Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: Single European Language
Message-ID: <donhDAE4Bt.1EB@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <690061730wnr@afin.demon.co.uk> <3rr0co$1ed6@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com> <3rsdbc$6eo@panix2.panix.com> <3rslpb$1vku@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com>
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 1995 22:40:41 GMT
Lines: 82
Sender: donh@netcom2.netcom.com

UJZA56B@prodigy.com (Kyle Gryphon) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <3rslpb$1vku@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com>:
>TO: rcpj@panix.com 
>SUBJECT: Re: Single European Language 
>We will see who is wrong when Esperanto flops.

Holding your breath is not advised.

>As for vocabulary, your statement simply wasn't true.  There are just not 
>enough words to cover all of the ideas covered by English's vocabulary.

I myself have done a fair amount of translating from English to Esperanto 
and have yet to find an idea in English that Esperanto's vocabulary won't 
cover, one way or another. Of course, there is no one-to-one 
correspondence between the vocabularies of the two languages, and each 
one has single words that don't have single-word equivalents in the 
other. (Edmund mentions "crumpet" and "krokodili" -- let me add that I 
could not think of a single English word for "subplafone", "ekzemple", 
"enau^tig^i", etc., etc., ad tedium.)

>I personally have studied the commonalities present among the Romance 
>languages, and the only reason for past failures with recombinant 
>languages
>are the personal tastes of the public; the linguists, like Zamenhof, 
>created 
>monstrous monuments to themselves and only for that purpose, creating 
>languages based as much in their own personal style as on practical 
>concerns.  There is no reason why near-perfect recombinant idioms cannot

I presume that you would rather have a photo of that smiling Italian 
lady, and to hell with that silly painting. De gustibus...

Zamenhof, by the way, was not a linguist; when he invented Esperanto, he 
was a (medical) student. Planned languages invented by linguists have 
generally been less than ragingly successful.

>be produced.  It is only a matter of taking a less radical approach to 
>their 
>creations.

Been there, done that. Try Interlingua (Gode's, not Peano's), Altutonish, 
etc.

>Some of the writers have suggested Esperanto serve as some sort or 
>replacement to natural languages.  I wonder if speaking a language as 

Can you quote these suggestions? I don't remember seeing any such...

>sterile
>as Esperanto will have any effect on thought processes.

Hard to tell. My wife would insist that my oldest daughter's awards for 
good journalism and clarity of thought originally derived from the fact 
that she spoke Esperanto before she spoke English -- but then my wife 
does not have the same reverence toward languages such as English that 
you do, having learned it late in life and having found it (for her) 
inferior to Esperanto in various ways. There is also the determination 
that a professor at San Jose State made a few years ago, to the effect 
that the proverbial Chinese and Japanese superiority in mathematics at 
American schools derives not from any difference in genetic makeup but 
from the fact that the counting systems in those languages are consistent 
and easy to learn, not like those in English and French -- this Asian 
mathematical superiority actually disappears for third- and 
fourth-generation Americans of Asian descent who have learned English 
exclusively, at home as well as in school. Esperanto's counting system is 
more like those of Chinese and Japanese (and the Arabic numeral system) 
than it is like those of English and French, so maybe...

(Claude Piron, in a private communication, once informed me that studies 
in Europe showed that children raised speaking Esperanto generally showed 
slightly more creativity than children raised speaking other languages. 
While this would, if true, be understandable -- children raised speaking 
Esperanto are less subject to the process of correction [showing them 
that rules are not to be trusted] than other kids speaking Western 
languages -- I hae me doots... Besides, how does one go about measuring 
creativity?)


-- 
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
