Newsgroups: alt.politics.ec,alt.politics.eu,sci.lang,soc.culture.europe,soc.culture.esperanto
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!oitnews.harvard.edu!yale!zip.eecs.umich.edu!panix!news.mathworks.com!news.alpha.net!uwm.edu!msunews!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!planet.mh.dpi.qld.gov.au!antonyg
From: antonyg@planet.mh.dpi.qld.gov.au (George Antony Ph 93818)
Subject: Re: Esperanto? The EU? (Very, very long)
Message-ID: <D5CpBo.6Eq@planet.mh.dpi.qld.gov.au>
Organization: Qld Department of Primary Industries
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #2 (NOV)
References: <donhD3v8EG.275@netcom.com> <JBENSN-0303952000300001@banana.hrfs.uiuc.edu> 	<3jeh80$32r@univ.simbirsk.su> <3jkjo0$4u3@netnews.upenn.edu> <DJOHNSON.95Mar10171634@tartarus.ucsd.edu>
Distribution: inet
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 23:31:00 GMT
Lines: 39

djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) writes:

>Why English?  The only reason it's in wide use is from English and
>American colonialism, imperialism, economic clout, or whatever 

Oh, language preference as part of the anti-imperialist struggle.  Neat.

>(and
>because Americans are lax in really learning foreign languages).  It
>has nothing to do with any objective advantages to English as a good
>language for inernational communication.

>English is very bad for this purpose in many ways.  It is very
>difficult to learn 

Not correct.  The initial productivity of effort in learning English is
very high, due to the almost complete lack of such grammatical niceties
as declensions and different forms of verbs for different persons.

(the defacto international language is not
>English, it is pidgin English), has an enormous vocabulary,

Not everyday English: you can make yourself understood using a couple
of thousand words and being grammatically correct.  The difficulty in
English is the idiomatic use of the same basic vocabulary in expressions
whose meaning cannot be deciphered from the component words.  But most
English speakers are not on top of all of these either.

>bizarre spelling and grammar rules (more so than even many other
>European languages).

Spelling yes, grammar no.  I studied a fair few European languages
(Latin, Spanish, Russian, German, on top of a Hungarian mother tongue)
and I found English the simplest of the lot in grammar.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
George Antony                                       antonyg@dpi.qld.gov.au
Economic Analysis, Strategic Policy Unit, Department of Primary Industries
GPO Box 46, Brisbane Qld 4001, Australia
