Re: Who castrated Esperanto?

On Feb 20, 11:35 am, craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 20, 11:58 am, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Feb 20, 5:17 am, Horace LaBadie <hwlabadi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

In article
<7bb3a0b2-2be0-4f13-b4a7-a9f5dc6ff...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

 Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 19, 11:30 pm, Iain <iain inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 19, 11:03 pm, Horace LaBadie

<hwlabadi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<65339a0c-d3f5-4a6e-a2a5-01444a378...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

 Iain <iain inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In English, for example, there is hardly any advantage in having
"autobiography" when "life story" will suffice.

Well, yes, there is. They mean different things.

Expand.

And even if they
didn't, why use two words when one will do?

Exactly!

Ok I see your point.

Presumably you meant: why use a phrase containing two words when a one-
word phrase will suffice?
The problem there is merely that it needs to be learned.
The three words "own life story" are closer to the cradle, and
"autobiography" is one thing more to learn.

--Iain

As learning division is one more thing to learn after subtraction, but
it makes things simpler. It's a bit idiotic not to learn new words,
especially useful ones.

Still missing the point. We're not talking about the wisdom of
forgetting English words. We're talking about how the smallness of
Esperanto's vocab is jolly nice.

Trying to limit the vocabulary of Esperanto is a losing battle. If
Esperanto is used as a language of general human-to-human
communication,


But it isn't a language of general human-to-human communication. It's
a language of special human-human communication.

Esperanto, if adopted worldwide as a second language, would lack an
environment of surround talk, because each speaker, though able to
communicate with foreigners, would be surrounded by his mother tongue
nonetheless, and only ever speak Esperanto on occasions. The examples
would fade from his memory, and only the rules(which are few enough to
never forget) would remain.

One of the big mistakes of the Esperanto community, is the attempt to
keep the language alive, whereas they should be ensuring it remains
dead, but well known nonetheless.

Esperanto ought to be delivered as a set of rules and paradigms. It
ought never to be taught by example, except maybe a handful of initial
examples. That way, the language gets rebooted each generation.

it will necessarily become more and more similar to
natural languages and evolve in the same way they do. This will
involve the adoption of learned borrowings from the common vocabulary
of Western culture and, increasingly, from English (giko "nerd, geek"
is a case in point).

Contrary to the sort of linguists criticized by Piron, I do not think
Esperanto is somehow laughable, stupid, ridiculous or scary. But on
the other hand, I don't think Esperantists usually grasp how
preposterous the idea is that it could be possible to design a
language which is easier than national languages because it does away
with universal characteristics of natural languages. It is not
possible. That language will inevitably develop many of those
trappings which make your average national language a kind of inside
joke - idiomatic expressions, specific cultural references and so on.
Thus, the people who are told that you only need to master Zamenhof's
grammar to count as full-blood Esperantists are being had. The fact
is, that Esperanto is by now a language with a cultural package and a
history, very much like any national language.

I don't think it is a bad thing. I think that if anything it makes
Esperanto more interesting as a subject of study, in the same way that
national languages are interesting. But for people like you - and they
are found among opponents and proponents of Esperanto alike - the idea
of Esperanto as something fundamentally different from national
languages seems to be an axiom, and the thought of Esperanto as
essentially a natural human language with all the trappings, bells and
whistles of one is equally unsettling.


Granted, there is nothing about the content of Esperanto composition
that immunises it against the forces of language evolution. But there
are ways of handling a language that sidestep the forces of evolution.
You can confer negligible senescence on a language by ensuring it
never comes alive. For example, Latin evolved into Italian, but Latin
was still defined in a certain way in Italy, learned according to a
selection of early sources, and spoken accordingly, all through the
middle ages. It still evolved, but not so much.

A universal _second_ language(learned by rule and not example) IS
fundamentally unlike a national mother tongue. In terms of evolution,
that's a world of difference. If it is only _ever_ a second language,
and never a first language, the impetus for evolution is much less.
Also, the language is only ever spoken on occasions: international
meetings etc, so whatever evolution there may be, happens in slow
motion.

The problem is, Esperantists cluster together in groups, teach it to
their children at age 2, etc etc, so it becomes like a national first
language, and evolves as one. I fully accept that Esperanto, if
adopted intuitively and spread from generation to generation, would re-
accumulate all the irregularites that make natural languages so
unappealing in the first place. But this, IMO, is not the future
Esperantists should be aiming for.

-Iain
.

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