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From: antony@cix.compulink.co.uk ("Antony Rawlinson")
Subject: Re: One point against Esperanto
Message-ID: <D5tBnM.8Gv@cix.compulink.co.uk>
Organization: ABC                           
References: <795682541snz@duntone.demon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 22:54:58 GMT
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In reply to:

> If Esperanto is so universal, why is it so much easier for those
> speaking European languages?  It has often been accused of being
> Eurocentric and ignoring other world languages in its makeup.
> -- 
> Jim Moody

(plus 3 other contributions from you on a similar theme)

Esperanto is sometimes confused with Occidental and Interlingua, which 
were specifically designed to be easily understood, without separate 
study, by someone familiar with Romance and Germanic languages (like Phil 
Hunt's new project Eurolang).  They can genuinely be accused of being 
Eurocentric.

Although Esperanto uses mostly european-based vocabulary, the syntax and 
word-formation are designed to follow logic, rather than existing 
languages.  This IMO makes it genuinely international, but has led to the 
opposite accusation from proponents of Interlingua, that Esperanto words 
don't look like those of european languages!  You can't please everybody.

As for being easier for speakers of european languages, this has not 
discouraged the Esperanto movement in Japan and China, or for that 
matter, in Hungary, whose language is non-Indoeuropean and has almost 
nothing in common with Esperanto.  The main reason for the greater number 
of european speakers is that Europe is the one place in the world with 2 
conditions:

- a large number of national languages exist close together

- the populations have the money, leisure and infrastructure to make 
visiting each other a real possibility.

Antony Rawlinson.
