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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: One point against Esperanto
Message-ID: <D5r1Es.4CJ@indirect.com>
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Organization: Department of Redundancy Department
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 17:18:27 GMT
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Not so very long ago, jim@duntone.demon.co.uk asked...
>If Esperanto is so universal, why is it so much easier for those
>speaking European languages?

  Because its vocabulary consists mostly of Romance roots, with a few 
Germanic ones thrown in.

>It has often been accused of being Eurocentric and ignoring other world
>languages in its makeup. 

  Yes, that's true.  It's easier for Europeans to master the vocabulary 
than it is for Orientals, for example.
  Now then.  If we were to create a language identical to Esperanto, but 
with each dictionary item replaced by some randomly-created root, the 
vocabulary would be equally difficult for Europeans and Orientals.  That 
is, it would be more difficult for Europeans, and about the same as 
Esperanto for Orientals.  Nothing is to be gained by this.
  On the other hand, Esperanto's mainly-Romance vocabulary allowed it to
"bootstrap" the initial set of speakers from the general European
populace, and the fact that the grammar is vaguely similar to most
European grammars in that respect helped as well. 
  However, the grammatical inflections are so viciously regular, that many
people claim that it is actually not an inflected language (like
Indo-European languages in general) at all, but agglutinative (like
Finnish, Turkish, Inuit, and to some extent, Chinese). 
  And again, Orientals have more trouble learning Esperanto than they 
would learning a constructed language patterned after their own 
languages, but they have less trouble learning Esperanto than learning 
natural European languages.

-- 
                              ==----=                    Steve MacGregor
                             ([.] [.])                     Phoenix, AZ
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        Help stamp out, eliminate, and abolish redundancy!
