperant/2516

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-28 | 12.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sideshow!urban
From: [e-mail] (Michael P Urban)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: Los nin~os que hablan esperanto
Date: 27 Jan 1993 19:21:13 GMT
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
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Reply-To: [e-mail] (Michael P Urban)
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In dealing with the Edelmiroj of the world, one is torn between the
rational reaction of completely ignoring the unconvincible and hoping
that they will lose interest, and the instinctive defensive reaction,
hoping to correct the spoken falsehoods.

This posting is not the rational thing to do.  Edelmiro wins this
year's Award for Most Provoking (but not Provocative) USENETter.

> "constructed languages that are derived from or based on natural languages."
>[As you can see all of these artificial languages are based on natural
>language and are thus parasitic on it.

This use of the word `parasitic' makes no sense to me; it sounds as
though Esperanto somehow seeks to diminish the languages which
contributed its word-stock and grammar.  Even more curious is that
Edelmiro seems to think that the *a posteriori* nature of Esperanto is a
*defect* in the language; that somehow it would be a more worthwhile
creation if it were entirely *a priori*, like Solresol.  Yet
elsewhere, he has claimed that Esperanto cannot be spoken
monolingually because it is `not natural'.  Or is it the other way around?

>[As we may see these are old world eurocentric "movements" which have decided
>to plunge the entire world in the absurd ideas of speaking a language with a
>indoeuropean base (syntax -certain free word order, limited gramatical
>categories- phonology -sounds-) So, we are sitting before another imperialist
>attempt from the old world to shove their language down non-indoeuropean
>peoples.]

Here Edelmiro is either ignorant of, ignoring, or simply refusing to
believe that Esperanto is _intended_ as a second language, a tool for
international communication.  He has not said what he would prefer as
a solution to the problem of transnational communication.  English?
Surely that would be a far more imperialist attempt to shove a
nation's language down other peoples' throats.  A more
`internationally' devised neutral idiom like, say, Loglan?  Obviously
that would not be a `natural' language.  Edelmiro is simply involved
in flaming here; he does not tell us what would be better.

>[So, this pure and simple language, in which any stutter or sneeze while
>pronouncing a subject pronoun will creat havoc with a listner who will never
>know nominative referece, since verbal morphology will not repeat it, happens
>also to have one form for each tense or mood.

Perhaps we should devise a language for Edelmiro which lacks
subordinate clauses, so that he is forced to write clear sentences.
:-)

Is Edelmiro saying that because `li' and `ni' are so similar
phonetically, that Esperanto verbs should have Romance-like verb
conjugations?  How remarkable.

> I imagine they has aspectual
>morphemes some place in the picture, or perhaps they have simply eleiminated
>them, and reduced the whole tense system to past, present and future,
>eliminating thus the hundreds of temporal possiblities of natural language.
>imagine...

Well, One is free to imagine whatever you like.
I imagine that if Edelmiro were a real linguist interested
in the study of languages, he might actually go off
and read a detailed study of Esperanto and examine its
literature to find out how verbs and their tenses are actually
used in the language, rather than using his imagination.
As Waringhien said of another critic who found Esperanto
difficult to understand, this is the first time I have ever
heard of a linguist expressing pride in his ignorance of a language.

>...t, try to sell your product to the Chinese and see if they buy it...
>Esperanto started in Europe and has had few fans wherever a non-european
>language is spoken.  Does'nt this say a lot about the ideology of your
>"movement"?

You are speaking from ignorance.  Again.  Check out the Esperanto movements in
China and Japan.  During your research, be sure to find out if these
movements are weakened in any way by the linguistic details of
Esperanto, compared to the social aspects that would be associated
with any `international language' movement.  Let us know the results
of your research.

>
>>Stop using this stupid analogy with Pig Latin. Pig Latin is a coded
>>form of another language (English say). Esperanto is not a coded form
>>of any other language.
>    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>No, it is a coded form of other languageS, not a particular one.

Fine.  You still have not answered his basic objection
to this characterization, which he sets out in the form of
a challenge: please set forth these simple encoding rules by which
Esperanto can be generated from those other languages.  If you feel
that those rules are too complex to be stated briefly, then please
explain how Esperanto differs in this respect from English (as a
`coded form' of Norman French, Anglo-Saxon, and so on).  Be sure
to avoid purely historic differences.  Extra credit: tell us why
you think any such differences hold practical significance.

(re: Esperanto has its own grammar)
>Well, I'll take your word on it for a moment.  Could you please indicate in
>the Space below what are the rules for generating a Noun Phrase in Esperanto:

You are free to examine a copy of Kalocsay's Complete Analytic
Grammar of Esperanto for one school's analysis of the noun phrase.
Since Esperanto is a simple-minded encoding of European languages, you
should have no trouble reading it.

(re, the difficulty of translating Esperanto to English)
>Of course, its "simplicity" generates an enormous ammount of ambiguity, and by
>the time you decide which is the corresponing English expression, you have
>fallen asleep.

You are, of course, speaking entirely
out of ignorance once again.  The difficulty is
often that an English translation is looser and
more ambiguous than an Esperanto word.  For example,
to translate `elangligi' as `translate' would be too loose;
to say `translate from English' would be too cumbersome.  A moment's
though is required when such words are encountered.

>Its funny that you state you have so much difficulty
>translating from Esperanto into English, when I can do the same from Spanish to
>English (any clause whatsoever) in less than a second  Perhaps its 'cause I'm a
>native speaker of both languages.

Perhaps.  You have admitted that there are bilingual native speakers of
Esperanto plus other languages.  One might learn more by seeing if
these speakers are more fluent translators.  Is there research that
indicates that bilingual native speakers are more fluent translators
than second-language speakers?

Or perhaps Spanish is more like English than Esperanto is, especially
in the area of word formation.  Nah.  Esperanto is just a coded form
of European languages, a catch-phrase that you have stated repeatedly,
with no facts or research to back it up.  Hint: `derived from' does
not mean `identical to'.

>
>Fortunately, Spanish needs no "movement" in order to have 400 million speakers.

Other than a bit of colonialism a few hundred years ago, eh?  How many
people are speaking Aztec nowadays, by the way?

Even if you take the number of Esperanto speakers at half a million
(an indisputably low estimate by almost anyone's accounting), this
figure is remarkably high for a language that has never been backed by
a State or major political movement (but was the target of some major
political movements such as Naziism).  Normally, languages are
disseminated by `gold and gunpowder'; Esperanto's uniqueness may be
that it has been spread so widely on a principally volunteer basis.

>>There are also people who have leant the
>>language because of scientific interest,
>
>Certainly not linguists who don't waste their time.

No, not you.  You don't waste your time, nope. Posting on USENET is
scientific research vital to the advancement of....well, must be
something...

(hm.  Anyone else notice that as my irritation grows, I switch from
third-person to second-person?  And why AM I bothering?)

>...  Linguists, on the contrary, try to figure out what languages ARE...

But you are not doing this; you are repeatedly telling us what
you imagine Esperanto to be, or what it must be, or predicting -- in
the complete absence of evidence -- that Esperanto cannot be learned
as a first language.  Indeed, you seem to indulge in circular
arguments that Esperanto cannot be learned monolingually because it is
not `natural', and you know it is not natural because it cannot be
learned monolingually.

> But if this is too dificult for you to understand, ready any book by
>Joseph Greenberg on the matter.  He happens to be the most respected authority
>on language universals who's around,

Wells refers to Greenberg more than once in his book,
Lingvistikaj Aspektoj de Esperanto.  You are free to
examine that book, if it is not too difficult for you to understand.

>Of course non native of English can learn esperanto faster than English, but
>once they do thay can't communicate with the same efficiency as with English

You have, of course, done experiments to prove this, or can cite
such experiments.  Please provide the references for this important
research.

>>I can process Esperanto
>>mentally in real time, and so can thousands of people I have met.
>
>Apparently no so fast, since you have trouble parsing it into English (see
>above).

Sigh.  Listen carefully.  This is a syllogism.  The premises are:
1. I can understand an arbitrary Esperanto sentence's semantics in
   realtime.
2. I require additional cognitive time to produce an equivalent English
   sentence.

The conclusion is:

3. I am thinking and processing directly in Esperanto, just as I would
   in any fluently-learned second language.

Your conclusion seems to be that 1. and 2. are contradictory, since
you are beginning from the unshakable assumption that 3. is impossible.
You are forced to conclude that either 1. or 2. is a lie or a sign of
a mental defect; further, you must conclude that this is the case
for thousands of people who can report the same claims.

Enough.



Honestly, I do not know what Edelmiro is really getting at.  Esperanto
is not a sponaneously-spoken, unplanned language, like English or
Chinese.  Its grammar is mostly European, with agglutinative features
that help to simplify its lexicon and that sharply distinguish it from
its European sources.  Its word stock is almost entirely Germanic and
Romance roots, adapted to its own phonetic system.  It has no
monolingual native speakers past the age of five years old, but there
are many attested cases of children who learn Esperanto as a first
language, with the local language also learned at about the same time.
Many more children and adults have learned Esperanto to a level of
fluency completely comparable to second-language acquisition at the
same age level.  These are facts beyond dispute.

Whether it is a `natural' language depends largely on the criteria you
use to define `natural'.  Native speakers?  Yes.  Monolingual
native speakers?  No.  The ability to `think in' the language?
Thousands of informants who affirm yes.  Conformance to linguistic
universals?  Not clear from this discussion; note that if any other
human language were to fail such a test, the test itself would be
called into question.  Historic and sociological fact figure into the
equation as well: modern Hebrew certainly failed several of these
tests early in its history; only its establishment as the language of
a State changed its status as `natural' by some of these criteria.

But for Esperanto, these questions are really little more than amusing
distractions.  The real question is, would Esperanto be a practical
solution to the problem of transnational communication if adopted as
an international standard auxiliary language?  And to this question, a
hundred years of practical experience tells us that the answer is Yes.
It might be possible to derive some `better' language, but Esperanto
is already more than suitable as a practical solution.  The thousands
of people who correspond across borders every day know this.  The
thousands of people who have attended international gatherings in
Esperanto know this.  It is only the linguistic tinkerers, the
xenophobes, academic snobs, bureaucrats, and politicians who have any
doubts.

Absolutely my last Edelmiro post.  Really.  I promise.


    Mike Urban

    [e-mail]