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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: Single European Language
Message-ID: <donhDA9uDv.3pJ@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <690061730wnr@afin.demon.co.uk> <3rqb6l$mcg@fido.asd.sgi.com> <3rqgpv$ota@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk> <3rqkha$366@fido.asd.sgi.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 15:15:31 GMT
Lines: 96
Sender: donh@netcom3.netcom.com

livesey@solntze.engr.sgi.com (Jon Livesey) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <3rqkha$366@fido.asd.sgi.com>:
>In article <3rqgpv$ota@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>, etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) writes:
>|> > This is your favourite debating tactic, isn't it?   Addressing a straw
>|> > man argument.   I didn't say it "proved" anything.   I asked why, if 
>|> > Esperanto really does facilitate communication, so few people use it
>|> > on the net?
>|> 
>|> The number of Esperanto speakers "on the net" is about 500-1000.
>
>The net has been around for a lot time now, and it would be an ideal
>meadium within which to prove the claims that Esperanto actually 
>*does* facilitate communication between people of different cultures, 
>rather than simply being *claimed* to do so.
>
"The net" as we know it has been around for about a decade. The influx of 
non-government/university users began in the mid- to late eighties. The 
net is difficult to access in one of the two parts of the world where 
large concentrations of Esperanto speakers live (Central and Eastern 
Europe) and does not exist, for all practical purposes, in the other 
(mainland China).

>In other words, it would be an existence proof.   But if, after all
>these years, there are only 500-1000 Esperanto speakers on the net,
>that leaves me feeling that Esperanto is still at the enthusiast
>stage, and that the claims to be able to do something useful for
>the world simply have not panned out.
>
Derk Ederveen's list of Esperanto speakers on-line (names are collected 
by waiting for them to give him permission to publish their names -- 
after they find out that the list exists!) contains between 500 and 600 
names at the current time. The membership list of the Esperanto League 
for North America contains about 150-200 E-mail addresses for those 
members who have net access (or had it in 1994), of whom about 30% also 
appear in the Ederveen list. Edmund G-E at one point mentioned his own 
list of names, also with some overlap, and I have my own, also with some 
overlap. I would estimate that these four lists total on the order of a 
thousand names (and addresses) of Esperantists on the net. Whether they 
are exhaustive or not is a question you will have to decide for yourself.

How many people on the net? Nobody knows. Figures I've seen range from 
two million to thirty million. The biggest compendium of names and 
addresses I've seen is the 1994 Internet White Pages, which contains a 
quarter million addresses (some of them multiple addresses for the same 
person), but -- given the way it was collected -- it, too, can hardly be 
exhaustive. Let's estimate that there are twenty million people on the 
net. Then one in twenty thousand speaks Esperanto. Extrapolating this to 
the population at large, and not worrying about minor quibbles such as 
the fact that the largest concentration of net users is found in one of 
those parts of the world where Esperanto is least known and used (the 
U.S.A.) we find that there are some 300,000 Esperanto speakers in the world.

BUT WAIT! as they say in the Ginsu knife ads. THAT'S NOT ALL! Let's try 
another tack. According to one article in my local paper, there are 
somewhere between ten and forty thousand WWW home pages now accessible 
through the Web. Another article in the same paper suggests that twelve 
thousand of these are commercial. If we assume that the actual number of 
home pages is 32,000 (because this makes the arithmetic easy), we find 
that there are 20,000 individual home pages on the Web. Seventeen of 
these to which I have links are from individuals actively promoting 
Esperanto. I know of an eighteenth one which I haven't yet been able to 
look at because my ISP's nameserver can't find it (in Hungary). 
Presumably there are at least a couple more -- let's say twenty. That 
means that one out of a thousand WWW providers not only speaks Esperanto, 
but is actively at work promoting it -- but let's say that this is 
representative of all Esperanto speakers. By extrapolation, this means 
that there are approximately six million Esperanto speakers in the world.

BUT WAIT AGAIN! An even more delightful extrapolation comes from the 
number of Nobel Prize winners over the last century who have spoken 
Esperanto. Without going into too much detail (assumptions: 1200 winners 
over the last century, including multiple winners but excluding 
organizations, and a linear growth in the proportion of people who speak 
Esperanto during the same period and starting at 0%), I find, remarkably, 
that some eighty million people speak Esperanto.

Well, such are statistics. You get some data, make some assumptions, 
create a model, and come up with a set of figures that range across two 
and a half magnitudes. Still, it is interesting that making pretty much 
the same (unjustifiable) assumptions about the number of speakers on the 
net that you do, and assuming a simplified model that doesn't take into 
account the disparities in distribution of net users and Esperanto 
speakers, I come up with a minimum figure that would be far in excess of 
what you would be willing to admit (based not only on your postings here, 
but on your interesting broadsides during another battle on some other 
newsgroups, several months back.

One thing I've never understood -- _why_ are you so violently set against 
Esperanto? Nobody is trying to give you an Esperanto enema -- you could 
easily ignore it and, from what you say, it would probably just go away 
after a while.

-- 
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
http://www.webcom.com/~donh
