| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5] > | Artificially Re-Created English as international lingua franca Thread poster: Thomas Johansson
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esperantisto 
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FarkasAndras wrote:
The history of these languages, including Esperanto, should tell you something: this is a pointless exercise.
Why?
Esperanto is an interesting idea, but it is the miserable failure it inevitabley had to become.
What failure? Esperanto is spoken by ≈2.5 million people in different countries (a figure that is considered more or less reliable). Around 1,000 people are native speakers (I personally know a family with 2 children, whose mother tongues are Esperanto and Russian). There are web sites, magazines, books published in Esperanto and even television broadcasts. Thus, Esperanto performs much better than many national languages, hundreds of which are predicted to die in the foreseeable future.
| | | | esperantisto
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SITE LOCALIZER | Right and wrong | Feb 18, 2009 |
Thomas Johansson wrote:
There is a fundamental difference between EVE and esperanto.
That’s right, of course.
Esperanto is a purely artificial language (although ultimately based on roots from various Indo-European languages, etc. etc.).
I don’t understand, what you mean under ‘purely artificial’. Purely artificial is solresol. Esperanto has no grammar phenomenon unknown in national languages, and its vocabulary is taken from national languages by 99%, I guess. Most speakers find Esperanto absolutely natural. One Turkish Esperantist even persuaded me, that Esperanto had been derived from Turkish
The difference is that Esperanto is a planned language, while any simplified English (any simplified language at all) is not, and irregularities of the respective national language are just slightly ironed out, but not eliminated.
| | | | | Poor children! | Feb 18, 2009 |
esperantisto wrote:
What failure? Esperanto is spoken by ≈2.5 million people in different countries (a figure that is considered more or less reliable).
This reminds me of the situation that arises when gay associations are asked how many gay people exist: they always claim that 10% of the population is gay in Western countries. But if you start asking people how many gay people they know in person, the usual report is that about 1% or at most 2% of the people whose sex life they know are gay. So faced with the evidence, these associations say that there must be a lot of UNDERCOVER gay people.... in 2009!!
This figure of 2,5 million people sounds a big exaggerated to me. Who did they ask? Probably associations who want to promote esperanto. In all my life, and after living several years abroad and working in languages and translations for 15 years, I never met a single person who spoke esperanto. Oh, not true: about 25 years ago one school mate was interested and even could speak a couple of words...
So there must be a lot of UNDERCOVER speakers of esperanto.... in 2009?
esperantisto wrote:
Around 1,000 people are native speakers (I personally know a family with 2 children, whose mother tongues are Esperanto and Russian). There are web sites, magazines, books published in Esperanto and even television broadcasts. Thus, Esperanto performs much better than many national languages, hundreds of which are predicted to die in the foreseeable future.
Poor children, those of "native" esperanto families. Their parents clearly failed to understand that language is not a piece of furniture you can choose and replace at wish.
Language is so intimately linked to the nature of human beings, the society they live in, their culture, their history, that artificially altering the language also alters people artificially.
[Edited at 2009-02-18 09:05 GMT]
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esperantisto wrote: Thomas Johansson wrote: Esperanto is a purely artificial language (although ultimately based on roots from various Indo-European languages, etc. etc.). I don’t understand, what you mean under ‘purely artificial’. ... The difference is that Esperanto is a planned language, while any simplified English (any simplified language at all) is not, and irregularities of the respective national language are just slightly ironed out, but not eliminated.
From the Chambers dictionary:
"artificial language. invented language functioning not as the native speech as its users but as a computer language or means of international communication"
Apart from the "computer language" part, what part of this definition does not apply to esperanto?
[Edited at 2009-02-18 09:11 GMT]
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esperantisto
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Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
Poor children, those of "native" esperanto families. Their parents clearly failed to understand that language is not a piece of furniture you can choose and replace at wish.
In most cases, those are families with the parents belonging to different nations. Esperanto is the language that united them into families, why would not it function for their children?
Look at Ivrit (modern Israeli Hebrew): when Ben Yehuda was raising his son as the first native Hebrew speaker in the modern history, the people around said, the father was insane. So what? Today, Ivrit is a fully functional language. By the way, you can call it artificial too, because it was created by a single person based on its ancient source.
Language is so intimately linked to the nature of human beings, the society they live in, their culture, their history, that artificially altering the language also alters people artificially.
We, esperantists, have been hearing this buzz for over a hundred years. C’mon. Invent something new.
| | | | | The natural languages of their parents | Feb 18, 2009 |
esperantisto wrote: Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
Poor children, those of "native" esperanto families. Their parents clearly failed to understand that language is not a piece of furniture you can choose and replace at wish. In most cases, those are families with the parents belonging to different nations. Esperanto is the language that united them into families, why would not it function for their children?
Well, I have known many plurinational families (I grew in one) and their children end up learning both languages (with different degrees of perfection, of course). Both languages will help them communicate with their relatives and friends, enjoy the culture that is their own in 50%, and get to know and learn about the history and life that brought their parents to be what and how they are. Will esperanto allow them to do the same? I can't think of an "esperanto culture" or "being esperantish" in the same sense of "being Spanish", "being German", "being English"... And I can't think of what benefit it is for these children to have esperanto as their mother tongue.
Please explain what the situation looks like from your point of view. I am sincerely curious!
| | | | esperantisto
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SITE LOCALIZER | More flexible thinking | Feb 18, 2009 |
Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
And I can't think of what benefit it is for these children to have esperanto as their mother tongue.
When you speak a planned language, you do need to think what to say, and don’t need to think how to say it.
As to the specific content to be abstracted from such open-ended protocols, and counted as instances of creativity in them, thirty years of work with Loglan has put me in touch with numerous categories of creative verbal behavior in the friends, co-workers and learners who have been exposed to Loglan at various stages of its development. It is possible that none of this behavior was actually evoked by exposure to Loglan but, given the circumstances in which I observed it, all of it could have been. For the benefit of other future experimenters let me record here the several types of this behavior that I have observed: (1) richness and oddity of metaphor; (2) unusually frequent designation of previously "unheard of", or unthought about, individuals and phenomena; (3) increased awareness of ambiguity as evidenced by jokes or other usages that call attention to it; (4) a taste for neologisms or for bizarre or over-literal usages; (5) the invention of inflected (or de-inflected) forms that do not exist in ordinary usage in the speaker's native language but are in principle possible in it (e.g., 'coolth' 'idiosyncrat', 'ert', 'qualitiedly', 'therapped grouply', 'encomiast', to list a recent sample); and finally (6) a heightened sense of fun with one's own and other people's English, e.g., with the often comic contrast between what people actually say and what they think they are saying...or have said.
http://www.loglan.org/Loglan1/chap7.html
| | | | | That does not address the matter | Feb 18, 2009 |
esperantisto wrote: Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
Well, I have known many plurinational families (I grew in one) and their children end up learning both languages (with different degrees of perfection, of course). Both languages will help them communicate with their relatives and friends, enjoy the culture that is their own in 50%, and get to know and learn about the history and life that brought their parents to be what and how they are. Will esperanto allow them to do the same? I can't think of an "esperanto culture" or "being esperantish" in the same sense of "being Spanish", "being German", "being English"... And I can't think of what benefit it is for these children to have esperanto as their mother tongue.
When you speak a planned language, you do need to think what to say, and don’t need to think how to say it.
Sorry, but I don't think this answer the matter of the cultural link between the language taught to a child and the rest of the world. Please share your point of view about this.
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esperantisto
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SITE LOCALIZER | The language and the culture are not linked | Feb 18, 2009 |
Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
…the cultural link between the language taught to a child and the rest of the world.
Most of the Irish speak English, but very few of them if any state they belong to the British culture. Most of the Belarusians and quite many Ukrainians speak Russian, but few of them state they belong to the Russian culture. There is no Belgian language, but I wouldn’t say, there is no Belgian culture. You mix two quite different things. There is nothing to prevent a natural-born esperantist to be linked to a particular culture.
| | | | esperantisto
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OK, but is there an ‘English culture’? Hardly.
"being English"
There is not ‘being English’. There is ‘being British’, ‘being Australian’, ‘being US American’… Moreover, ‘speaking German’ is not ‘being German’, ‘speaking Spanish’ is not ‘being Spanish’ etc.
[Edited at 2009-02-18 12:48 GMT]
| | | | | I think you took me wrong | Feb 18, 2009 |
esperantisto wrote: Tomás wrote:
Both languages will help them communicate with their relatives and friends, enjoy the culture that is their own in 50%, and get to know and learn about the history and life that brought their parents to be what and how they are. OK, but is there an ‘English culture’? Hardly.
I think I might have expressed myself incorrectly, but my sentence above is valid: I said that by speaking the mother tongue of their parents, children get to know, learn and love the whole path and environment that made their parents the way they are.
Would you say that you are "esperantish", in the sense that esperanto has shaped you as a person, your conscience, your way of thinking, the way you behave when faced with human situations?
I honestly think that Spanish-speaking people have a lot in common, even if each of us is different of course, and even with the huge cultural and historical differences between Spanish-speaking countries. We are shaped by our language as it carries the essence of our common history, and also have shaped and continue to shape the language to match our evolving needs.
What do you think about that?
| | | | esperantisto
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Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
Would you say that you are "esperantish", in the sense that esperanto has shaped you as a person, your conscience, your way of thinking, the way you behave when faced with human situations?
Esperanto does influence your thinking. Try and see.
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Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote: esperantisto wrote:
What failure? Esperanto is spoken by ≈2.5 million people in different countries (a figure that is considered more or less reliable). This figure of 2,5 million people sounds a big exaggerated to me.
According to Ethnologue.com:
---
Population 200 to 2,000 (1996).
Region Speakers in about 115 countries, used most widely in central and eastern Europe, China and other countries in eastern Asia, certain areas of South America, and southwest Asia.
Language use 2,000,000 second-language speakers (1999 WA). All ages.
---
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=epo
In between, I don't know how they got these figures, but generally I trust Ethnologue's language data, and I think their methods are probably based on long experience.
| | | | | suppose we compare EVE and Esperanto | Feb 18, 2009 |
I really don't know how this got into a discussion of Esperanto...
In any event, a comparison between EVE and Esperanto might perhaps be fruitful.
As far as I know, Esperanto was created by drawing on the lexica and grammars of various languages (mostly Germanic, Romanic, and Slavic, I think, perhaps also others) in an attempt to create a "streamlined", regular system (syntax-, morphology-wise, etc.). It has arguably ended up a language that is both rich and capable in... See more I really don't know how this got into a discussion of Esperanto...
In any event, a comparison between EVE and Esperanto might perhaps be fruitful.
As far as I know, Esperanto was created by drawing on the lexica and grammars of various languages (mostly Germanic, Romanic, and Slavic, I think, perhaps also others) in an attempt to create a "streamlined", regular system (syntax-, morphology-wise, etc.). It has arguably ended up a language that is both rich and capable in linguistic expression and extremely easy to learn in comparison with other languages.
Now, I am not sure this is a correct "metaphor" in terms of what EVE would be, but PERHAPS we might tentatively propose this way of thinking of EVE: It would be like Esperanto in the sense of drawing on existing natural languages and seeking to streamline the overall result into a regular system; however, instead of drawing on several different languages, it would draw only on English.
I don't like the phrasing here: "...draw on...", which I think suggests a level of distance to the source language and degree of artificial intervention that I am not comfortable to associate with EVE, the way I have been thinking about it. (EVE, the way I think about it, would be extremely close to current, modern English.) But anyway, I propose this comparison for the sake of argument. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Wrote to the editor | Feb 19, 2009 |
Thomas Johansson wrote: According to Ethnologue.com: --- Population 200 to 2,000 (1996). Region Speakers in about 115 countries, used most widely in central and eastern Europe, China and other countries in eastern Asia, certain areas of South America, and southwest Asia. Language use 2,000,000 second-language speakers (1999 WA). All ages. --- http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=epo
Well, let's find out! I wrote to the editors and will come back about this if and when they reply to the question of where they got that data.
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