Re: Who castrated Esperanto?

On Feb 19, 5:10 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 19, 8:43 am, craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:





On Feb 19, 2:33 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Feb 19, 4:39 am, craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Feb 19, 6:13 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Feb 18, 5:56 pm, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Feb 18, 10:28 pm, craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Feb 18, 10:04 pm, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The following dictionary has words such as "aŭtobiografio" and
"ateismo"

And?

The whole unique benefit of Esperanto is the small size of its
vocabulary, without any loss to the range of ideas that can be
expressed, yet here we have words imported from the Romance languages
for meanings that could be expressed with the morphemes in the
original specification.

Esperanto for god is 'dio', for example, not "te".

Thus your version of E-o is on the level of Basic English? So it's
even worse than we thought!

Who is "we", Your Majesty the King of Usenet Peter I of the Daniels
dynasty?-

The many people here who recognize the pointlessness of the E-o and
all similar projects.

Your attitude is unscientific to say the least. I am not an
Esperantist, but I think your sort of convulsive anti-Esperantism is
indicative of a lack of curiosity that is singularly puzzling in  a
scholar.

Frankly, your sneering and sniggering attitude towards all and sundry
would be much less exasperating and inexcusable if you weren't relying
on ignorant, immovable prejudice about so many things.-

There's a reason the discussion of conlangs in sci.lang is strongly
discouraged. Their creators and users usually have no conception of
the nature and use of human language. E-o has been under discussion
for well over a century, and its shortcomings are obvious, especially
when compared with the claims made for it.

I won't make presumptions on what you consider to be shortcomings of
Esperanto. That's another discussion, like you suggest. Yet
shortcomings or no shortcomings, there is still an irrational
prejudice concerning it. There can be no doubt.

Suggest to someone that we revive Latin, and use it as the Lingua
Franca for Europe like we did in the Middle Ages, and the worst
reaction you'll get is "Nah, not really practical or economical --
Latin's not especially easy; let's just stick with English, French and
German".

Make a similar suggestion concerning Esperanto, and you get reactions
like that cited by Claud Piron in his (IMO flawed) essay
'Psychological Reactions to Esperanto'

' Take a bird, perhaps one of our lake swans, pluck it completely,
gouge out its eyes, replace its flat beak with a vulture's or an
eagle's, graft on to its leg-stumps the feet of a stork, stuff an
owl's eyeballs into the sockets (...); now indite your banners,
propagate and shout the following words: "Behold the universal bird",
and you will get a slight idea of the icy feeling created in us by
that terrible butchery, that most sickening vivisection, increasingly
offered to us under the name of Esperanto or universal language. '

Although I don't like the thrust of Piron's writing here, I do
acknowledge the prejudice to which he refers with his citation.

Finally there is the mindset of the linguist. As a practicer of a
value-neutral science, the linguist needs to be vigilant against
seeing languages as he would prefer them to be, rather than as they
are. When something comes along that it outright prescriptive, it
presses all the wrong neurons in the linguist's head.

As for the evolution of conlangs, there's a way to prevent that. There
is a reason why Latin doesn't evolve(at all) nowadays, and that is
because Latin is always learned directly according to ancient sources
(or material that imitates ancient sources carefully), and not from
the parent. Why shouldn't Zammenhoff's specification count as ancient
source? I think one of the big mistakes concerning Esperanto is that
it is taught, not that it is learned.

--Iain
.