Newsgroups: alt.politics.ec,alt.politics.eu,sci.lang,soc.culture.europe,soc.culture.french,soc.culture.german,soc.culture.esperanto
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!news.ucdavis.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!donh
From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Esperanto? The EU? (Very, very long)
Message-ID: <donhD3v8EG.275@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 02:32:39 GMT
Lines: 390
Sender: donh@netcom8.netcom.com

In the last 3-4 days I've archived a hundred or so posts on the language 
question in the EU in general and Esperanto in particular. Much of this 
has been interesting. Some of it has been of such a nature that, if I 
believed in the magical Law of Similarity (the map _is_ the territory), 
I would print it out in two hundred copies, shred it, mulch it, and bed 
my rose tree in it, expecting this year's crop of blooms to be bigger, 
stronger, and more colorful than ever. Should I decide to do this, and 
if it works, my special thanks to Mr. Chau, Mr. Gerdemann, and Mr. 
Livesey for their metaphorical contributions to the fertility of my 
garden.

I've decided to try to answer some of the questions that have been 
raised that bear, directly or indirectly, on Esperanto. Since there seem 
to be about sixty-nine newsgroups involved in this, I've decided to cut 
that number down and post only to those that appeared in a large number 
of headers. I find six -- alt.politics.ec, alt.politics.europe.misc, 
sci.lang, soc.culture.europe, soc.culture.french, soc.culture.german. 
I've also added soc.culture.esperanto, which somehow seems to have been 
left out of most of this discussion. No follow-ups set -- trim your own 
headers, if you want to do so when and if you reply.

Any opinions expressed herein are my own, and binding upon no other 
individual on the face of this planet. Naturally, wise and intelligent 
people will automatically agree with me. ;-)

This is almost 400 lines long. Quit here if you want.



ESPERANTO IS NOT A REAL LANGUAGE ... IS IT?

People use Esperanto to talk to each other, make love, argue politics, 
write poetry (both good and bad), write novels (allegories, thrillers, 
science-fiction...), write scientific papers, do their jobs, etc., etc., 
etc -- in short, to communicate with other people under all possible 
circumstances. To me, this means that it's a real language. You may 
exclude it from this category, if you wish, by redefining the term "real 
language", but this is a trivial way of getting rid of it, and would be 
an indication more of meanness of spirit than of any problem with the 
language.

REAL LANGUAGES EVOLVE, AND ESPERANTO HASN'T ... HAS IT?

If you don't count going from a vocabulary of 800 roots (1887) to one of 
9000 official roots and at least 9000 unofficial ones (size of Zhang 
Honfan's Esperanto-Chinese Dictionary) as evolution, then maybe it 
hasn't. If you don't count the gradual spread of the use of the -N 
ending (Zamenhof would have said "pas^o post pas^o" for "step by step"; 
most people today would say "pas^on post pas^o"), then maybe it hasn't. 
If you don't count the gradual disappearance of -CIO object roots in 
favor of truncated action roots ('abolicio' -> 'aboli', 'navigacio' -> 
'navigi', 'administracio' -> 'administri', 'federacio' -> 'federi'), 
then maybe it hasn't. If you don't count the gradual conversion of 
country names in -UJO to country names in -IO, then maybe it hasn't. If 
you don't count the growing treatment of 'anstatau^' and 'krom' as 
coordinating conjunctions rather than prepositions (with consequent 
further use of -N for desambiguation), then maybe it hasn't. If you 
don't count the increase in the number of the body of official affixes 
by about eight percent, then maybe it hasn't. If you don't count the 
appearance of a number of unofficial affixes, then maybe it hasn't. If 
you don't count the appearance of short prepositional phrases 
concatenated into adverbs, then maybe it hasn't. If you don't count the 
development of dozens of different writing styles, then maybe it hasn't. 
Etc.

Of course, you can always fall back on the argument that Esperanto's 
basic structure and grammar have not 'evolved' in the past 100 years. 
But then neither have those of English. What do you want? They work just 
fine as they are.

ESPERANTO CAN'T BE AS EASY TO LEARN AS ESPERANTISTS CLAIM ... CAN IT?

Most Esperantists today go easy on such claims, fearing (rightly) that 
they will be laughed at by those who know nothing about Esperanto. When 
Count Leo Tolstoy claimed that he learned Esperanto "in three or four 
hours" we must assume -- and probably correctly -- that this meant that 
the polyglot Tolstoy learned, in 3-4 hours, to read Esperanto texts with 
the help of a dictionary.

On the other hand, I've run into far too many cases of people who, in a 
very, very short period of self-study (usually months, sometimes weeks, 
rarely -- but not never -- days) have taught themselves to read and 
write Esperanto better than any language that they learned in school for 
a period of years, and who -- this latter is an experience I shared -- 
found that the first time they were actually exposed to spoken Esperanto 
they had no trouble in understanding it, nor in participating in 
conversation. Why do you think so many people who speak Esperanto are so 
enthusiastic about it? Because they think it's going to save the world? 
See below.

Why should Esperanto be easier to learn? First, because the grammar has 
been cleansed of irregularities. The student of English, for instance, 
is faced with at least two totally irregular verbs and around three 
hundred "strong" or "radical-changing" verbs, each of which has three 
components that have to be learned separately; the student of Esperanto 
has to learn one simple paradigm, six endings, applicable to all verbs. 
The student of English has to learn the irregular plural endings of a 
large number of nouns (and, consequently, has to pay attention to 
_every_ noun so that he will know whether or not it uses one of these 
unusual endings); the student of Esperanto has to learn one plural 
ending for all nouns. Etc.

Second, because Esperanto has a _productive_ system of word-formation. 
Once you have memorized a relatively small vocabulary (eleven 
grammatical endings, nine pronouns, a dozen numerals, a correlative 
system consisting of fourteen parts, about forty affixes, a hundred or 
so particles, and maybe three hundred word roots) you can leverage this 
yourself into all the vocabulary you need to carry on a conversation in 
the language, or read most of the material written in the language with 
about 90% comprehension. The rest you can pick up as you need it.

Third, Esperanto doesn't force you to learn contexts as well as words. 
When do you use the root 'profund''? Anytime you're talking about depth, 
whether physical or metaphorical. When do you use 'deep' in English, and 
when 'profound'? Hint: you'd never use the latter in discussing a 
physical situation; but in metaphorical situations, the two may be used 
(mostly) interchangeably. In Esperanto, a root has a meaning, and may be 
used metaphorically as well; but nowhere is there any rule to say, "You 
may not use this particular root here, because you have to use this 
other root with the same meaning under these conditions."

I cite my best friend: She studied English for nine years (high school 
and university) in her home country. She studied Esperanto for one 
semester in her last year of university. At the end of that semester she 
felt more competent and confident reading and writing in Esperanto than 
she did in English. (My friend's native language, for the record, is 
Shanghainese, not one of the European tongues; and she did not learn 
Esperanto out of a hobbyist's interest, or to save the world, but 
because the authorities in her university ordered her to do so, against 
her own wishes. Not that she regrets it!)

ESPERANTO ISN'T OF MUCH USE ... IS IT?

Personally, I've found it more useful than I would have originally 
suspected, thirty-odd years ago. I have used it to travel in Europe and 
China, and seen what sort of traveling I would have been doing had I 
been using only English; to put it as politely as possible, where I've 
been I've seen that Esperanto-speakers want to talk, and English-
speakers want to take. (The exception, of course, is Great Britain; but 
even there, _pace_ those who insist that there is no significant 
difference between British and American English, the question of 
language and accent sometimes intervenes, as I have posted elsewhere. By 
the way, in response to the suggestion that British TV programs and 
movies are widely viewed on American television, I would point out that 
British programs and movies are almost 100% restricted to public 
television channels, which in terms of number of viewers fall somewhere 
short of the religious channels and the Home Shopping Channel; and that 
almost all that are shown at all were originally made in Britain with 
the American market in mind -- the two exceptions that I can think of 
off hand being the old Monty Python and Dr. Who.)

I read books from all over the world in Esperanto, subscribe to 
magazines from all over the world in Esperanto (and get some that I 
never subscribed to -- my public thanks to the Yokohama Esperanto-Rondo 
for their excellent window on Japanese life, _Novaj^oj Tamtamas_), have 
friends all over the world through Esperanto, and have a much better 
idea of what goes on in the world than I would ever learn through my 
English-language newspapers, magazines, or news services. You may not 
consider this very useful. If not, then I can't argue the point, because 
your definition of 'useful' differs too much from my own.

One other indication of the usefulness or uselessness of Esperanto can 
be given by the experience of Radio Polonia, whose Esperanto broadcasts 
for three decades brought in a level of listener response exceeded only 
by that of their German-language broadcasts -- and higher than that of 
English. This is why, when Radio Polonia had to cut services back for 
financial reasons after the fall of Communism, they merely reduced those 
for Esperanto, while those for some "languages of wider dissemination" 
-- Spanish comes immediately to mind -- were terminated completely.

MOST INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS HAVE FIRMLY REJECTED ESPERANTO ... 
HAVEN'T THEY?

If they had, Esperantists would be less than happy -- but, far from 
rejecting Esperanto, since the League of Nations accepted (over the 
violent protests of the French government) Assistant Secretary-General 
NITOBE Inazo's enthusiastic report about the language, no international 
organization -- particularly those currently extant -- has even looked 
at Esperanto, even though, in the case of the UN, they have had its 
existence forcefully pointed out to them (with the two largest 
international petitions ever collected on private initiative, one in 
1948 and one in 1966 -- in the first case, they eventually referred it 
to UNESCO, and in the second case they simply _lost_ it). Internal UN 
reviews of the language problem have concentrated on traditional means 
of solving the problem (add more languages, hire more interpreters and 
translators, ensure that all employees are multilingual), without 
devoting so much as a paragraph to the study -- and possibly rejection 
-- of the idea of adopting a neutral auxiliary language.

Esperanto has not been rejected by the UN or the EU. It hasn't even been 
considered.

(The case of UNESCO is somewhat extraordinary. Despite formal protests 
from the US State Department, UNESCO considered a resolution favorable 
to Esperanto at its 1954 General Conference in Montevideo -- and firmly 
rejected it. But the method of rejection was so irregular [and, thanks 
to the local Esperantists in Uruguay, made so public] that the local 
press forced UNESCO to take a second look before the closing of the 
conference -- and this time the same resolution was adopted. A second 
favorable resolution was passed some 30 years later, at Sofia, Bulgaria 
-- by some weird coincidence, at the first General Conference after the 
United States and Great Britain [read: Ronald Reagan and Margaret 
Thatcher] picked up their marbles and went home.)

LATIN WOULD BE A BETTER CHOICE FOR A COMMON EUROPEAN LANGUAGE ... 
WOULDN'T IT?

Zamenhof, who was later to invent Esperanto, decided when he still wrote 
his age with a single digit that the solution to the language problem 
that he saw every day around him was to convince everybody in the world 
to learn Latin or Classic Greek; and he vowed to devote his adult life 
to this cause.

Around puberty, Z entered high school (gymnasium) on the language track, 
where he had the privilege of studying both Latin and Classic Greek. I 
don't know how many weeks into the courses he was before he decided that 
inventing his own language would probably be more realistic.

I took three years of Latin in high school, and have good reason to 
suppose that few American contemporaries of mine were as adept at 
wrangling the language as I was. At the end of three years I could, with 
the aid of the Cassell's I won in a contest, plow my way through -- 
though not enjoy very much -- Vergil and Cicero. I can safely say that, 
had Selma Lagerlof's _Gosta Berling's Saga_ and Ivan Vazov's _Under the 
Yoke_ been translated into Latin rather than Esperanto, I would never 
have devoted hours to reading those two multi-hundred-page classics the 
year after I got out of high school. Let's face it -- the number of 
grown people who are going to learn Latin as an auxiliary language well 
enough to use it in free-flowing conversation, or even for light 
reading, is at least as miniscule as the number of grown people who are 
going to learn any other ethnic language to the same level.

BUT A MODIFIED, SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF LATIN SUCH AS INTERLINGUA WOULD BE 
MORE EUROPEAN ... WOULDN'T IT?

If you're talking about the abortion created by Alexander Gode in the 
late forties, forget it. I mean, a constructed language that conserves 
three conjugations???

If you're referring to one of the names under which the "Latino Sine 
Flexione" of the Italian mathematician Peano was known -- this is a 
different kettle of fish. This is Latin as she should have been, shorn 
of all those complicated declensions, conjugations, and incomprehensible 
ablative constructions, but -- at least in terms of its vocabulary -- 
remaining essentially Latin! I don't know whether anybody, or how many, 
ever spoke this language, but, if you are interested, it would certainly 
be a better candidate for revival than Gode's Interlingua, Hogben's 
Interglossa (nowadays resurrected as Glosa), or any of a thousand other 
stillborn language projects. Some of you university types in Europe 
should be able to find examples -- I seem to remember reading that one 
volume in Peano's collected works was written entirely in the language.

ESPERANTISTS ALL BELIEVE THAT IF EVERYBODY LEARNED ESPERANTO, WAR AND 
DEATH IN THE WORLD WOULD END ... DON'T THEY?

If you put six Esperantists together in a room, the only thing you will 
get them to agree on is that Esperanto is good. If you put twelve 
together, chances are that you'll find one who won't even agree on that.

Very likely, though, you could get all Esperantists to agree that if 
everybody in the world learned Esperanto, everybody in the world would 
be able to speak Esperanto. But as to whether this was desirable or not 
-- you wouldn't find any agreement on that...

ESPERANTO LACKS THE TECHNICAL VOCABULARY TO MAKE IT SUITABLE AS A MODERN 
LANGUAGE ... DOESN'T IT?

Did you expect that a group of people so fixated on language would 
somehow overlook technical vocabularies? Esperanto probably has one of 
the finest technical lexicons of any of the lesser-used languages -- and 
it may be that I don't even need to put in the qualification.

You can even find a few sample technical dictionaries available, for 
free, on the net. Check out Pilger's dictionaries of names of mammals 
and of insects (in Linnaean order), or any of at least three 
dictionaries of computer terminology, at ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl:/pub/
esperanto -- of the latter, if you have TeX and a laser printer, I 
recommend the latest version of Pokrovskij's book (1700+ definitions, 
with English and other equivalents, illustrated).

ESPERANTISTS USE THE LANGUAGE FOR NOTHING BUT TO TALK ABOUT ESPERANTO 
... DON'T THEY?

It's a good starting point for people from lots of different cultures 
who don't have anything in common _except_ the language. But it's 
certainly not the end. If half the postings on soc.culture.esperanto are 
about Esperanto, half of them aren't -- there have recently been, among 
other things, postings about the Chechen War (from Russia, among other 
places), about the earthquake in Japan (from Japan, among other places), 
about the floods in the Netherlands (from the Netherlands, among other 
places), etc. Some Esperanto magazines are devoted entirely to 
Esperanto, as well as being written in it; others (_El Popola C^inio_ 
from China, _Monato_ from Belgium, _Novaj^oj Tamtamas_ from Japan, _La 
Espero el Koreio_ from Korea, as examples) definitely are not. And most 
books in Esperanto have nothing to do with Esperanto, except for being 
written in it (in nine volumes of the science-fiction almanac _Sferoj_, 
for instance, I doubt that the word has been mentioned once, except on 
the copyright page).

YOU CAN'T EXPRESS ALL NECESSARY CONCEPTS IN ESPERANTO ... CAN YOU?

Any language with a speaking population will develop the means, within 
the framework of rules that define it, to express all necessary 
concepts. You can express all necessary concepts in English, Chinese and 
Swahili today. You may not have been able to express all necessary 
concepts in Esperanto on July 26, 1887 (the date the first Esperanto 
textbook rolled off the presses), but by the end of that decade you 
obviously could. You may not be able to express all necessary concepts 
today in Interlingua, Loglan, Klingon or Quenya -- but when and if any 
or all of these develop significant speaking populations, believe me, 
you will be able to.

YOU CAN'T TRANSLATE GREAT LITERATURE INTO ESPERANTO ... CAN YOU?

There are plenty of crappy translations in Esperanto -- every time I 
look at La Certosa's translation of Grazia Deledda's _The Mother_, I 
wince. (I suspect that Mr. La Certosa does, too, with a few more years 
under his belt.) There are also a lot of good ones. I've mentioned a few 
elsewhere and will not append a list of my favorites. Note one simple 
rule, applicable to all languages: one good translation suffices to show 
the quality of the language; one bad translation only suffices to show 
the quality of the translator.

(Example: In 1986 I got a copy of Albert Goodheir's Esperanto 
translation of Europides' _The Trojan Women_. After reading it I decided 
to do a review comparing it with an English translation. So I pulled 
Edward P. Coleridge's off my shelf and opened it. It was unreadable, and 
the review never got written. As far as I could tell, the major 
difference was not in the language of translation but in the fact that 
Goodheir was translating something about which he cared deeply, while 
Coleridge appeared to be doing a translation exercise. Goodheir's 
translation showed what Esperanto is capable of; as anybody experienced 
in English will agree, Coleridge's only showed what Coleridge was 
capable of.)

Fernando de Diego once sneered that fifty percent of Esperanto 
translations were lousy translations of useless works, twenty percent 
were lousy translations of good literature, twenty percent were good 
translations of useless literature, and only ten percent consisted of 
good translations of good literature. American science fiction readers 
will instantly recognize this as an independent rediscovery of Theodore 
Sturgeon's famous Law -- "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but 
then ninety percent of everything is crud!" -- from which Esperanto 
literature, like everything else, is not immune.

... and finally ...

ESPERANTISTS ALL AGREE THAT ESPERANTO SHOULD BE MADE AN OFFICIAL 
LANGUAGE, POSSIBLY _THE_ OFFICIAL LANGUAGE, OF THE EUROPEAN UNION ... 
DON'T THEY?

Fortunately, I'm not a citizen (first-class or second-class) of the 
European Union, so I don't have to look at what would be most 
advantageous for the EU. I am an Esperantist, and tend to look at what 
would be most advantageous for Esperanto. And, as far as Esperanto 
becoming a tool of the EU gov't, I just don't see it.

(1) Esperanto doesn't belong to anybody -- and hence it belongs to 
everybody who wants to use it. Unless a couple of other heavyweights 
were to decide, at the same time as the EU, to make Esperanto _their_ 
official language (and I don't see that happening!), the EU would, in 
effect, become the new owner of Esperanto; so, farewell, our vaunted 
cultural and political neutrality.

(2) And, once the EU had decided "in principle" to adopt Esperanto, 
who's to guarantee that a couple of Eurocrats, munching at a McDonald's 
in Brussels, would not decide to "repair" the language. A century of use 
has shown that "repairs" (they are commonly called "reforms") are 
generally the products of people who read through _Teach Yourself 
Esperanto_ once, decide that because Zamenhof didn't do it in the same 
way the French do he was dead wrong, and set out to fix up the language. 
In other words, most proposed reforms of Esperanto are definitely _not_ 
for the better. Mostly they end up in the garbage can ("dustbin", if you 
prefer) of history. The EU would have the clout to ensure that, good or 
bad, this would not happen.

I think that the adoption of Esperanto by the EU would be a step toward 
resolving a multitude of problems that plague the organization -- 
including the serious one of making it more democratic. But I don't 
think that it would do Esperanto any good, and so I'm not terribly 
enthusiastic about the idea. And I know that there are other 
Esperantists -- including many in the EU itself -- who agree with me.



-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/do/donh/donh.html 
