Come on, Monty, we’ve already been through all this Esperanto stuff on the boards before. Esperanto is just another example of late 19th century utopianism. Sure, it’d be great if we could all communicate with one another in the same language, but the fact is that people only learn a language that is not their own if they have to. No one has to learn Esperanto. English, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, yes, Esperanto no. And no amount of idealism will change this.
Many people have no need or desire to communicate with people outside their home area, so Esperanto is out for them. Many people in Third World countries are stuck within boundaries that cause one ethnic group’s language to be predominant (examples: India and Hindi, China and Mandarin), so those who wish to be successful on a national level learn that language. Esperanto is out for them, too. If you’re living in Madras, learning Esperanto isn’t gonna help you deal with the folks in Mumbai, Calcutta, or New Delhi. Finally, most people around the world who learn an international language choose English, because a lot of the money and the power in this world are located in English-speaking countries. If you have to deal with the Americans or the Brits, Esperanto is out for you, too, because them gringos and limeys ain’t gonna be bothered with Esperanto. So who is left to learn Esperanto? A bunch of idealistic foo-foos who probably have jobs in what the Marxists call the public sector, because those folks in the so-called private sector aren’t going to waste their time learning a language that two million people with no money or power speak.
Esperanto is as dead as Communism. Both were utopian movements, both appeared in more or less the same place at more or less the same time, both were supported in their early days by more or less the same people, both assume an international consciousness that does not exist. And both are finished. Kaput. Muertos.
Lawrence: And your point relating to my asnwer was what exactly?
Let’s see: (1) A question was asked as to why some radio programmes are broadcast in Esperanto, (2) I researched the subject, and (3) answered the question. Finally, (4) you just bitched about it.
I speak Esperanto, and to my knowledge, I am not a foo-foo or a Marxist.
Esperanto is far from dead, from my vantage. It is without question the most successful and popular of the auxillary languages. Scads of clubs and conventions feature Esperanto; original books and stories are being produced in Esperanto. (In fact, the Esperanto sci-fi periodical Sferoj now only accepts original fiction.) A quick search on your favorite search-engine will prove that Esperanto prospers on the Internet.
Two million speakers may not seem like a whole lot, but it’s enough that I could find a Esperanto friend in pretty much any big city in the world. Esperantists tend to be a pretty friendly community. Likewise, the Esperanto “Pasporta Servo” service offers the world-traveler free (that’s right, senkosta) accomodations for Esperanto speakers, at over 1000 locations world-wide.
It seemed you misunderstand the goal of Esperanto. Fear not! Esperanto is not intended to replace anyone’s language. It’s simply intended as a tool to allow folks to communicate easily, with a minimum of time, money, and energy wasted. You’re right, nobody is forced to learn Esperanto. That’s a good thing. It’s like a private club with a secret language. Anyone can learn it and be a part of the club, if they first put forth a little effort. Y’see, that’s how we weed out the lazies.
Esperanto is much simpler to learn than English, Mandarin, French or Portuguese. Furthermore, if I learn one “middleware” language I should be able to communicate with other Esperantists in Scotland, China, France, and Brazil, no matter what their native language or dialect is.
You mentioned China. What are the odds of finding a resident of China who speaks Esperanto? Surprisingly, pretty good odds. I’m led to understand that Esperanto is undergoing a boom in China right now. China also features one of the most beautiful magizines available in Esperantoland, El Popola Cxina. Why is Esperanto popular outside of the United States? I think because it’s notEnglish.
English carries with it much political baggage. And contrary to popular American opinion, English is not very common outside of our social bubble. Your proposal to make “English the international language” is really easy to say, but somewhat naive, since you already speak English. Imagine for a moment what you’re asking the rest of the world to do! Personally, I wouldn’t want to force anyone to learn English later in life as a second language. Its grammar and spelling rules are insidiously inconsistant. Heck, I have an English B.A., and I still find myself looking up spellings or obscure grammar rules.
By contrast, Esperanto can be learned 5 to 10 times faster than learning other ethnic languages. I picked up fluency on my own, for free, by taking a correspondance courses I found on the 'Net.
Since learning the language, I have met several new friends across the globe. Their global perspective is often interesting and surprising. Though we have different native languages, we meet on middle ground using Esperanto.
So, though it may be somewhat idealistic, Esperanto is still a good idea and is very much alive. It allows you to “get to the good part” of learning a foreign language, without the pain of learning all the exceptions to the rules. I invite you to check out a couple of lessons and see for yourself. Several free courses can be found at http://www.esperanto.org/angle/kiel.html
Vis-a-vis English vs. Esperanto as a world language:
I sincerely doubt there’s a country in the world where the number of English speakers doesn’t exceed the number of Esperanto speakers (usually by an order of magnitude or more). Ditto for those learning the languages.
Good point.
Besides, one might ask–and I note that Cecil has never taken up this isse–which English? Mario Pei once wrote, defending the idea that to learn a foreign languages requires the help of a cultured native speaker rather than any native speaker: “If a foreigner learns English with a hillbilly accent or a Brooklyn Navy Yard pronunciation, is that any better than speaking it with a foreign accent?”
English, like Italian, Chinese, or any other “natural” language with any real territorial extent, has dialects. Even if the rest of the world were to accept Enligh for this purpose, a standardized form would have to be available–and, TV and the Internet notwithstanding, English has no standard form!
Obviously, Cockneys, Oxonians, hillbillies, New Yorkers, Australians, Bostonians, Oregonians and Newfoundlanders don’t speak the same “English.” Esperanto is much more “standardized” than this.
Ok, first off, let me say that Esperanto is a great idea, and if it actually worked, I’d be all for it. It does have some major problems, though. First of all, it’s not a world language, it’s a European language-- Yes, it’s easy for a Francophone or a speaker of English (for example) to learn, because so much of the vocabulary is similar. One wonders, though, how many Esperanto words derive from Korean, or Aramaic, or Cherokee. You might argue, of course, that even with no vocabulary background, it might be easier for a native speaker of one of these languages to learn Esperanto because of the simpler grammar structure. The mistake here, is that “simple” does not mean “easy”. The goal for an international language should be that it is complete and consistent, both areas in which Esperanto is arguably lacking. Supposedly, Esparanto grammar only has 16 rules… Do those rules include provisions for the subjunctive? Passive constructions? Pluperfect participles? As for consistency, as I understand it, Esperanto has roots for words, which can be rendered into the noun or verb form (or other parts of speech) by application of various suffixes. All very well and good, but how does one establish to what the noun form of a given verb corresponds? Does the verb “to farm” correspond to the noun “farmer”, “farm”, or “agriculture”?
Finally, as to the universality of Esparanto: While I don’t doubt that there are speakers of Esperanto worldwide, can’t that be said of most languages? How many people are there that actually speak Esperanto but not English?
I apologize if I have any misunderstandings here, if so, please feel free to correct me.
“There are only two things that are infinite: The Universe, and human stupidity-- and I’m not sure about the Universe”
–A. Einstein
Chronos: Nobody said “easy.” All have said “easier than national languages.”
Yekrats: China does not have a nation-wide native national language. Putonghwa is the Mandarin dialect of Beijing, IIRC. That is not understood by all speakers of the other Chinese “dialects,” which apparently are more correctly termed “languages.”
Regarding the absence of Cherokee, etc., root words in the language: Of course it’s Euro-based! Nobody said it wasn’t. But the beauty of the language is not in the origin of its words but in the simpler (note that I said “simpler” & not “simple”) grammar. [An aside: I’m quite amused by some folks who think “Orient” should no longer be used, but the term “Asia” alone should as “Orient” is Euro-based. I agree, so’s the term “Asia” as it comes from a European story! Yet, those same folks don’t bitch about the term “China” which means “Middle Kingdom.”]
Regarding the prevalence of English: Yep, Esperanto does have a following amongst folks who are dedicated to not succumbing to English. You might also want to note that in Ireland, the Parliament has at least one Member who only discourses in Gaelic. I don’t begrudge him that, but I think that if he’d learn Esperanto also (assuming he hasn’t yet, I’ve no proof one way or the other), then he can travel the world without having to speak English also. I’ve also found myself in every single port-of-call during my active duty Navy days discoursing with other Esperantists. I’ve also found myself in those same ports, on occasion, without the aid of any English speakers.
Monty, you also did 5) encourage people to learn Esperanto. My post was a reaction to that. I think if people are going to put in the time and effort to use a second language it should be a language that is actually useful to them, such as English, Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, Hindi, Arabic, etc. No doubt Esperanto is somewhat easier to learn (5 to 10 times? I doubt it, at least to use it with any fluency. We calculate that it should take a normal Spanish-speaker about 360 classroom hours to reach Intermediate level, moderate fluency, in English, here at the American Institute in Barcelona) than any of these abovementioned languages, but developing fluency in any language is hard, time-consuming work. I believe that most people choose to learn languages because of the functional utility that that language will have for them; that means that the rational second language choice for most people will be either the dominant regional language (Mandarin in China, French in much of sub-Saharan Africa, Hindi in India, Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa) or English, the de facto international language.
Yekrats, since there are more than a billion people in China and only about two million people around the world who speak Esperanto, my guess is that your possibilities of finding an Esperanto speaker in China are pretty slim. Also, in my original post, I did not propose to make English “the international language”. In this post I did say that English is the de facto international language, because it is, whether anyone likes it or not. You say “English is not very common outside our own social bubble”. That’s not true. I live in Europe. English is the language used by Europeans to communicate with one another if neither of them knows the other’s native language. Well more than half of college-educated Europeans speak English, as do educated people in all the former British colonies. English has more than 400 million native speakers and probably as many non-native speakers. If I were a person native to a non-English-
speaking country and I wanted to make my way in the world, English would be the first foreign language I would choose to learn.
Dougie, there are several standard Englishes, including Standard British (the variety normally taught and used in Europe and former British colonies) and Standard American (the variety normally taught and used in the rest of the world). I’m an English teacher. We don’t teach people to talk with a hillbilly accent. We teach them to talk Standard American English, which is more or less what you hear on TV. This variety of English is the one they will hear the people they have to do business with speak. Doctors, business people, professors, scientists, politicians, and lawyers speak the standard. And European people who learn a second language are normally of the middle-class and above–they learn their language for business or professional reasons. I imagine the same is true in other parts of the world. Learning a second language is such a damn hard job that you don’t do it unless you have a real need.
Finally, if I may quote H.L. Mencken in his The American Language (I have the 1938 edition), “The trouble with all the ‘universal’ languages is that the juices of life are simply not in them. They are the creations of scholars drowning in murky oceans of dead prefixes and suffixes, and so they fail to meet the needs of a highly human world. People do not yearn for a generalized articulateness; what they want is the capacity to communicate with definite other people. (English)…for all its deficiencies, is better than any conceivable Esperanto, for it at least springs from a living speech, and behind that speech are nearly 200 million men and women, many of them amusing and some of them wise.”
By the way, let me comment that I am not a monolingual American. I live in Barcelona and speak near-perfect Spanish, reasonably good Catalan, and very poor French as well as English.
I am not trying to start a flame war. I appreciate Monty’s original article and the various reasonable, intelligent posts on this thread. I just disagree with most of you about this subject.
Say what you want about Esperanto, but here is my 2 cents. I don’t speak Esperanto, and I no nobody who does, but I think that it would be easy to learn. I could understand the last bit of the article (and there was no translation) using the little French and Spanish that I know.
Not bad. If a language can be learned that easily, then maybe we shouldn’t knock it too much
To Chronos:
This should have been easier for you or anyone else to grasp, but then Zamenhof pointed out a few things in his description of the language, which even he admitted might hit a snag:
He said that he constructed Esperanto out of roots that do not change–much like Chinese or Turkish; isolated or “agglutinative.”. “But since a language in this form would be totally foreign to the peoples of Europe,” he wrote, “I conformed this dismemberment altogether to resemble the format of the European languages [that is, he set up the language’s root words to look like and be used like Indo-Euhropen declensional endings.]”
He took the example of the Esperanto word fratino, “sister,” and analyzed it thus:
frat=child-of-same-parent
in=feminine (thus ino means “woman.”)
o=substantive indicator
He said that "what the reader takes to be a prefix, or suffix, is an altogether independent word [emphasis his].
Esperanto uses little booklets called “keys,” printed in the national languages, which allow a speaker of those languages, confronted with a text in Esperanto, to translate the text, even, as Zamenhof wrote, ‘if he had never before heard of the language’s existence.’
If you were to try to translate from German into English, Zamenhof continued, you would hit obstacles which can only be surmounted if you have plenty of acquaintance with the national language, which, in the example he gave, was German. He used the sentence Ich weiss night, wo ich meinen Stock gelassen habe; haben Sie in nicht gesehen? This would come out in normal English as “I don’t know where I left my stick; have you seen it?” But if you just took a German-English dictionary, you would come up with “I white not, where I to think composed property; to have she — not —,” which, Zamenhof added, would be quite hard to understand!
Esperanto does not use the subjunctive; the imperative mood is substituted.
The passive uses the verb with esti (“to be”) plus the main verb with the passive suffixes -it, -at, and -ot for the past, present, and future passive: La telefono estis instalita.
For pluperfect, use the past tense of the verb with the past passive: La telefono estis instalita (“The telephone had been installed”).
For farming, use the appropriate tense of the verb erpi ("to sow* or rikolti (“to harvest”).
And I will not quote H. L. Mencken on anything. This should be a topic for a separate thread.
Thanks, Dougie & Flash. Um, Lawrence, if your posting was “just a reaction” to my article, I suggest you temper your reactions just a tad. The entire tone of your introduction was naught but a flame. I shall continue to do “5) encourage others to learn Esperanto” for the following reasons:
a) I think it’s a beautiful language (since that’s in the eye of the beholder, you just have to live with that)
b) I think it can be quite useful because I am an idealist and see nothing wrong with idealism.
c) I personally have been able to use it (and, yes, I make mistakes in it too) around the world. Admittedly, I seek out other Esperantists, but that’s no different from folks I’m sure you’ve met in Spain who wish to practice their English on you. But in my case, not only did all parties wish to practice Esperanto but also to actually communicate with someone from another land.
and finally,
d) Not everyone is enamoured with learning English. I’ve no heartbreak with someone learing it since I speak it also, obviously. However, there are a good number of folks who think that learning English is succumbing to the all-pervasive American culture. That’s their opinion, but why force another on them?
Your notion that all nineteenth century utopian notions have been proved wrong seems to me to be badly argued. Some utopian schemes of that era have been implemented and succeeded, so much so that they’ve become the common sense of today. Some have been tried and failed disastrously. Some have never been tried on any large scale and have hung on as hobbies and fads.
Incidentally, try actually meeting a few public-sector employees before you make such rash generalizations about them. The notion that government employees are more likely to speak Esperanto is both wrong and irrelevant. Throwing in gratuitous slurs is no way to persuade people of your arguments.
> Esperanto propaganda would also have you
> believe that the language is widely used
> and spoken, or that some sort of
> linguistic revolution is just about to
> happen. The reality is that speakers of
> Esperanto are pretty much confined to
> Eastern Europe, where its general make-up
> is most familiar, and Japan and China,
> where its principal attraction seems to be
> that it is not English. The number of
> speakers is impossible to ascertain with
> any accuracy; I’ve seen estimates ranging
> from 50 thousand to 16 million, and the
> most reasonable guess is somewhere around
> one million - roughly comparable to Welsh,
> one-sixtieth of Swahili, and one five
> hundredth (approximately) of English.
So it’s impossible to express a hypothetical in Esperanto, but only to order people about as if you’re sure of yourself?
In keeping with the spirit of the Pit, might I suggest that this is a good reason why both Esperanto and Esperanto speakers be made extinct as soon as may be?
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
Monty, according to the standards of this board, I think my posts have been very low-key. You wanna see real flames, check out a few of this board’s other threads. I apologize if I offended anyone, but I stand up for everything I said.
Wendell, I was assuming that government employees everywhere in the world are like government employees here in Spain. Here, to get a govt job, you have to pass a very difficult test called an “oposición”. Once you’ve passed the test, you’re in for life. You have to show up stoned every day for a year and threaten your supervisor with a knife in order to get fired. I am only slightly exaggerating. Thus, govt jobs in Spain tend to go to people who have a university education (got the smarts to pass the test) but who don’t have the initiative to go out and risk it in the private sector (don’t have the balls to go out and get a real job which might pay much more but which you can get fired from if you don’t hack it). Over here, there are hundreds of thousands of these people who all vote for leftist parties, belong to unions, and do things like show up for tree-plantings on Arbor Day, volunteer their kids to go harvest sugar in Cuba for a week, and go to Esperanto classes. Sorry if I suggested that American govt employees might be the same sort of people.
The problem is that there was no call for you to be nasty in your post at all, even if you were being relatively mild by the standards of this board. Monty didn’t even say anything very positive about Esperanto in his mailbag answer. He answered the question without trying to convert people to being Esperanto advocates. You seem to think that it’s absolutely necessary in any mention of Esperanto to trash it. And you did throw in some gratuitous slurs.
Incidentally, while I’m not sure whether Esperanto was idealistic or not, I do think it was linguistically naive. It was invented in 1887, and the design of it looks like what a not particularly skilled linguist of the late nineteenth century would create.
