Re: Esperanto and Interlingua

Ruud Harmsen:

Peter T. Daniels:
Ruud Harmsen:
These possibilities are rarely used, because most users employ the
language is ways resembling their own language. But the mechanisms
exist in Esperanto, which is what makes it unique.
So there's one of the ways Esperanto differs from any human language.

Yes. That makes it nice and interesting. Don't you think? (;-0

I don't think it's unique at all. There are lots of regional variants
in national languages; possibilities that are exploited by some
speakers but not others.

I wonder whether Orwell modeled Doublespeak on Esperanto. I wouldn't
be surprised; he had a rather jaded view of utopianists.

One objection to Esperanto is that meaning are rather sharpely
defined, and that as a consequence, word play isn't easy in it.

It's not so difficult as you think. A number of words can be divided
in different ways: "sentema" means "sensitive" (sent-ema) or "without
a subject" (sen-tema), "kurago" means "courage" or "age of
running" (kur-ago) etc. Raymond Schwartz excelled in that sort of
thing.

I don't quite remember what Orwell's doublespeak entailed, but it seems
unlikely it is anything like Esperanto.

It's been inspired by what Orwell thought about language, including,
it seems, Esperanto. If he had known what we know about language
today, he probably would have depicted the dystopian language planning
activeties somewhat differently.

....

One can certainly create such a language on the basis of Esperanto,
but as it is, it is nothing like it, as I said, on the contrary,
because Esperanto is rather direct and concrete, more so than many
natural languages.

It has been claimed that Esperanto is more natural than other
languages, which makes sense if you look upon regularity as a natural
feature of language. It does not make sense, however, if you look at
it scientifically, for as far as naturalness goes, there is only one
human language. Otherwise you might as well claim that Indonesian is
more natural than Sinhalese.

Jens S. Larsen

.

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