Re: I think I am a language geek :)

From: Bill Bonde ( ``There's sunshine in my stomach'' ) (stderr2_at_backpacker.com)
Date: 07/03/04 

Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 17:06:47 -0700

Dmitri wrote:
>
> >From: "Bill Bonde ( ``There's sunshine in my stomach'' )"
>
> >Don't you think that the effort required to learn Chinese is greater for
> >a French speaker than learning Spanish? Maybe that's the issue.
> >
> >
> >
>
> Sau Dan (and other, equally arrogant, pedantic persons here) will have to say
> "no"......otherwise they will have admitted that we DO have a point about
> Esperanto,
>
What point do you have about Esperanto? Esperanto is considerably more
difficult than it has to be. It is biased towards European languages. It
has some difficult sounds. If you don't want English to be the world
language, then consider some sort of English pidgin. What happens in
pidgins such as Tok Pisin could be directed towards commonalties in all
human languages. A ruthlessly consistent system of extending a few basic
words in predetermined ways would be nice too. These basic words should
be, to the extent possible, words that are already considered
'international' words. 

-- 
"How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely pouring over his
dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in
the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
be truly and livingly found out." -+Herman Melville, "Moby ***"