Talk:Esperanto/Archive 1

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The note on the Utah convict sounds like mere advocacy (learn Esperanto and get letters). What is the status of the 30,000 titles that the British Esperantists 'have' (yes, I know the verb is hopelessly vague in English, and that the Esperanto must be MUCH more exact)? 30,000 EVER published, or 30,000 currently in print? A side issue is that I'd like to know what Foreign Service level 1 is if level 3 is communication is that above the level of grunted greetings (which must be level 2?). Is level 1 WISHING you could grunt greetings, much like my ability at spoken German? --MichaelTinkler

Points well taken. My comment about the Utah inmate was indeed advocacy and has been deleted (personally I could care less about having Esperanto pen pals, but some like them). There are 30,000 books in the library in the British Esperanto Association alone. For the record, havi is the word for "to have" in Esperanto and it actually has the same vagueness as English.  :) The foreign service levels are somewhat defined in the government document at http://oig.state.gov/pdf/7sp005.pdf. It appears that level 0 is wishing you could grunt greetings, and level 1 is actually being able to grunt greetings (as is also my ability at spoken German). Thank you for your comments. --ChuckSmith

Could somebody please give a reference for the study mentioned in the entry that it pays off (or at least is no hinderance) to learn Esperanto as the first language. -- HJH

See Chuck Smith/Pedagogical evidence for Esperanto.

Because Esperanto is so well known

Is Esperanto really so well known? I only heard about it a year ago when I was 21 researching a paper on Machine Language Acquisition. I would say only about a quarter of the people in the United States have even heard of it. --Chuck Smith

Good point. Perhaps a better way of putting it is to say that Esperanto is by far the most well known of the artificial (auxiliary) languages. -- Egern

What does everyone think about breaking this article into Esperanto language and Esperanto culture like the other languages are set up? I think this article is large enough to warrant this split. --Chuck Smith

Yes. Yes, indeed.--Node 22:01, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Can't the other Esperanto pages go as sub-pages of this one? - Mark Ryan

I think they would go better as seperate pages because LMS wants to get rid of subpages altogether soon. --Chuck Smith

Yes, they shouldn't be subpages. But they shouldn't be uppercase either, so I've renamed them. --Zundark 2002 Jan 12

To 12.234.138.157: removing references to the Esperanto version of the wikipedia and moving the links to criticism pages to be before the supportive pages is pretty childish. If you really want to show how poor Esperanto is, may I suggest you start up a Wikipedia project in your favored language and try to surpass it in honest usage? There are stub sites ready to go for Interlingua and Volapük at the least, and I'm sure Jimbo would be happy to set up wikis for any languages that don't have 2-letter codes. Brion VIBBER, Monday, April 29, 2002

I don't know about the spirit being Hebrew; my impression has always been that the spirit has been that of the prestige language of the area Esperanto was first extensively used; namely, Poland -- and German. It should be also noted that canonical modern Esperanto style is not primarily Zamenhof's, but Kazimierz Bein's ("Kabe", who to my knowledge was Gentile).

I took out the phrase about the spirit of the language being Hebrew because Enrique Ellemberg (a fluent Esperantist from Argentina) and I also agree. I also removed the part about the ease of use being luck because Zamenhof spent many years testing the language to see which parts worked and which didn't. Also, that would be more appropriate on the L. L. Zamenhof page. Enrique's comments are as follows: --ChuckSmith
"its heart and spirit (its logic) is Hebrew."
Cxu tio certas? En la pagxo la vorto "Hebrew" estas ligo, kaj pro tio havas enfazon. Mi pensas ke la ideo de "Hebrew"-a lingvo povas malallogi interesitojn. Ankaux mi scias ke iu foje Zamenhof pensis pri lingvo por judoj, sed finfine li faris lingvon por la mondo, ne nur por la judoj. La judoj ne akceptis liajn ideojn.
"Zamenhof was not a professional linguist, but rather an ophthalmologist"
Zamenhof studadis lingvistikon kaj lingvojn, de sia volo, dum multaj jaroj. Zamenhof studis medicinon nur cxar la patro trudis gxin. La lingvon Esperanton Zamenhof pretigis multaj jaroj antaux ol esti oftalmologo. La oftalmologo ne kreis Esperanton. La studento de lingvoj kreis Esperanton.
"extremely regular and easy to learn (due in large part to luck..."
LUCK ???!!! Zamenhof laboris multege da jaroj en sia lingvo, provante cxion per tradukoj, kaj refarante cxion kio ne funkciis. Nenio estis "luck", bonsxanco, en la vivo de Zamenhof.
Could be. There have been hundreds of language projects over the centuries with pretty much the same aims as E-o, both before and after. It just happened that LLZ was the language author who hit the target. Maybe the "lucky" part was that he did it at the right time: just when international travel was becoming established and fashionable. --Tiffer 20:56, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Language points

I'm removing the "some claim" from (some claim that its syntax is more like Asian languages) unless I can see any evidence against this. See Esperanto: A Western Language? by former UN translator, Claude Piron.

Yes, Chuck, I've read that article. (I love Piron's articles -- I started on an English translation of his Confession d'un fou européen some time ago which I'll have to finish one of these days!) BUT... he doesn't say anything there about syntax! He does show similarities in word formation (part of morphology) -- usually building from invariable parts rather than the variable inflections and oddly or unrelated word families we see in Indo-European. However, there are quite a few decidedly un-Asian but IE-like things in Esperanto's syntax: required plural markers, required noun-adjective agreement in number and case, required tense markers (on verbs) and aspect markers (on participles), prepositions, relative clauses... I'm willing to believe that someone claims there are greater similarities to Asian languages in syntax, but I'm not aware of such claims and I wouldn't believe them without seeing any evidence. Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Character of E-o

I'd like to see more references to Esperanto's supposed similarity to Asian languages. The analysis in the Claude Piron article mentioned above is deeply flawed, linguistically. Piron likens Esperanto to Chinese! The problems with that are:

  1. Chinese is not at all polysynthetic; it is the canonical example of an isolating language
  2. Piron's real basis for comparison is their regularity. But Chinese is regular because of its lack of inflection; Esperanto is regular because the inflection system has no exceptions.
  3. I'm not fully qualified to judge on this point, but he seems to be using the word word a bit loosely. The strings of Chinese morphemes he cites are AFAICT phrases, not words.
  4. The similarity of ordering among the morphemes doesn't rise much beyond the threshold of coincidence.

Overall, Esperanto is closer to a fusional language than to an agglutinative language. The test for agglutination, as mentioned above, includes that morphemes are concatenated without change. But this can be explained in the case of Esperanto by the intentional effort to keep the language fully regular; there are other tests which suggest properties of a synthetic language.

The main argument is another test for agglutination: that each element of meaning be expressed in a separate morpheme. Esperanto follows the model of other European languages, with a small number of morphemes coding a large number of meanings: -as conveys verbal function, present tense, declarative mood; -o encodes status as a noun, subjective mood, singular number; etc. Another argument is the general similarity to Latin or German, which are considered canonical fusional languages.

The verb endings can be analyzed further: -s indicates verbishness, -t- indicates participleness [cannot stand on its own, must be followed by additional endings to make adjective, noun, or yes even verb forms], -n- is a passive->active converter for participles; -a- is present, -i- past, -o- future, -u- potential. -u- participles are not "official", but do appear in usage. The -i infinitive and the -u volative mood act a little differently from everything else; infinitive is noun-like but not exactly, and volative has a default subject [second person] and can't be used in participles. --Brion

I note some confusion on this point, for example in the Esperanto FAQ, part 9, which sets up a dichotomy between "'Western' root-based thinking and 'Eastern' agglutinative thinking", and claims that Esperanto is a "good compromise" between the two. It's not clear what's meant here; for example, some of the most highly agglutinating languages out there are Mohawk, Innuit and Basque.

The distinctions "agglutinative" and "synthetic" lie along a continuum, so this is not a cut-and-dried issue, but I'd like to capture the most accurate characterization here, especially with regard to relation or non-relation to Asian languages. The comment in the article is, even if correct, much too vague: the Asian language with the most speakers by far is in fact not agglutinative at all (and yet is the only Asian language mentioned in Piron's article). Can we have some pointers into the literature comparing Esperanto to Japanese? --Len


How about this:
As far as [modifiers coming before the modified word], European languages behave in different ways. For an adjectival modifier, the basic principle in French is [noun + epithet], while in English it's [epithet + noun], unless it's a subclause, including relative clauses; then the order is always [noun + epithet]. Japanese and Chinese stand out for their regularity. "The fact that he's a liar" is "[he's a liar]-ish fact". To formulate; in the European languages: SN -> NP, in Japanese and Chinese: SN -> P N, where SN = naming sintagm [??"sintagmo noma"??], P = clause, N = name or noun.
Esperantologists' hobby horse about the agglutinative nature of Asian languages and Esperanto means absolutely nothing here. There is absolutely no such fact that Esperanto is more easily learnable for Asians because of its agglutinative nature. Esperanto is durch und durch a European language.
YAMASAKI Seikô, Enkonduko en la Japanan; Chapecó-SC, Brazil: Fonto, 2000. pp 22-23; my translation. --Brion 21:06 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)

Claude Piron doesn't have time to respond to the comments made in this thread on his comparison of Esperanto with Chinese, but he told me that his comparison is with actual Chinese (i.e. the language used by Han people both in China and in the Chinese diaspora), not with the image of Chinese found in many linguistics textbooks and encyclopedias. He sent me an article he wrote in French on the remarkable difference between the real language and the features constantly ascribed to it in books on general or comparative linguistics.

I have posted this article and you can read it at http://www.esperanto.net/info/CHINOIS.rtf.

In this article, he demonstrates by linguistic analysis of Chinese material, comparison with other languages and the use of various tests where you are mistaken if you adhere to the conventional opinion according to which

  • there is no distinction between word and morpheme in Chinese,
  • Chinese words don't belong to a grammatical category and can readily switch from one to the other,
  • the substantive, adjective, verbal or adverbial function of a Chinese word depends on its place in the sentence,
  • Chinese morphemes are autonomous units not susceptible to agglutination, and
  • Chinese is a language without affixes and endings.

He also presents a few hypotheses on the psychological causes of this distortion of reality which are traditionally repeated among linguists, and of which even people who have studied some Chinese appear not to be aware. People often stick to a preconceived opinion that has been transmitted to them by authorites rather than to reality, to such an extent that they don't see the facts that contradict that opinion.

--Chuck SMITH

I can't read French alas, but I highly suspect that Piron's demonstration is based only on eyeballing existing corpora, which will likely only use "typical" Chinese language constructs. But, to exercise all the nooks and crannies of Chinese grammar -- which is the main point anyway -- there's no substitute for face-to-face contact with a native Chinese speaker! Chinese being my mother tongue, I can safely say that for one thing, many so-called "affixes" (e.g. "men5" for plural) are really clitics, and can apply over phrasal constructs such as conjunctions. So there... -- tk1@despammed.com
Well, as you can see from the biography of Claude Piron, he was a UN translator for Chinese, so I think he must know Chinese pretty well. I've just printed out his essay and I'll try to read it sometime during the next week... --Chuck SMITH 12:37, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for the response. Incidentally, Edwin Pulleybank in "Outline of Classic Chinese Grammar" argues that Chinese is really a bit of an inflecting language, and classical Chinese much more so: inflection is done by modifying the consonants and tone contour within a single syllable (= character). Now that's confusing... -- tk1@despammed.com

I removed the phrase "Esperanto advocates" because even some linguists who don't speak Esperanto show that morphemes make languages easier to learn, plus that phrase is very biased. --Chuck SMITH

Fair enough. I just hate seeing the phrase 'Some say'. It's better (I believe) to attribute beliefs. Would it be fair to say "Esperanto advocates and many linguists say..." ? cprompt

Well, if you have to put something there then use "Esperanto speakers" and not "Esperanto advocates".  :-) --Chuck SMITH

Living Language

Well I disagree with you there, as I think the English idiom is well established.

Well, I know in practice I've responded both ways before in English and have been misunderstood, so I always clarify myself completely. Whether in theory one way is right or not, that could be different. I generally take languages by what I find in practice rather than what's in the textbooks. --Chuck SMITH

But anyway, I have since found out what is recommended in Esperanto. Excerpt from Plena Ilustrita Vortaro:

"II...Rim. 2 Respondante al nea demando, kies neadon oni volas konfirmi, kelkaj popoloj, precipe okcident-eŭropaj, uzas ne, dum aliaj, precipe orientaj, uzas jes: li diris: ĉu vi ne scias, kio tio estas? Mi diris: ne, mia Sinjoro....Male: ĉu ŝi edziniĝis? demandis Marta. -- Jes, iele tio fariĝis, ke ŝi ne edziniĝis(Z). Same, responde al nea demando, kies malpravon oni volas aserti, la unuaj uzas jes (aŭ jes ja), la aliaj ne:...La sola rimedo eviti miskomprenon, almenaŭ en la konversacio, estus ripeti la pridemanditan verbon: ĉu li ne venos? -- Li venos (aŭ) Li ne venos."
Responding to a negative question, whose negativity one wans to confirm, some peoples, mainly western European, use no, while others, mainly eastern, use yes <...snip...> The only way to avoid misunderstanding, at least in conversation, is to repeat the asked-about verb: "Won't he come?" -- "He will come (or) He won't come".

I have every sympathy with this honest acknowledgment in PIV that if speakers of very different native languages are to communicate effectively then there is more to learn than everyone simply saying and understanding things the way that comes most naturally to them.

I agree. That's why I always clarify myself after my response even as I do in English, especially when I'm communicating with someone who is not a native English speaker... somehow I now realize that we've left the discussion about the article and just started chatting... perhaps we should delete some comments here that aren't directly related to the article, eh? --Chuck SMITH

Insisting on promoting Esperanto in a way which looks easiest (in this case for English speakers), rather than admitting that not everything will ideally suit everybody, can be at the expense of speakers of other languages. The word ŝati is a case in point: because people have insisted on misusing it just in order to create a way of saying "I like" which is easy for them, an ambiguity has now arisen for everybody else when ŝati is used these days, as to whether it is being used in its true sense of "esteem highly" or is simply being used to mean "to like".

--Trainspotter 17:07 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I always understood ŝati and plaĉi to mean the same thing, but used in a different word order. As far as the "misuse" of the language goes, languages evolve naturally and no one can control a living language, so if a meaning changes over time then that happens. The same happened in English with the word gay... --Chuck SMITH

Pri la paragrafo: "However, modern Esperanto usage may in fact depart from that originally described in the Fundamento. The translation given for "I like this one", in the phrases below offers a significant example."

La vortigo "may depart" ne bone priskribas la problemon. La ekzemplo pri ŝati/plaĉi; laŭ mi, ne taŭgas.

Ĉu mi ne povas diri : "mi ŝatas ĉi tiun veston, kaj ankaŭ tiu plaĉas al mi; sed mi preferas la jenan."

Mi proponas forviŝi tiun paragrafon, kaj krei apartan paĝon pri la problemo de lingvo evoluado. Mi trovis bonan klarigon en la tezo de François LO JACOMO : "liberté ou autorité dans l'évolution de l'espéranto' . paĝo 135 : Faute et évolution.

parta traduko :

Se mi uzas la vorton "kara" laŭ la senco "multekosta", mi sekvas la tradician normon, tiel kiel atestas la vortaroj (inter kiuj PIV). Sed mi ne konformiĝas al la nuna uzo kiu limigas tiun terminon al la unua senco. -- Raymond Gerard

The role of the Fundamento de Esperanto ("Basis of Esperanto", a work containing the sixteen rules of grammar, a "universal dictionary" and a collection of exercises) was laid out in the "Declaration of the Essence of Esperantism" at the first World Congress (Boulogne, 1905):

La sola unu fojon por ĉiam deviga por ĉiuj esperantistoj fundamento de la lingvo Esperanto estas la verketo "Fundamento de Esperanto", en kiu neniu havas la rajton fari ŝanĝon.
The only, once and for all time compulsory for all Esperantists, basis of the language Esperanto is the little work "Basis of Esperanto", in which nobody has the right to make a change. (translation, emphasis mine)

Extract from the "universal dictionary" (and hence from the Fundamento):

ŝat' estimer | esteem | viel halten, grossen Werth legen | дорожить | cenić, oceniać, szacować.

But you say that "no one can control a living language, so if a meaning changes over time then that happens". If it is the considered view of the Esperanto movement to oppose parts of the Boulogne declaration, e.g. if the Fundamento is not to be considered unendingly binding, then that should be made explicitly clear, because otherwise people will naturally assume that the declaration retains the endorsement of the movement.

Unless you can point out any obvious flaw in the above logic, please could you:

  • EITHER: revert the edit to ĉi tiu plaĉas al mi
  • OR: state clearly that you do not fully support the Boulogne declaration, and give some indication whether this is a minority or majority view within the movement

Thanks.


The meaning of gay in English has changed because it is a living language which nobody can control.

--Trainspotter 14:08 11 Jul 2003 (UTC)

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