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From: antonyg@planet.mh.dpi.qld.gov.au (George Antony Ph 93818)
Subject: Re: Esperanto? The EU? (Very, very long)
Message-ID: <D5Espq.B3M@planet.mh.dpi.qld.gov.au>
Organization: Qld Department of Primary Industries
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Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 02:39:26 GMT
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djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) writes:
>antonyg@dpi.qld.au (George Antony) wrote:
>>djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) writes:


>None of those reasons [for learning English] are because 
>it's a nice language.  

That is in the eye of the beholder.  I'd say that it is nicer than
many that I've come across but perhaps less so than Spanish which
is my preference.  On the original issue of Esperanto, I find it
unappealing on almost all counts.

>And none
>of those reasons came about because English was well suited to
>being an international language.

Here we definitely differ.  I think it IS well suited, partly for
reasons of ease of learning and partly because of the momentum that
it has already built up. 

>Ie, ask most people who learned English as a non-native language
>why they did so.  I suspect that few of them chose it for esthetic
>or intellectual reasons.  Most chose it because it is popular, it
>is easy to find other speakers of it, it is easy to find media
>for it, it is required for many things, and so forth.

Yes, perhaps it is sad for some purists, but most people learn 
languages for practical reasons.

>And they are certainly not at all reasons for abandoning any look
>at any other language for this purpose.  Ie, English is just the
>last of a very long line of international languages, and it will
>die out in popularity just as the others have.  

All previous world languages have died out in popularity because of 
the increasing domination of another language, as you pointed out,
through physical or intellectual context.  GIven that English is the
lingua franca of the information age, its place is, in my view,
much more secure than that of its predecessors.

>> >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.

>Cite something here.  

Cite *what* ?

>Sure, I agree that pidgin English is not too bad
>to pick up.  But this does not indicate how easy it is to pick up
>other pidgin language (should be trivial, since pidgin is just a mix
>of local+foreign vocabulary and grammar, so all the hard parts of the
>foreign language get tossed out).  Or what happens when real
>communication needs to happen.

You are fundamentally mistaken if you equate a pidgin usage to a 
beginner/intermediate usage.  My argument, based on my own experience
and that of others around me, is that it is relatively easy to reach
a beginner/intermediate level of competence in English.  This is
NOT pidgin usage of the language.

>Ie, a few days of drilling will teach someone the basic verb
>declensions.  

As a theoretical knowledge, perhaps.  But not something people can
use: they will still end up using the root forms in most situations
or keep their mouths shut.

Besides, you conjugate verbs and decline nouns.

>But it takes ages to learn the gigantic vocabulary of
>English 

Bullshit.  Basic English vocabulary is smaller than any other that I
have come across.

>and to memorize the irregular verbs and spellings and
>pronounciations.  

These are certainly problems.

>Real communication is what is important, and that
>means being able to read newspapers or talk to someone else and have a
>meaningful conversation.  And to get to that point, you need probably
>a couple of years study.  After all that time, a bit of verb
>declension is a trifle.

You have just told us that a couple of days are enough to absorb "verb
declension".  Sure, apart from Esperanto you take years with any language:
fewer with English and more with Hungarian.

>Well, duh.  Russian was listed as the one of the few languages worse
>than English in that regard :-)  German is in the same ballpark.
>Spanis that regard :-)  German is in the same ballpark.
>Spanish I don't know - it's easy for English speakers for some reason.

Commonality of word roots and similarities in conjugations.  Of all, 
English is the easiest to achieve a basic, usable knowledge.

>Latin should be much simpler though, since it's very regular.

For sure, except that until one learns all the rules, by your definition,
one would speak pidgin Latin.  And I tell you, there are a few rules in
Latin !  Small wonder all those creole Latin languages have emerged, 
mostly dropping declension of nouns, and the associated sundry rules,
altogether. 

>But then, what of non-European languages?  Japanese has very very
>few irregular verbs (but then you need to memorize characters).

I have nibbled at Bahasa Indonesia(/Malaysia).  Perfectly phonetic,
no grammar at basic level.  But no familiar words from Indo-European
languages either, and at advanced level one encounters a maze of 
pre- and suffixes for verbs that need to be learned in context.  
Very much like English, since there are strong parallels in the 
circumstances of their emergence.

>But those aren't good choices for an EC language, which is where
>I think this thread started.

>What about French?  That's a very serious suggestion, since at one
>time it was the defacto international language.  I even expect many
>French speakers at the time gave the same "French is and should be
>the international language, it's so obvious" argument.

It would have been a serious argument 200 years ago.  Now is now.

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