As I’ve said before, a few years back I bought some books on Esperanto, the artificial language for international use. And although I never really bothered to learn the language, I still guess I would fall into the category of “friend of Esperanto” (as I believe it is called). I used to get a newsletter from a local Esperanto organization. Unfortunately, when I didn’t send them any money, they stopped sending it to me (though to their credit, they had actually been sending it to me free for a while). I just have one question. Or more correctly I have a question with several parts…
How far has Esperanto progressed so far? Specifically, are more people speaking it now than were in the past? And what strides have they made for the availbility of materials translated in the language? Are more materials (i.e., prayers, government forms, etc.) written in it now than were in the past? Moreover, is Esperanto progressing forward, or is it on the decline now?
It also had a role in the Brit series Red Dwarf, where everything on the space ship was written in both English and Esperanto. They did more with it on the first two seasons than the later ones.
Esperanto has a following world-wide, most places you can find a group of folks interested in it and speaking/writing/whatever in it. I don’t think it’s dying out, but it’s not progressing much in any way.
I knew a bunch of Esperato folks awhile back. They were VERY upset about the attention Klingon was getting when their artificial language was soooooo much easier.
And don’t forget the non-classic film Incubus, in which a young William Shatner proves his delivery is stiff and unnatural in any language. I believe it was the first (and maybe only) film to be made in Esperanto.
It was made quite a while ago, though, so I guess it’s really not “progress.” Still many Esperanto sites out there, including Esperanto web radio.
I can’t cite any statistics because, frankly, I can’t be bothered to, but Esperanto was never much of a success and it’s certainly fading now. There are not many people left who bother with it nowadays; the notion of an international language is considered by a lot of people to be pretty flawed and Esperanto itself is pretty flawed as well.
But in answer to your question, no, there are fewer speakers of Esperanto today than there were during whatever ‘heydey’ it might have had, and I doubt any governments are particularly supportive of it.
“Strides”? Esperanto is like an incontinet old man: it can barely totter as far as the sh%tter. Where, I might add, it belongs.
Learning a new language is difficult & time-consuming. Learning one that only a scattered few people know is of academic intrest only.
English is the official language of Aviation. It’s spreading fast.
English has hundreds of millions of native speakers. Unlike Chinese, it is spoken as the primary language of many nations; an important secondary one in many others. English is also essentially the language of the Internet & computers. This last fact has sealed its Fate.
The WWW will spread English into a true International language by default.
I disagree about the role of the Internet/WWW. The Internet has done more to divide the world than to unite it in any way. People with obscure interests are forming online communities. I’m sure the Internet makes it easier for Esperanto speakers to find more Esperanto information and to get in touch with other Esperanto speakers.
Though I agree with you that Esperanto itself is doomed.
Language and culture are irrevocably tied together. IMHO, one of the central flaws of Esperanto is that is does not have its own culture. Therefore, speaking Esperanto is little more than an esoteric academic pasttime.
That, I think, is why Klingon succeeds where Esperanto fails. Trekkies/Trekkers have their own culture. They have an environment in which, wacky as it may seem, speaking Klingon makes some sense. That’s what gives it more staying power.
A gross mis-statement if ever there were one. I was a member both of the Esperanto League for North America (ELNA) and the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA) for a couple of years. Through both organizations it became quite clear that Esperanto does have its own culture - hundreds of organizations for people with similar interests, and hundreds of periodicals for both interests and national populations. Not to mention people who write or translate novels, compose songs and/or poetry, even draw comics (both innocent and very, very racy) in Esperanto. There is no basis for asserting otherwise. Nor is it the first linguistic group to absorb its culture from somewhere else - the Romans stole their culture wholesale from the Greeks, up to and including serious chunks of the language.
That having been said, it would be wrong to deny that Esperanto occupies anything more than a niche in the pantheon of world languages, though it was created as a conscious attempt to eliminate most of the difficulties of learning a second language by streamlining the grammar as much as possible.
Bosda, do you feel the same way about other minority languages? A friend of mine has an excellent three-volume reference set that is a rather exhaustive list of all the human languages spoken in the world - a significant minority of them have less than 1,000 verifiable speakers. Should they go into the sh%tter as well?
Veering wide of the course for a moment, I think that’s mistaken. The communities you mention, including the one we’re in right now, would not have existed without the Net. We wouldn’t be having these interesting discussions among people from around the world, and we’d all be more ignorant and inevitably less tolerant. The connections made would not have existed. I don’t agree that other, different connections, of a similar width and depth, would have existed instead.
This little community of ours, like most other Net-enabled ones, does depend on a common language, though, and the language of international discourse has been English for over a century. It covers so much of the world that most political overtones and the resistance they might engender are nonexistent. Compare that to the worldwide standard calendar, the one created by the Romans - there aren’t any political overtones there anymore, either. Esperanto (yes, I remember the topic) was one of several well-meaning attempts to provide an international language without political ramifications, but that role is already filled, and arguably was filled back then, too.
The Net has not only facilitated communication and the fight against ignorance, it has thereby fostered the sense that the world is a single community - and has more firmly established English as the world language.
It also isn’t as if English constricts communication for non-nataive speakers in any real way - it absorbs words and concepts from other languages very readily whenever they prove helpful - giving it a huge vocabulary but further internationalizing its use.
[list=1]
[li]Esperanto emphatically does not have it’s own culture. Rubbish! The items you mention all use themes & stylistic conventions from the cultures of the people who create them. It has no identity of it’s own, the material is simply encoded into Esaperanto, it’s as simple as that.[/li][li]The Romans “borrowed” a lot from Greece (and the Eutruscans, but you don’t mention that), but many of the militant features of Roman culture were their own, as well as their equating civil engineering projects with “good government”, a view the Greeks would most certainly not have shared.[/li][li]Yes, I do feel that way about the minor languages, and so should you. They are barriers to communication, as any esperanto-head should himself realize.[/li][li]Yes, to the Porcelain Throne with them all. :D[/li][/list=1]
What you’re describing is the fact that Esperanto speakers include people from many walks of life who have diverse interests, and that there are publications in Esperanto targeted toward these groups. Fair enough. Esperanto speakers are cultured. But I don’t believe that this is sufficient to constitute an entire culture unto itself.
Trekkies, on the other hand, have a lot more in common with one another than I suspect the Esperanto community can claim. They, at least, can claim to belong to a substantial sub-culture. Learning Klingon comes with all kinds of associations.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor * [list=1]
[li]Esperanto emphatically does not have it’s own culture. Rubbish! The items you mention all use themes & stylistic conventions from the cultures of the people who create them. It has no identity of it’s own, the material is simply encoded into Esaperanto, it’s as simple as that.[/li][/QUOTE]
So it is your contention that there is no poetry, stories, or anything written originally in Esperanto? Or what do you mean by “encoded”? And how do you define a cultural “identity”?
Kizarvexius, what do Star Trek fans have more in common than Esperantists, aside from an overly-focused interest in a series of TV shows?
What they have in common are those things that they have extrapolated from their overly-focused interest in a series of TV shows:
A) A common “history”. Even if it is both fictional and supposedly happening in the future.
B) A common philosophy. Mankind must continue to explore the universe, but in a purely philanthropic manner. Respect all life. To boldly split infinitives no man has split before.
C) A common mode of behavior. The constant assumption that the whole concept is true. The fanatical attention to detail. The burning desire to explain away every plot inconsistentcy. The tendency to appear in public in Star Fleet uniform. The near-universal loathing of Wesley Crusher. The perpetual “Kirk vs. Piccard” debate.
D) A common language. Well, two, actually. English and Klingon.
I admit that there’s not a lot of grounds here to qualify “Trekiedom” as a culture in and of itself. But it has (IMHO) more potential in this department than does Esperanto.
A culture is a distinct pattern of symbols, themes, values and beliefs that grow up over many years, and is associated with a certain population. The idea that there is an “esperanto culture” is just plain silly!
After all, the esperanto speakers belong to the cultures of the nations and ethic groups they live in.
They may or may not qualify as a sub-culture, like Star Trek fans, but you haven’t even offered one bit of information that suggests it.
The reason I doubt that there is an “esperanto” sub-culture is the very fact that you don’t understand the meaning of the word “encode”. Or, you pretend not to.
All your silly esperanto crowd is doing is converting literature in *one *format (say, Turkish) into another format (Esperanto). The symbols, iconography, and themes still derive from our hypothetical native-speaker of Turkish’s culture. They remain Turkish. They are simply encoded into Esperanto. No new symbolism is, or even can be, created by the mere act of phrasing something in another language. If the symbols, icons and themes are from Culture “A”, they remain a part of Culture “A”, even if they are translated, or even composed, in Language “X”.
Thus it is demonstrated—there is no “Esperanto Culture” and cannot ever be one, unless a given culture abandons its own native language utterly, and adopts Esperanto completely.
BTW–please ignore the above fractional post. Somebody was messing with my keyboard when I stepped away for a moment.
Bosda, say what you will about Esperanto speakers (and it’s all true) but I value these people for the contribution they and the Trekkies have made to our lives:
Their belief that a Utopia is possible and something to be worked for is an inspiration and a guide for the rest of us. I take comfort that Jordan, for instance, is ruled by a Trekkie.
Additional comfort grows from the dual facts that, no matter how nerdy and geeky I am, I have neither spent more than ten minutes studying Esperanto nor have I worn Spock ears in public except once to a Halloween party while TOS was still being broadcast.
And any idiot knows that Picard could out-captain Kirk any day.
Esperanto is in a class by itself. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view.
Probably the key “stride” that Esperanto has made is survival. And this is in no way a joke.
Over the last century and a half, there have been literally thousands of “artificial languages” invented. Only two have found any degree of public acceptance that has continued over the years: Esperanto and Basic English. And as we learn more about the evolution of languages, Basic English seems fit only for use as at best a Creole. But there is in fact an internatioonal population of Esperanto speakers. There have been a few documented cases of its use in permitting two Esperantists to serve as translators between groups with no common tongue.
Esperanto has its faults. It’s “easy to learn” only for someone with background in Latin or a Romance language – though of course its relative simplicity makes it easier than most natural languages. The goofy noun/adjective endings flags violate a principle of glottocreativity known to most five-year-olds – “phrases whose words belong together need to rhyme, slant-rhyme, assonate, or alliterate.”
And the idea that it’s somehow at fault for not having a culture of its own is completely contrary to its basic principle – it was intended to serve as a bridge between cultures, by giving the a common speech form.
I personally don’t see it as having much of a future – but that it has survived and has supporters today, 125 years after its invention, makes it unique among invented languages.
And there are, of course, several Dopers, among them matt_mcl and Olentzero, who speak Esperanto like a native.
From my studies of it, Esperanto is not supposed to have a culture by design. Esperanto strives to be a neutral, common-ground way to speak to anyone. By not embracing a culture and not becoming the main tongue of any land, it (hypothetically) should be free from the baggage of being associated with that ‘culture’. English is the language of the Capitalist Colonialists. French is ze language of lu-u-uv. Achtung! We all know what de German ist, ja? (Zees ees tongue-in-check, ja?)
Esperanto has no dialects, no hidden meanings, no loaded words. It is just what you see - a synthetic language. Is it perfect? No. Is it still alive. Yup, I like to think so.
For some reason, all this drives some people nuts.
:D[/li][/list=1]