urban@spp2.UUCP (12/05/84)
How easy is Esperanto to learn? (1) Well, Esperanto is the only "natural language"* that people regularly are able to learn, to a degree of fluency, with only a book as a teacher and model. The attendees at the first international Esperanto congress are said to have been themselves pleasantly surprised at how well they were able to speak the language "for real" for the first time. (2) Because of the European admixture of root-words that contribute to the basic Esperanto vocabulary, and because of English's own peculiar history, English speakers have a particularly easy time learning to read Esperanto (of course, recognition is always easier than recall). In fact, an English speaker with a normal high-school exposure to any Latin-derived language will probably be able to make good guesses at the content of most Esperanto publications before beginning to learn the language. (3) Because it has a regularized grammar and morphology (although the phonological properties like nasal assimilation and secondary accent seem to be left somewhat undefined), Esperanto can be more "fun" to learn than "real" languages. Since you tend to get a more immediate psychological payoff from Esperanto, you tend to be less likely to abandon the learning task before you're fairly good at it. (4) There are native speakers (denaskaj parolantoj). The language is evidently so well-crafted that a child whose parents speak Esperanto (perhaps as their only common language) will analyze and model the language internally in such a way as to produce the same language as the parents, even producing unexpected, novel, but grammatically correct and comprehensible utterances**. I consider this to be, somehow, a remarkable achievement of linguistic engineering, even if it WAS accomplished by copying "standard average European" grammar. I don't necessarily claim that Esperanto is in any sense "useful" for most people. It IS an excellent linguistic hobby item, and many tourists and "korespondemuloj" (uh, people who like to write letters) find it quite rewarding. Mike ................................................................ *by "natural" I am playing Humpty-Dumpty and refer to the fact that its domain of discourse is the real world. Is there a more accurate and equally concise term? Maybe I should just say "human" language to distinguish it from AI languages or mathematical notations? **I once read an anecdote about such a speaker who surprised her parents by asserting that her father worked "maldiman^ce", lit. "un-sundaily" (i.e. every day but Sunday). Quite correct, but her parents had certainly never heard this novel compound before.
neal@druxv.UUCP (Neal D. McBurnett) (12/09/84)
I have just posted an Esperanto->English "translator" to net.sources. Below I have reproduced the "intro" file from that posting. If anyone is interested in corresponding in Esperanto, send me mail! I already have about 3 USENET names, and I know that there is a group on CompuServe also. ------ First "what is this Esperanto thing, anyway?" That's a hard question. The pat answer is "the international language, used by millions of people in over a hundred countries. It was specifically designed to be easy to use and politically neutral." One recent development which should interest computer scientists is that the European Economic Community has funded a large effort to try to use Esperanto to help them deal with translating official documents among the seven languages they use. This should result in computer programs to translate from Esperanto into each of the seven languages. I think this capability could provide a powerful incentive for people and organizations all over the world to pay more attention to Esperanto. Esperanto is much more popular in Europe than it is in the US, chiefly because people there deal with "the language problem" every time they travel more than a few hundred miles in any direction. It is also gaining popularity in the far east. There are more than a million speakers in the world. This may seem like a small number in relation to the number of English speakers, but I like to think of it this way: a much higher percentage of Esperanto speakers in foreign lands are the sort of people I would like to be able to converse with. I expect Esperanto to do me the most good when I travel, especially to the eastern european countries (where English is less popular....) I would LOVE IT if I could converse via electronic mail with esperantists in other countries (or here in the US). In August of 1985 there will be a meeting of the Universal Esperanto Association in Augsberg where I will be able to meet several thousand esperantists from scores of countries. Where else could you do that? There are hundreds of regular publications in Esperanto, and hundreds of regular radio programs worldwide. How easy is it to learn? Some say between 4 and 10 times easier than other natural languages, with all their exceptions, special cases, and idioms. In a month of studying it during the evening in my spare time (on my own) I have gotten to the point where I can frequently (slowly...) understand the gist of articles from a Chinese magazine without referring to a dictionary. Well, I hope the lisp program can be of use to you! For further information, send mail to me or to one of these groups: Esperanto League of North America, Box 1129 El Cerrito, CA 94530 Free Postal Course, Esperanto Information Center, 410 Darrell Road, Hillsborough, CA 94010 (send a self-addressed, stamped envelope). various local organizations (especially in CA): ask me for one near you. -Neal McBurnett, ihnp4!druny!neal
jc@mit-athena.ARPA (John Chambers) (12/12/84)
Just a note about the claims for uniqueness of Esperanto. Far from it! For instance, there is a large chunk of Africa where the dominant language is Swahili, which originated as an artificial language. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where there are still people to be found that speak Chinook, another artificial language that was spoken throughout what is now Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia until the area was taken over by English speakers. The obvious objection is "But these were just 'trade languages', based on some local aboriginal languages". So is Esperanto. Its avowed purpose, to allow easy communication among people who speak a lot of different languages, is the reasons these other languages were developed. Esperanto is just as local, being only easy to those who are fluent in the major languages of Europe. This is very similar to the bases of Swahili and Chinook in the locally dominant languages. Of course, in this century, Europeans and their descendants (including myself) are rather culturally dominant in much of the world. It is easy to understand why Esperantists might not have noticed that their languages wasn't the first of its type. On the other hand, nobody should be allowed to make such a claim unchallenged. Any linguistics degree program worthy of the name will introduce its students to several classes of unusual languages. There are pidgins; not "real" languages but very interesting to linguists, historians, and psychologists. There are creoles; equally interesting to the same groups, and to others because they are practical, useful languages. (English originated as an Anglo-Saxon/French creole.) There are artificial languages, mostly trade languages. There are revived or reconstructed languages. (Modern Hebrew and Icelandic are two very different examples.) There are dead languages kept alive for reasons (usually religious). There are jargons, with which we are all familiar; some (such as modern mathematics) practically become new languages in their own right. Real artificial languages are in fact quite rare. Does anyone out there have any good descriptions of some others beside the three listed above? John Chambers