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From: brg@netcom.com (Bruce R. Gilson)
Subject: Autonomy, recognizability, and ease of learning (was: Free formation of i-gua adjectives)
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Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 13:44:09 GMT
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(I am posting this to three places, the  alt.language.artificial newsgroup on
Usenet and the Auxlang and Novial mailing lists: the somewhat different nature
of these three will mean that some of what I say will be either off-topic or
not of great interest in each. But there is enough of what I want to say that
overlaps each that I would rather not make separate customized posts to each
of the three places.)

don@donh.vip.best.com (Don HARLOW) wrote, on alt.language.artificial:

[...]

>Zamenhof made the conscious decision -- and this is one of the few
>things he did state explicitly about the language -- to make it
>_quickly_ learnable to the point where one could actually use the
>language with a cursory inspection of the orthography and grammar, a
>read-through of the word-building system, and an extremely minimal
>vocabulary (the prototypical "key" -- a booklet somewhat larger than a
>postage stamp, about twenty pages long, containing the grammar,
>examples of word-building, sample texts and such a vocabulary -- could
>be slipped into an envelope with a letter written in Esperanto to
>somebody who had never heard of the language before, and the letter
>immediately deciphered -- and in many cases, apparently, replied to in
>Esperanto). For this to be possible, it was necessary to make
>_concept_ basic, as in the traditional Western idea of Chinese
>writing. And from that it followed that Zamenhof had to base his
>vocabulary at a slightly lower level than that of nouns, verbs, etc.,
>and go for the "root" -- what function the concept played in a
>sentence was then shown by additional agglutinated endings, rather
>than being made part of the basic form.

[...]

>Again, we come to the question of _autonomy_. Given the nature of
>Esperanto, it was perfectly legitimate for Z. to give "akurata" the
>meaning of "punctual" -- actually, he could have defined it as meaning
>"blue" if he'd wanted to. The important point for Esperanto is that,
>once you know the actual content of the root, you can put together new
>words using that root in a predictable way, e.g. -- in this case -- as
>verbs:

I think we get into some interesting questions here. Is "autonomy" totally
desirable, or is it desirable at all? Is ease of learning more important than
autonomy, if autonomy _is_ desirable? Which contributes more to ease of
learning: easy recognizability or regular word formation? 

The devotees of E-o have come down on the side of autonomy, and they have
their own answers to all three of these questions. The devotees of Interlingua
have taken an opposite approach. I feel that the compromise that Novial
represents is attractive, primarily because it conforms to my OWN feelings:

Autonomy is desirable in an IAL only to the extent that it gives a language
its own character. Since nearly ALL people learning an IAL will be native
speakers of something ELSE (even E-o, which has _some_ native speakers, has
very few as a proportion to the total E-o community), it is important to
be able to relate a language to one's own. For speakers of, say, English,
Spanish is an easire language than Hungarian: despite the fact that Hungarian
has a _much_ simpler grammar, Spanish words are, by and large, more likely
to have "hooks" that an English-speaker can use to remember them by.

Recognizability, therefore, is an important factor in learnability. Although
I've been among the leaders of the movement to modify Novial to make it a
"better" (in quotes, because _my_ "better" would not necessarily agree with
Rik Dalton's "better") IAL, one thing I don't want to do is significantly
reduce the recognizability of the language.

Making "akurata" meen "blue" would certainly have been within the capability
of Zamenhof when he designed his language. Would such a choice have been a
good idea? In essence, this is what _a_priori_ languages advocate: _total_
autonomy. And I don't think that was Zamenhof's idea. I believe he _wanted_
recognizability; the very idea of a small book that could accompany an E-o
letter, as described above by Harlow, makes me feel this "in my bones."
But in this, he _failed_, and now, in consequence, E-ists, in order to defend
their language, fall back on autonomy.

E-ists generally take the position that every decision made by Zamenhof was
the right one. My position (even with regard to Jespersen, whom I greatly
admire) is that nobody is perfect and that any invention can be improved.
I do not try to justify a Jespersen decision by changing my value system
when I think he did something wrong; I try to fix it, which Jespersen himself
probably would have considered a valid activity. Unfortunately, in 1905,
E-o was fossilized by the adoption of the Fundamento. As a result, "fixing"
E-o is out of the question in the sense of "repairing" it. It has already
been "fixed" in the sense of making it unchangeable. (Unfortunately the
word has these two, quite different, meanings in English!) 

I think that E-ists, IL-ists, and our Novial group have among them vastly
different ideas about the answers to the three questions I posed at the
beginning of this note. And I think this is the reason we sometimes get into
very acrimonious debates.

                                Bruce R. Gilson
                                email: brg@netcom.com
                                IRC: EZ-as-pi
                                WWW: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3141
                                (for language stuff: add /langpage.html)
