Waterj: Incubus, http://incubusthefilm.com/ .
Lawrence: Nowhere did I say it was a good flame, only that it was a flame.
Lawrence, first let me correct a misconception. There is NO SUCH THING as “the standards of this Board.” Each forum in this Board has different standards… very different standards.
The BBQ PIT is the place for flaming, and has a very high tolerance range. The forum called MPSIMS is far more tolerant of minor insults (though nowhere near as tolerant as the PIT), while COMMENTS ON CECIL’S COLUMNS and this forum have a very low tolerance of insult.
The rule in this forum is, if you want to poke fun at the idea, that’s OK, but don’t insult the person.
Having stated that general rule, I add that I think your posts have been well within the confines of the rules. You were attacking the concept of Esperanto and adherents of it as a world language, and I see nothing objectionable in your choice of words. (Granted, “idiotic foo-foos” is somewhat of a slur, but what the hell.)
Monty, you might want to re-read, perhaps after a relaxing sauna. Unless I’m missing something, the only personal comment by Lawrence is that he starts with the phrase “C’mon, Monty.” The rest of his post is not attacking you per se, but Esperanto as a viable concept… and that attack seems to me to be well within the bounds of propriety and courtesy of this forum.
OK, it’s somewhat off topic (since the topic was the radio broadcasts rather than the viability of the language) and probably belongs in Great Debates, but it’s here, and we’re the least used forum, so let it remain here.
Carry on.
Esperanto is sort of like Spanish with several handfuls of English and a few pinches of German/Yiddish and Greek thrown in, all spoken with a Polish accent. (Not only are the phonetic sounds the same as in Polish, albeit simplified, the stress accent is always on the penultimate syllable, a characteristic of Polish.)
I suspect that George Orwell’s Newspeak included some satire on Esperanto, the way it makes contraries by adding mal-. Esperanto says malbono for ‘bad’; Newspeak says “ungood”!
According to Mario Pei, Esperanto is the official language of the Hostiles in U.S. Army war games. So it is useful for something, at least.
Now, how do I book that free hotel room? --Pardonu min-- Nu, kiel mi mendas tion senkostan hotelan c^ambron?
Well, ishmintingas, since you brought it up, here’s part of what I submitted as the article in question (but which got edited out, obviously in consideration of space, etc.):
From http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-7.html :
Please note that the designation “Aggressor Language” is not used to mean that Esperanto is aggressive but that the Aggressors (i.e., the Soldiers playing the part of the enemy forces) are to use that language to give some realism to the field exercise. What with Soldiers shooting each other, I’d think the Army should be striving for a bit less realism in those things, but what they hey, I preferred being on a comfortable ship instead of in a wet foxhole.
For the die-hard book collector (and those who don’t give a whit about accuracy), the Army’s textbook on la lingvo can be obtained from used book dealers. The following appeared from my search on Bibliofind:
Personally, I recommend getting the accurate and free guide from the websites posted above.
The real benefit of Esperanto is not as a truly univeral language, but as a stepping-stone to natural languages. At a school near Manchester, England, students were divided in two groups. The first studied one year of Esperanto followed by three of French. The second group studied no Esperanto and four years of French. The Esperanto group actually learned more French than the all-French group. From The_Future_of_Modern_Languages_in_English-Speaking_Countries by Humphrey Tonkin and Grahame Leon-Smith
Forgive the diversion, but Monty, you are totally wrong here.
China does not mean “middle kingdom” it is a transliteration of Ch’in or Qin, the dynasty in effect in China when the Portuguese first came. It probably means more like “The land of Qin” than anything else.
Middle Kingdom (actually zhong guo, meaning middle country) comes from the fact that China was the dominant force in Asia for a few millenia, the eastern world revolved around China the way the west revolved around Rome. It’s not strictly Chinese arrogance that gave birth to that term (although it had something to do with it).
Orient and Orientals are objected to not because of their original meanings, but the connoctations attached to them as they were used over time. Asians are looking to get past the “exotic oriental” stereotypes and other stereotypes attached to the words. See the thread on the word “squaw” for more.
Don’t know about your bookstore dictionary, kpl; however, my dictionaries contain the entry “Zhong Guo” for China and the 1st character is the character for “Middle” and the 2nd is for “Kingdom.” I think I’ll go with what the Chinese list in their own dictionaries for that one. What you did describe above, though, is why the English term “China” is used.
I would disagree. But I would agree that Esperanto is as dead as Communism, and Capitalism.
Sign language seems to be a language invented by scholars that would fit Mencken’s definition of living speech.
rocks
Well, I speak Chinese. I think that should make me a good enough authority.
Besides, if guo meant “kingdom,” it doesn’t anymore. America, in Chinese, is mei guo. America isn’t much of a kingdom. Then again, neither is China nowadays, yet guo is still a part of China’s official name, in Chinese. I highly doubt the Communists there inserted the guo just for tradition’s sake.
As for your last sentence, please elaborate.
That is an unnecessarily low blow! I resent the implication that Esperanto is Newspeak or a forerunner of it. Nor do I accept the philosophy, post hoc ergo propter hoc. (just becausue a cat gives birth in an oven doesn’t make her kittens biscuits!)
Golly…do you have gobs and gobs of time to learn the vocabulary of French or English or Latin or Russian or whatever? The affixes Esperanto uses make this burden unnecessary. Do you think that’s too damn bad, that people should accept that burden anyway? 
Well, I don’t know why you’re drawing a distinction in this regard and, for example, English, all of whose subjunctive forms are identical to the imperative; or to Spanish, all of whose imperative forms (except for the second-person informal positive) are identical to the subjunctive.
Touché, Matt. 
Well, no, matt_mcl, imperative forms are not all identical to subjunctive forms in English (what’s the imperative form of “to be”? Are the final sounds of “had” and “have” indistinguishable?) Moreover, as one having a passing knowledge of grammar should know, English, although descended from a highly inflected language, has become largely positional, with meaning shown by auxiliary verbs, as “would” and “may” (as my Spanish is a couple of thousands of years out of date, I won’t comment on the grammar of that language).
Zamenhof may have intended an identity in forms between imperative and subjunctive verbs to be idiomatic usage in Esperanto. There may have been a mistake in understanding since his time. He may have been such an arrogant bastard as to assume that anyone who knew Esperanto would, ipso facto, be counted as one of the herrenvolk. He may even have screwed up (it happens). But, I assure you, habitually substituting the imperative for the subjunctive in most languages will buy you a punch in the snoot (unless you’re a politician, in which it is expected).
“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
Well, if you’re going to accuse me of punting the subjunctive in English, let it be on the grounds of being too facile. The imperative form of “to be” is, as everyone knows, “Be!” (Check out the poem by Madeleine L’Engle in A Wind in the Door.) And what is the subjunctive of “to be”? “If it be…” Looking down the list, we see that all English subjunctives and all English imperatives that I can think of (and bear in mind it’s 11:30 at night) are the same as the infinitive. So I guess that was a cheap shot. But my point about Spanish still stands. (“Tengan!” “…que ustedes tengan…”)
Were I in the mood, I would point out there are, indeed, subjunctive forms in English distinct from the imperative. Not, of course, that this is relevant. In an ideal language, they ought to be separate forms, regardless of what the case may be in illogical English.
“There are only two things that are infinite: The Universe, and human stupidity-- and I’m not sure about the Universe”
–A. Einstein
I’d just like to clarify. When I say that in Esperanto (or English, or Spanish) the subjunctive is the same as the imperative, I mean that the verb form (i.e. the conjugation) is the same. Obviously the expressions are different.