Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Steve MacGregor)
Subject: Single European Language
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Date: Sun, 18 Jun 1995 02:47:18 GMT
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According to UJZA56B@prodigy.com (Kyle Gryphon):

>I hold that most of us have no desire learning (much less communicating) 
>in a language so simple to learn and with such a small vocabulary.  I 
>think many of us find the grammatical/morphological rules inelegant and 
>the language devoid of feeling.  

  Sounds reasonable.  I find =all= languages which I do not understand to 
be devoid of feeling.  If their grammars are strange to me, I find them 
inelegant.

>It is a silly idea that a culturally neutral language with any of the 
>grace of the existing languages of Europe can be formed.  Zamenhof knew 
>this, and Esperanto is not neutral and IS a romance language.

  A culturally neutral language with a grace of its own can be formed, 
though.  Neutrality is subjective.  Esperanto is more neutral than 
Interlingua, but less neutral than Lojban, for example.

>Yes, you can say that it isn't a Romance language because it was created
>unnaturally, but so then were the literary forms of many languages.

  And I can say that Esperanto isn't a Romance language because it isn't 
a Romance language.  Just as English, though much of its vocabulary comes 
from Latin, is not a Romance language.  A language doesn't consist of a 
vocabulary alone, you see.  There's also a grammar, and Esperanto's is 
less related to Latin's than is English's.

>I was just reading how long it took putting Slovenian together and
>de-Bulgarifying Macedonian. 

  That's interesting.  If that was an actual purposeful endeavor, and it 
actually did have a result, that is.  Otherwise, it would be just another 
case of the sorts of things that happen to other languages naturally.

>[Esperanto] shuns orthographic and grammatical rules handed down by the 
>centuries, in the hopes of making it "easier" to learn.

  And English shuns the rules of the Romance languages, handed down over 
the centuries, and uses its own.  The Romance languages shun the rules of 
the Germanic languages, handed down over the centuries, and use their 
own.  Both groups get along just fine with their own rules.  Esperanto 
gets along just fine with its own rules, which make it demonstrably 
easier to learn.

>Tell me, does it matter if it can be learned faster?

  Yes, because it makes the time spent in learning the language more 
economical.

>Is anyone (more than a few) going to abandon a natural language to
>support Esperanto when there is no practical reason for doing so. 

  I don't know about anyone else, but =I= am certainly not going to 
abandon English, and attempt to communicate with the rest of the 
English-speaking community in Esperanto.  That would be silly.  The 
French are not going to abandon French as the language of France, and 
I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts the Germans are not going to convert to 
Esperanto, or any other language, as the national language of Germany.
  So what?  Has any Esperantist (or Volapukist, Glosist, or Lojbanist, 
for that matter) =ever= proposed abandoning a national language?  Your 
argument is going nowhere.
  I do not have to abandon English in order to support Esperanto.

>If we learn the correct 3 or so Romance languages, there is no barrier to
>understanding ALL of them.  The same is true of the other Euro-groups.

  Sure.  And how long does it take to learn all of the Romance 
languages?  For that matter, how long does it take to learn all of the 
Indoeuropean languages of Europe, plus Hungarian, Finnish, and the other 
non-Indoeuropean languages of Europe?  I'll bet you dollars to bagels 
that it would take less time to learn just Esperanto.

>It would be infinitely more acceptable creating a few recombinant idioms
>and letting them serve as official languages for Europe.

  That depends on what your criteria of acceptability are.
  Now then:  recombinant?  That would be Interlingua or Glosa (or
Eurolang, which is still under development), interesting projects that
have created fully-formed (or nearly so) languages that would serve Europe
just as well as Esperanto would, even though Interlingua is about twice as
complex, and Glosa's grammar is about as weird as Esperanto's. 

>These new languages would be as complex as the least complex language
>used in forming them, and yet clearly better than Esperanto. 

  That would make them at least twice as complex as Esperanto.  Why would 
that be better?

-- 
--     __0       Stefano MAC:GREGOR   Mi dankas al miaj bons`ancigaj steloj,
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