I’ve given you the basis for Esperanto’s claims to simplicity, Collounsbury - the sixteen rules of grammar. What in them is simple to understand for IE language speakers but not for non-IE speakers?
Your second objection is a restatement of the ‘universality’ argument. Again, let me emphasize that this doesn’t hold water. Esperanto doesn’t claim to be universally based, but universally usable, that is, it can be easily learned and comprehended by anyone. Which of course feeds back into your first objection that it’s not, for non-IE speakers. And so please re-read the first paragraph of this post.
I already said , I have neither time nor inclination right now to give you a course in comparative grammars, nor do I have the talent to do so.
I’m suggesting that you go look into non-IE grammars to get an understanding of how different they can be in encoding information, organization etc. You’ll at least see the point, whether you accept it.
I did. You are the one misunderstanding me.
(1) All languages are universally usable.
(2) Esperanto’s supposed ease is relative to a certain frame of referance and will not hold true for those coming from non-IE background, necessarily.
That’s it. If you can’t get this through your head, then I can’t help you nor do I know better ways to state this. Perhaps if Ish or others wanted to explain more to you…
No argument here. Anyone can learn any language they choose; the number of polyglots here on the SDMb well attest to that fact. The key factor is how long it takes someone studying a language to achieve a reasonable level of fluency, in other words to be able to use a language beyond “grunting greetings”, as it was phrased in the Mailbag article.
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So what’s that frame of reference??
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But you’re making a statement about comparative grammar, therefore you must know at least something about the differences between Esperanto and non-IE languages to back up your statement, no?
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I see what you’re saying. I’d like to know why you’re saying it, or to put it another way, on what basis you’re making these assertions. In short: back it up.
I beg to differ, Collounsbury. The main difference between artificial languages like Espranto and natural languages (particularly ones with a variety of sources like English) is the exceptions.
Right now, I speak English and French by birth. Those were relatively easy to learn - but due to the fact that I learned French at home, and picked up reading in French on my own, I have a very poor grasp of the rules of grammar and their exceptions. I just say what “sounds” right. Thus, I am no help whatsoever to the S.O. when she tries to grasp the intricacies of French grammar, which are a lot more then 16 rules (one of which is the “rule” that things are pronounced in a standard fashion!).
At the moment I am learning Japanese. It has a lovely almost designed structure to two of its written language (unsurprising, given the origins of hirigana and katakana), and the spoken language has the wonderful convenient object and subject markers, but the one thing I’ve learned is that there always seem to be exceptions. Evolved languages are not as easy to learn as, say, Java (programming language) or Espranto. I’m sure my Japanese teacher would be overjoyed if she could give me a list of 16 basic rules for Japanese grammar, with no exceptions.
I would say that a Japanese person learning Esperanto would indeed have a harder time then a speaker of an Indo-European language. They might want to leave the subject as assumed, or insist on classifying objects depending on where they are relative to them and the person they are addressing, or leave future tense to implication or special forms.
But I think it is quite safe to say that learning Esperanto would be much easier then learning English, which is currently becoming the “international language”. I think that a push for Esperanto to take that role would succeed since it would be easier for English speakers to accept.
Finally, I think that Esperanto is as good as an artificial language can get. You keep emphasizing that other languages have different rules. An artificial language that tried to be cross-cultural would be too varied and confusing.
Yes, Esperanto is Indo-European in origin, but it does a good job of being fairly recognizable to the speakers of those languages while keeping its rules simple and few in number.
I would much much rather Esperanto became the universal language, rather then English.
Oh, and thanks to Olentzero for posting that list of Esperanto rules. My interest has been piqued. I had planned to try my hand at Spanish after Japanese (Nihongo :)), but Esperanto sounds like a fun, simple, project with speakers around the world.
Any language is equally usable.
~ No shit. I’m glad we all agree on this.
Frames-of-reference.
~ It is posited that because Esperanto uses an indo-european alphabet and sentence construction its advantage based on being a constructed language lie heavily toward the indo-europeans. Consider, for example, a constructed asian language. Chinese and Japanese might have little problem learning it, but over here it would still be a tough task. Yes, it would be easier than learning straight-out Mandarin, but you must see the point in saying that it is still a task to learn it, just like non-indo-europeans will still find it a task to learn esperanto.
When constructed becomes natural.
This is the most important part of the debate here and it seems to get glossed over. Every nation on earth is different from every other nation. Every state-like area in every nation is different than every other state-like area in that nation. Every city…every family…etc etc. Any constructed language that finds itself in popular usage in so many different locales will automatically spawn dialects, irregularities, etc etc. It will, in short, become a natural language and assume all the problems we hoped to avoid in the first place.
(3) Cannot be avoided. At all. It doesn’t matter how strict you make the rules: people break them. It doesn’t matter how complete you make the grammar: people will join words, create new ones, make old ones obselete.
Esperanto is a great attempt at a tower of babel. However, I’d still like to learn it in spite of my disagreement with its position as savior-of-the-language-barrier.
Dankon, Kyberneticist! If you go to the ELNA site at http://www.esperanto-usa.org you’ll be able to order some decent learning materials, including the excellent Esperanto: Learning and Using the International Language by David Richardson.
I certainly believe there are materials of similar quality in Japanese so that any aspiring Esperantists there would have little real problem with the items you mentioned, both because the grammatical constructs you mentioned don’t exist in Esperanto and because the learning texts would be rather explicit in how things can be expressed in Esperanto.
Now that we’ve gotten some actual items from another language, let’s actually do a little comparison with Kyberneticist’s contribution. (Full disclosure: I have studied a little Japanese myself so I’m partially familiar with the concepts talked about).
In Esperanto, as the rules state, the verb does not change for number or for person. So, for the verb “to be” , esti:
Mi estas Ni estas
(Ci estas) Vi estas
Li estas Ili estas
It would be immediately obvious to a Japanese learner that there might be some problems with leaving the subject assumed since the verb is the same throughout (it’s the same with all verbs). Additionally, any Esperanto text worth its salt would devote a line to making this clear.
This is where the prepositions come in. Literally, it still is possible to locate oneself in relation to the object being spoken about in Esperanto, but again, I think any study of a learning text would make it clear that the position of the object itself, rather than the speaker, is what needs to be classified. Not a difficult concept to grasp overall.
Like the present, there’s only one way to express the future tense:
Mi estos Ni estos
(Ci estos) Vi estos
Li estos Ili estos
and it needs to be expressed for the purposes of clarity.
I see aynrandlover has come back while I’m typing this so I’ll respond here.
Agreed. Learning any language is a task. The key factor is how easy a task it is. I still maintain that learning a language that has only sixteen rules of grammar, no exceptions, would be an easy task for anyone, no matter what language they spoke as a native.
Not so. Grammars of so-called ‘natural’ languages, and by that I mean languages that were more or less unconsciously developed through societal interaction and progress, had their grammars codified after the fact, often using one of the dialects as a basis (e.g. the Tuscan dialect for modern Italian, the Prussian dialect for modern German). Constructed languages set their grammar down first and, as in the case of Esperanto, is declared unchangeable. So there’s a conscious effort to prevent the development of dialects. I believe that this well-spoken to by my ability, 113 years after the creation of Esperanto, to read the home page of the UEA in Esperanto as it was written by the Dutch.
I believe you’re arguing two separate things here:
People will change the grammar.
People will change the vocabulary.
As I stated beforehand, Dr. Zamenhof made it quite clear that the sixteen rules he set down should be held inviolable by any Esperantist. Esperantism’s a movement, not just a language, so it’s not at all surprising that there needs to be some unifying criterion. And that’s it right there.
And there is no argument about the second point. If Esperanto vocabulary didn’t develop, expand, and change with the world then it truly would be a dead language. But any new words created must conform to the inviolable rules of grammar. If it’s a noun, it needs to end in -o in the nominative, -j in the plural, and -n in the accusative. Same for adjectives, except it must end in -a in the nominative. Verbs must end in -i for the infinitive, -u for the imperative, and -as, -is, -os, or -us for the tenses.
Also I’ll point out Rule 15 above, which provides for the creation of new words in Esperanto. Take, for example, the word computer. Some would argue that because it’s not the same in many languages, the proper Esperanto should be komputilo, whereas others argue that it should just be borrowed in a straightforward manner to become komputero. While they both conform to the standard for nouns in Esperanto, there has been much debate about which is the proper Esperanto word. Both are accepted for now, and the debate around this and other words like it is of much the same magnitude as the “2000 vs. 2001” debate - the difference in points of view doesn’t fundamentally threaten the system as a whole.
By the way, I think it’s great that you want to learn Esperanto despite your disagreement with what you perceive as its position. Esperanto doesn’t want to replace languages, just provide an alternative. It doesn’t want to knock the language barrier down, just make a sneaky end run around it.
Both will change with regular use. Beginning sentences with prepositions, incomplete sentences, improper conjugations, double-negatives…all these things are going to happen to any language no matter how strict or how few the words are. Collounsbury’s point is just that: the French take their language pretty seriously. They really get down and dirty in setting standards. That’s great for acedemia, but lousy in conversation.
Knowing many people who have learned English as a second language, it amazes me how poorly I speak it. I write it well, but not great (and I spell tolerably well, too) but I am not cut out for speaking perfectly. A created language can slide around a few points here and there, but it is a given that in practical speech you will find colloquialisms, dialects, irregularities, accepted sentence structure not normally allowed, etc.
Now, what if Esperanto is not used regularly but only to facilitate international conversation? I’d say there’s a hope here, but as C. stated to me it is pretty chimerical. He has added everything he can add to the conversation. It is not a saving grace of international communication. No language can be. The more popular it becomes, the less likely it is to stay well-structured. This is unfortunate, but I don’t see how it can be avoidable.
I do agree, though, that coming up with new words is not a huge deal. Vocabulary is not as important as sentence structure. And ever since I’ve heard of Esperanto I’ve wanted to learn it, god knows why, though. I don’t know anyone who speaks it.
aynrandlover: me, matt_mcl, Sunspace, tracer… of course you know people who speak Esperanto! Try out the book by David Richardson I mentioned earlier - it was my first introduction to Esperanto twelve years ago and I bought it when I finally found the opportunity.
My question to Collounsbury was more prompted by the fact that he seems to have turned to petty sniping rather than arguing his position.
You still seem to be arguing that changes in vocabulary and changes in grammar are inextricably intertwined, and I still disagree. Best I can offer is start learning the language, hook up with the ELNA and/or the UEA, order books and subscribe to magazines. And start talking to us. I really think there isn’t room for the grammatical changes you talked about in your last post because they just won’t start making lexical sense. Mi estas means “I am” and there’s absolutely no other way of saying “I am” in Esperanto. An incorrect conjugation means that there is a choice of word forms within the tense; as I showed earlier, the only word form in the present for esti is “estas” for all persons and numbers. You can’t alter that without any Esperanto within earshot gently correcting you at first and probably more stridently later if they find out you’re trying to prove a point.
Ultimately I think the point is that Esperanto at heart is a consciously directed language. Thus I think there is an active tendency to keep it well-structured because its intended purpose is to facilitate international communication. That doesn’t mean it can’t have a flowering literary and expressive side to it.
Ahem. In Esperanto, you can use just about any sentence structure that floats your boat. The S-V-O construction is not sacred. That’s why there are grammatical identifiers on the ends of words–so folks who like to put the verb after the object can do so.
I, for one, must say that I’m truly astounded that those who know little or nothing about the subject feel so free to detract.
A case could be made that formal, written Arabic is not a “living language” as it is far different from the spoken dialects of Arabic (Gulf, Egyptian, Saudi, etc.). Since I’ve studied some Arabic, with an Egyptian teacher, I won’t belabor that point.
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