OK, so I guess I was wrong about Swahili. Now I’ve just got to figure out where it was that I got that impression…
Has anyone bothered to read any of the links posted in this thread?
Mi parolas Esperanton. Certe la lingvo Esperanta estis… ahem
My understanding was that the orignal structure of the language underwent a lot of evolution under the pressures of use while it was in the hands of its creator, but when the community of speakers was small, a baseline standard for its internal workings was declared, so that it could stablilise and its users could develop vocabulary.
Esperanto has gained vocabulary since the early days, certainly, but the basic structure hasn’t changed all that much. The core of the language includes a very flexible system of affixes for extending existing words; if this is not sufficient, there is a mechanism for importing needed words form other languages.
Since the language is still around and quite functional, it clearly is not too simple to be useful. 
As for creolising? There is a strong slang among the European young people who speak Esperanto, and of course, when we can’t think of a word, we’ll slip in a native-language term and explain it, but I suspect that because most Esperanto users until now have been self-selected, we would tend to want to use Esperanto more.
This is of course the opposite situation to the OP, who was talking about children raised in an Esperanto-speaking environment.
Some Esperanto-speaking couples I have met, whose only common language was Esperanto, have raised their kids to speak Esperanto as a first language. I met some of them in Helsinki and Toronto and Vermont (and spoke to the kids–it was charming to hear the young ones speaking Esperanto). I understand that the kids very quickly pick up the other languages of their environment: the other paternal and maternal languages, plus the local street language.
I have heard that some of the older kids, upon growing up, eventually rejected their parents’ common language, and others didn’t. But I suspect that all of them could pick it up more easily than a complete newcomer.
:: rereads thread ::
Also, what Excalibre* said in post #29.
Shalmanese, how could an artificual language (or any language, for that matter) resist creolisation? Wouldn’t that be more related to degree of difference in structure between the different languages?
:: paging matt_mcl ::
:: paging matt_mcl ::
:: your linguistic assistance is requested in thread #333451 ::
Matt knows a lot more about the linguistic end of things than I do. I just use the language.
Shalmanese writes:
> Yes, but an artificial language is one that deliberately resists creolization.
I don’t think this makes any sense. Creolization is something children do in learning a language. Children know nothing of the history of the language they are learning. They don’t remotely care whether the language they’re learning can be traced back thousands of years or was invented five minutes before they were born. As long as there’s some minimal amount of vocabulary and grammar available, they will begin increasing that vocabulary and grammar to make it into a complete language. If it’s a complete language already, they will also begin extending the range of meanings of some words and regularizing some of the grammar. Most of the time for established languages, their new meanings and new grammar will be ignored by other speakers and the children will eventually learn the standard language, but sometimes their changes will be accepted by the other speakers. That’s how some language change happens, after all, by the regularization of grammatical patterns by children learning the language. The only thing that can be said to “resist creolization” then is a wide-spread older language with many speakers.
For what it’s worth, I’ve read it. My friend is intractible though. His reasoning?
“Surely some hippie family would have completely isolated and home schooled their kid soley in esperanto by now if it were possible!”
Surely there is a name for this type of logical fallacy. I say he lost and it’s up to him to prove the claim since he made it, he says “truce.” shrug
As Wendell Wagner says, the distinction between an “artificial” and a “natural” language isn’t necessarily a useful one … as other posters have pointed out, Swahili is a language (one of several) which began as a trade creole and only gradually gained native speakers … Is it helpful, perhaps, to think of Esperanto as a natural language whose origins are entirely known? The fact that the basic rules of the language were codified by a bloke called Zamenhof, rather than being gradually cobbled together by a bunch of East African and Arab traders, doesn’t make Esperanto any less a language than Swahili.
(Zamenhof, of course, built a certain amount of flexibility into the language from the outset; not only does it have all that agglutination going on, but taking loan-words from other languages is permitted, even encouraged, in the basic rules.)
The idea that Esperanto is fundamentally different, in terms of its effects on a native speaker’s linguistic development, is, I think, untenable. There are a number of native speakers of Esperanto, either raised as bilingual, or even monolingual in Esperanto. (The usual reason is: boy Esperantist from, say, Germany meets girl Esperantist from, say, Korea at an international conference, love blossoms, nature takes its course, and their children are raised speaking the only language their parents have in common … )
Heck, I’ve met a native Esperanto speaker. (Technically, bilingual in Esperanto and English. Perfectly articulate in both languages, and no weirder than any other Esperantist.)
Yes, individuals might start inventing personal grammars and slang, but the key is how effectively does it make it out to the language as a whole? It was to my understanding that esperanto was fairly strict as to what was acceptable grammer and what is not. People tend to be fairly unaccepting of new slang grammers. French is also another language that is actively trying to resist creolisation (but I guess change would be a more accurate word in this context since French isn’t a pidgin). They have academies whose job is to dictate acceptable and unacceptable word usage and grammar constructions.
Perhaps you are under the misapprehension that the French obey the proclamations of the Académie Française.
Zamenhof may have prescribed anything under the sun, but it doesn’t mean that native speakers will obey, any more than they obey linguistic prescriptivists of any other sort, especially when you consider that slang arises partially in response to very real social pressures that simply matter more to a person than the contents of a book.
In the case of French, while French culture has a strong streak of respect for the sort of grammatical prescriptivism you describe, it simply isn’t the case that the actions of the academics in the Académie have any great deal of influence on French speakers. (Nor is the American impression that there’s a group of whitebeards sitting in an ivory tower lamenting every slang word and ignored orthography reform very accurate - the Académie is primarily interested in the study of French literature. Linguistic prescription is a very minor aspect of the Académie’s work.)
It’s entirely naïve to believe that simply because someone sets down a linguistic rule that someone else will follow it. And thank goodness for that, too. There’s more wrong-headed rules for English that get promulgated by ignorant English teachers than I could even begin to count.
Besides, it couldn’t be clearer that French does not resist creolization, given the abundance of French-based creoles in the world, most notably Haitian Creole.
Cool, thanks.
Stupidity? Perhaps, strawman.
I think you’re correct and that he just doesn’t want to admit his error in the face of the facts.
Hey! I resemble that remark! 
I heard that there was a movie made entirely in Esperanto and William Shatner was one of the actors.
Yes, it’s called Inkubo or Incubus. I have a copy of it. He can’t act in Esperanto either.
It’s a 1960’s-style… “horror film”, I guess. Lots of the traditional Old Religious Occult Symbology in the title sequence. Basically, beautiful blonde demonesses plot to drag a good man to his doom. It was thought to be lost, until someone found the last copy in the French national archives.