[net.nlang] Problems with Esperanto

allen@osu-eddie.UUCP (John Allen) (01/13/85)

    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
<I forget which ones.> 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

jim@randvax.UUCP (Jim Gillogly) (01/14/85)

>> Jes, multaj problemoj!  It's still easier than any national language I've
>> ever seen...  [Prentiss Riddle]

>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.  [John Allen]

Although the vocabulary and grammar of Esperanto are indeed Indo-European,
the simplicity of the grammar and word construction still make it an easy
language to learn.  Many Chinese are now learning it, according to the L.A.
Times last year.  Many of the scientific papers in Esperanto were written
by Japanese last decade - there was also some abstracting being done.
It has been pointed out that the agglutinative nature of word-building in
Esperanto is similar to the way concepts are formed It would certainly be't
easier for an Asian or African to learn than any OTHER Indo-European lang!

>    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.

I'm not sure that this is still true.  Television has certainly made sharp
inroads into American regional dialects.  Certainly by the time any one
language gains world-wide acceptance the media will be a powerful world-wide
force.  Of course, it's more likely to be an abomination like English than
some neatly constructed language.

My main gripe about Esperanto is the funny diacritical marks.  Makes it
really awful to read on the net, as one poster recently remarked.  Loglan
gets around that, but it's incredibly hard to learn!  At least it's
neutral as far as word roots and grammar is concerned.
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	{decvax, vortex}!randvax!jim
	jim@rand-unix.arpa

riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (01/15/85)

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

urban@spp2.UUCP (01/15/85)

In article <37@osu-eddie.UUCP> allen@osu-eddie.UUCP (John Allen) writes:
>
>    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.
>  . . .
>  anyone who is not a native speaker of any of these (indo-european) 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.  
> ... (discussion of properties of non-IE languages)

But this argument simply says that "no international language
is possible", not that "Esperanto is not the best candidate"
for an international language.  Any grammar you can devise will
be somehow "alien" to a large segment of people, according to
this argument.  In fact, the large bulk of international
business is now conducted in European languages anyway.  The
Chinese have found Esperanto useful as a regularized and simple
introduction to European language structure and vocabulary.

>    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.
>... (citing political examples of the past) ...
>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.

The argument here is "it isn't in official use, so there's no
reason to put it into official use", or "when enough OTHER
people learn it, then *I* will".  Presumably, the only suitable
international language is therefore some already-existing
national language.  See your own argument 1, if you're suggesting
this is the case.  Do you think that English is easier for
a Japanese speaker to learn than Esperanto?

>    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.

This has not happened with Esperanto.  Since it is intended
specifically for international communication, it doesn't seem
to break into population clusters that develop their own
dialects.  Once again, you're not saying anything about
Esperanto itself, but about any international language.

>    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.

This is a misunderstanding of the function of an international
language.  The people who used Latin as an IL in Europe in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance didn't stop speaking their own
language!  Esperanto and all the less successful interlanguage
projects are intended as  international *auxiliary* languages.
The idea is: to go to an international science conference with
delegates from twenty nations, everybody doesn't have to learn
19 other languages, they only have to learn one (regularized, and
[one hopes] easy) second language -- and no single country has
the cultural domination implied by "everyone will speak English
[French/Latin/Japanese/Arabic], and all papers will be
presented in that language."

Evidently, you don't believe that an international language is
necessary, desirable, nor even possible.  As a linguist, what
solution do you propose to ease the problem of international
communication?  Or do you see no problem?

	Mike Urban
	trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban

steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny) (01/15/85)

> 
>     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.
> 
	This is so true.  Witness that Ireland tried to reintroduce
Gallic as a national language and since there was now reason for anyone
to learn it the attempt fizzled out.  On the other hand, Hebrew
came back to life with the formation of the modern state of 
Israel because it was the only way all the diverse people that
settled there could communicate.

-- 
scc!steiny
Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382
109 Torrey Pine Terr.
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
ihnp4!pesnta  -\
fortune!idsvax -> scc!steiny
ucbvax!twg    -/

emjej@uokvax.UUCP (01/16/85)

/***** 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 <fill in your favorite high-level language>
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
/* ---------- */

andyb@dartvax.UUCP (Andy Behrens) (01/18/85)

> My main gripe about Esperanto is the funny diacritical marks.  Makes it
> really awful to read on the net, as one poster recently remarked.  
>
> 	Jim Gillogly

La "Sesdek Reguloj" de Esperanto enhavas rimarkon, kiu diras

	Presejoj, kiuj ne posedas la literojn ^c, ^g, ^h, ^j,
	^s, ^u, povas anstata^u ili uzi ch, gh, hh, jh, sh, u.

Sed mi opinias, ke tio estas pli malbela ol la supersignoj anta^u
la literojn.

	*    *    *    *    *

(For those who want a translation:)

The "16 Rules" of Esperanto grammar have a note indicating that
the accented letters ^c, ^g, etc., can be replaced with ch, gh,
respectively, if your press is not capable of printing the 
accents.  My feeling is that this alternative is even uglier than
the accents before the letters.
					Andy Behrens

{astrovax,decvax,cornell,ihnp4,linus}!dartvax!andyb.UUCP
andyb@dartmouth.CSNET
andyb%dartmouth@csnet-relay.ARPA