ESPERANTO IS NOT A REAL LANGUAGE
... IS IT?
People use Esperanto to talk to each other, make love, argue
politics, write poetry (both good and bad), write novels (allegories, thrillers,
science-fiction...), write scientific papers, do their jobs, etc., etc.,
etc. -- in short, to communicate with other people under all possible
circumstances. To me, this means that it's a real language. You
may exclude it from this category, if you wish, by redefining the term "real
language", but this is a trivial way of getting rid of it, and would be an
indication more of meanness of spirit than of any problem with the
language.
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By Don HARLOW, past president of the Esperanto League for North America, Inc. (ELNA). This article addresses many questions which come up about Esperanto: Article: 31146 of sci.lang
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REAL LANGUAGES EVOLVE, AND ESPERANTO HASN'T ...HAS IT?
If you don't count going from a vocabulary of 800 roots (1887) to
one of 9000 official roots and at least 9000 unofficial ones (size of Zhang
Honfan's Esperanto-Chinese Dictionary) as evolution, then maybe it hasn't.
If you don't count the gradual spread of the use of the -N ending (Zamenhof
would have said "pas^o post pas^o" for "step by step"; most people today
would say "pas^on post pas^o"), then maybe it hasn't.
If you don't count the gradual disappearance of -CIO object roots
in favor of truncated action roots ('abolicio' - 'aboli', 'navigacio' - 'navigi',
'administracio' - 'administri', 'federacio' - 'federi'), then maybe it hasn't.
If you don't count the gradual conversion of country names in -UJO
to country names in -IO, then maybe it hasn't. If you don't count the
growing treatment of 'anstatau~' and 'krom' as coordinating conjunctions
rather than prepositions (with consequent further use of -N for desambiguation),
then maybe it hasn't.
If you don't count the increase in the number of the body of official
affixes by about eight percent, then maybe it hasn't. If you don't
count the appearance of a number of unofficial affixes, then maybe it hasn't.
If you don't count the appearance of short prepositional phrases
concatenated into adverbs, then maybe it hasn't. If you don't count
the development of dozens of different writing styles, then maybe it hasn't.
Etc.
On some Browsers THE SPECIAL LETTERS were difficult to show, as they are meant to appear. See if your Browser shows them correctly here:
Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ
ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ
Because internet technology did not until about the late 1990s allow Esperanto's unique special letters to be easily shown correctly, many Esperanto writers, including the author of the main long article on this webpage, used the following substitutes:
C^, G^, H^, J^, S^, U~
c^, g^, h^, j^, s^, u~
And many others used (and in e-mails are still using):
Cx, Gx, Hx, Jx, Sx, Ux
cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux
PRONUNCIATION: for Anglo-Celtic speakers are: "c^" = ch as in church, "g^" = j as in jar, "h^" = kh as the sound in Scots loch, "j^" = zh as the middle sound in azure, "s^" = sh as in shop, and the "u~," is pronounced "w" before vowels, or diphthongised as a quick "oo" in other places.
THE ESPERANTO ALPHABET (28 letters):
A, B, C, Ĉ, D, E, F, G, Ĝ, H, Ĥ, I, J, Ĵ,
K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, Ŝ, T, U, Ŭ, V, Z.
(Copied from
Curtis Whalen's webpage
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/3044/EsperantoCharacterReference.html
His e-mail address is curtis_whalen(plus sign)webpage@geocities.com)
The "x" is better used instead of the "^" and "~" on the Internet,
because it is easier for Esperantists and learners to read. Some use an "h". In the past I had used an expanded form of the original Zamenhof recommendation, because unlike him I also inserted an "h" after the special "u."
EJ, AJ and OJ: Pronounce these to rhyme with "Hey, my boy!" AUX rhymes with "How?"
-- Johano MASSAM
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Of course, you can always fall back on the argument that Esperanto's
basic structure and grammar have not 'evolved' in the past 100 years. But
then neither have those of English. What do you want? They work
just fine as they are.
ESPERANTO CAN'T BE AS EASY TO LEARN AS ESPERANTISTS CLAIM ... CAN
IT?
Most Esperantists today go easy on such claims, fearing (rightly)
that they will be laughed at by those who know nothing about Esperanto.
When Count Leo Tolstoy claimed that he learned Esperanto "in three
or four hours" we must assume -- and probably correctly -- that this meant
that the polyglot Tolstoy learned, in 3-4 hours, to read Esperanto texts
with the help of a dictionary.
On the other hand, I've run into far too many cases of people who,
in a very, very short period of self-study (usually months, sometimes weeks,
rarely -- but not never -- days) have taught themselves to read and write
Esperanto better than any language that they learned in school for a period
of years, and who -- this latter is an experience I shared -- found that
the first time they were actually exposed to spoken Esperanto they had no
trouble in understanding it, nor in participating in conversation.
Why do you think so many people who speak Esperanto are so enthusiastic
about it? Because they think it's going to save the world? See below.
Why should Esperanto be easier to learn? First, because the
grammar has been cleansed of irregularities. The student of English,
for instance, is faced with at least two totally irregular verbs and around
three hundred "strong" or "radical-changing" verbs, each of which has three
components that have to be learned separately; the student of Esperanto has
to learn one simple paradigm, six endings, applicable to all verbs.
The student of English has to learn the irregular plural endings of
a large number of nouns (and, consequently, has to pay attention to
every noun so that he will know whether or not it uses one of these
unusual endings); the student of Esperanto has to learn one plural ending
for all nouns. Etc.
Second, because Esperanto has a productive system of
word-formation. Once you have memorized a relatively small vocabulary
(eleven grammatical endings, nine pronouns, a dozen numerals, a correlative
system consisting of fourteen parts, about forty affixes, a hundred or so
particles, and maybe three hundred word roots) you can leverage this yourself
into all the vocabulary you need to carry on a conversation in the language,
or read most of the material written in the language with about 90%
comprehension. The rest you can pick up as you need it.
Third, Esperanto doesn't force you to learn contexts as well as words.
When do you use the root 'profound'? Anytime you're talking about depth,
whether physical or metaphorical. When do you use 'deep' in English,
and when 'profound'? Hint: you'd never use the latter in discussing a physical
situation; but in metaphorical situations, the two may be used (mostly)
interchangeably.
In Esperanto, a root has a meaning, and may be used metaphorically
as well; but nowhere is there any rule to say, "You may not use this particular
root here, because you have to use this other root with the same meaning
under these conditions."
I cite my best friend: she studied English for nine years (high school
and university) in her home country. She studied Esperanto for one
semester in her last year of university. At the end of that semester
she felt more competent and confident reading and writing in Esperanto than
she did in English. (My friend's native language, for the record, is
Shanghainese, not one of the European tongues; and she did not learn Esperanto
out of a hobbyist's interest, or to save the world, but because the authorities
in her university ordered her to do so, against her own wishes. Not
that she regrets it!)
ESPERANTO ISN'T OF MUCH USE ... IS IT?
Personally, I've found it more useful than I would have originally
suspected, thirty-odd years ago. I have used it to travel in Europe and China,
and seen what sort of travelling I would have been doing had I been using
only English; to put it as politely as possible, where I've been I've seen
that Esperanto-speakers want to talk, and English-speakers want to take.
I read books from all over the world in Esperanto, subscribe to magazines
from all over the world in Esperanto (and get some that I never subscribed
to -- my public thanks to the Yokohama Esperanto-Rondo for their excellent
window on Japanese life, Novaj^oj Tamtamas), have friends all over
the world through Esperanto, and have a much better idea of what goes on
in the world than I would ever learn through my English-language newspapers,
magazines, or news services.
You may not consider this very useful. If not, then I
can't argue the point, because your definition of 'useful' differs too much
from my own. One other indication of the usefulness or uselessness
of Esperanto can be given by the experience of Radio Polonia, whose Esperanto
broadcasts for three decades brought in a level of listener response exceeded
only by that of their German-language broadcasts -- and higher than that
of English. This is why, when Radio Polonia had to cut services back
for financial reasons after the fall of Communism, they merely reduced those
for Esperanto, while those for some "languages of wider dissemination" --
Spanish comes immediately to mind -- were terminated completely.
MOST INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS HAVE FIRMLY REJECTED ESPERANTO ...
HAVEN'T THEY?
If they had, Esperantists would be less than happy -- but, far from
rejecting Esperanto, since the League of Nations accepted (over the violent
protests of the French government) Assistant Secretary-General NITOBE Inazo's
enthusiastic report about the language, no international organization --
particularly those currently extant -- has even looked at Esperanto, even
though, in the case of the UN, they have had its existence forcefully pointed
out to them (with the two largest international petitions ever collected
on private initiative, one in 1948 and one in 1966 -- in the first case,
they eventually referred it to UNESCO [United Nations Educational Scientific and
Cultural Organisation], and in the second case they simply lost it).
Internal UN reviews of the language problem have concentrated on
traditional means of solving the problem (add more languages, hire more
interpreters and translators, ensure that all employees are multilingual),
without devoting so much as a paragraph to the study -- and possibly rejection
-- of the idea of adopting a neutral auxiliary language.
Esperanto has not been rejected by the UN or the EU. It hasn't even
been considered.
(The case of UNESCO is somewhat extraordinary. Despite formal protests
from the US State Department, UNESCO considered a resolution favourable to
Esperanto at its 1954 General Conference in Montevideo -- and firmly rejected
it. But the method of rejection was so irregular [and, thanks to the local
Esperantists in Uruguay, made so public] that the local press forced UNESCO
to take a second look before the closing of the conference -- and this time
the same resolution was adopted. A second favourable resolution was passed
some 30 years later, at Sofia, Bulgaria -- by some weird coincidence, at
the first General Conference after the United States and Great Britain [read:
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher] picked up their marbles and went home.)
LATIN WOULD BE A BETTER CHOICE FOR A COMMON EUROPEAN LANGUAGE ... WOULDN'T
IT?
Zamenhof, who was later to invent Esperanto, decided when he still
wrote his age with a single digit that the solution to the language problem
that he saw every day around him was to convince everybody in the world to
learn Latin or Classic Greek; and he vowed to devote his adult life to this
cause. Around puberty, Z entered high school (gymnasium) on the language
track, where he had the privilege of studying both Latin and Classic Greek.
I don't know how many weeks into the courses he was before he decided
that inventing his own language would probably be more realistic.
I took three years of Latin in high school, and have good reason to
suppose that few American contemporaries of mine were as adept at wrangling
the language as I was. At the end of three years I could, with the
aid of the Cassell's I won in a contest, plough my way through -- though not
enjoy very much -- Virgil and Cicero. I can safely say that, had Selma
Lagerlof's Gosta Berling's Saga and Ivan Vazov's Under the Yoke
been translated into Latin rather than Esperanto, I would never have devoted
hours to reading those two multi-hundred-page classics the year after I got
out of high school.
Let's face it -- the number of grown people who are going to learn
Latin as an auxiliary language well enough to use it in free-flowing
conversation, or even for light reading, is at least as minuscule as the
number of grown people who are going to learn any other ethnic language to
the same level.
BUT A MODIFIED, SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF LATIN SUCH AS INTERLINGUA WOULD
BE MORE EUROPEAN ... WOULDN'T IT?
If you're talking about the abortion created by Alexander Gode in
the late forties, forget it. I mean, a constructed language that conserves
three conjugations??? If you're referring to one of the names under
which the "Latino Sine Flexione" of the Italian mathematician Peano was known
-- this is a different kettle of fish. This is Latin as she should
have been, shorn of all those complicated declensions, conjugations, and
incomprehensible ablative constructions, but -- at least in terms of its
vocabulary -- remaining essentially Latin!
I don't know whether anybody, or how many, ever spoke this language,
but, if you are interested, it would certainly be a better candidate for
revival than Gode's Interlingua, Hogben's Interglossa (nowadays resurrected
as Glosa), or any of a thousand other stillborn language projects. Some
of you university types should be able to find examples -- I seem to remember
reading that one volume in Peano's collected works was written entirely in
the language.
ESPERANTISTS ALL BELIEVE THAT IF EVERYBODY LEARNED ESPERANTO, WAR AND
DEATH IN THE WORLD WOULD END ... DON'T THEY?
If you put six Esperantists together in a room, the only thing you
will get them to agree on is that Esperanto is good. If you put twelve together,
chances are that you'll find one who won't even agree on that. Very
likely, though, you could get all Esperantists to agree that if everybody
in the world learned Esperanto, everybody in the world would be able to speak
Esperanto. But as to whether this was desirable or not -- you wouldn't find
any agreement on that...
ESPERANTO LACKS THE TECHNICAL VOCABULARY TO MAKE IT SUITABLE AS A MODERN
LANGUAGE ... DOESN'T IT?
Did you expect that a group of people so fixated on language would
somehow overlook technical vocabularies? Esperanto probably has one of the
finest technical lexicons of any of the lesser-used languages -- and it may
be that I don't even need to put in the qualification. You can even
find a few sample technical dictionaries available, for free, on the net.
Check out Pilger's dictionaries of names of mammals and of insects
(in Linnaean order), or any of at least three dictionaries of computer
terminology, at
ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl:/pub/esperanto
-- of the latter, if you have TeX and a laser printer, I recommend the latest
version of Pokrovskij's book (1700+ definitions, with English and other
equivalents, illustrated).
ESPERANTISTS USE THE LANGUAGE FOR NOTHING BUT TO TALK ABOUT ESPERANTO
... DON'T THEY?
It's a good starting point for people from lots of different cultures
who don't have anything in common except the language. But it's
certainly not the end. If half the postings on soc.culture.esperanto
are about Esperanto, half of them aren't -- there have recently been, among
other things, postings about the Chechen War (from Russia, among other places),
about the earthquake in Japan (from Japan, among other places), about the
floods in the Netherlands (from the Netherlands, among other places), etc.
Some Esperanto magazines are devoted entirely to Esperanto, as well
as being written in it; others (El Popola C^inio from China,
Monato from Belgium, Novaj^oj Tamtamas from Japan, La Espero
el Koreio from Korea, as examples) definitely are not. And most
books in Esperanto have nothing to do with Esperanto, except for being written
in it (in nine volumes of the science-fiction almanac Sferoj, for
instance, I doubt that the word has been mentioned once, except on the copyright
page).
YOU CAN'T EXPRESS ALL NECESSARY CONCEPTS IN ESPERANTO ... CAN YOU?
Any language with a speaking population will develop the means, within
the framework of rules that define it, to express all necessary concepts.
You can express all necessary concepts in English, Chinese and Swahili
today. You may not have been able to express all necessary concepts
in Esperanto on July 26, 1887 (the date the first Esperanto textbook rolled
off the presses), but by the end of that decade you obviously could. You
may not be able to express all necessary concepts today in Interlingua, Loglan,
Klingon or Quenya -- but when and if any or all of these develop significant
speaking populations, believe me, you will be able to.
YOU CAN'T TRANSLATE GREAT LITERATURE INTO ESPERANTO ... CAN YOU?
There are plenty of crappy translations in Esperanto -- every time
I look at La Certosa's translation of Grazia Deledda's The Mother,
I wince. (I suspect that Mr. La Certosa does, too, with a few more
years under his belt.) There are also a lot of good ones. I've mentioned
a few elsewhere and will not append a list of my favorites. Note one simple
rule, applicable to all languages: one good translation suffices to show
the quality of the language; one bad translation only suffices to show the
quality of the translator.
(Example: In 1986 I got a copy of Albert Goodheir's Esperanto translation
of Euripides' The Trojan Women. After reading it I decided to
do a review comparing it with an English translation. So I pulled Edward
P. Coleridge's off my shelf and opened it. It was unreadable, and the
review never got written. As far as I could tell, the major difference
was not in the language of translation but in the fact that Goodheir was
translating something about which he cared deeply, while Coleridge appeared
to be doing a translation exercise. Goodheir's translation showed what
Esperanto is capable of; as anybody experienced in English will agree,
Coleridge's only showed what Coleridge was capable of.)
Fernando de Diego once sneered that fifty percent of Esperanto
translations were lousy translations of useless works, twenty percent were
lousy translations of good literature, twenty percent were good translations
of useless literature, and only ten percent consisted of good translations
of good literature. American science fiction readers will instantly
recognize this as an independent rediscovery of Theodore Sturgeon's famous
Law -- "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety percent
of everything is crud!" -- from which Esperanto literature, like everything
else, is not immune.
and finally ...
ESPERANTISTS ALL AGREE THAT ESPERANTO SHOULD BE MADE AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE,
POSSIBLY THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE, OF THE EUROPEAN UNION ... DON'T
THEY?
Fortunately, I'm not a citizen (first-class or second-class) of the
European Union [EU], so I don't have to look at what would be most advantageous
for the EU. I am an Esperantist, and tend to look at what would be most
advantageous for Esperanto. And, as far as Esperanto becoming a tool
of the EU gov't, I just don't see it.
(1) Esperanto doesn't belong to anybody -- and hence it belongs to everybody
who wants to use it. Unless a couple of other heavyweights were to
decide, at the same time as the EU, to make Esperanto their official
language (and I don't see that happening!), the EU would, in effect, become
the new owner of Esperanto; so, farewell, our vaunted cultural and political
neutrality.
(2) And, once the EU had decided "in principle" to adopt Esperanto, who's
to guarantee that a couple of Eurocrats, munching at a McDonald's in Brussels,
would not decide to "repair" the language. A century of use has shown
that "repairs" (they are commonly called "reforms") are generally the products
of people who read through Teach Yourself Esperanto once, decide that
because Zamenhof didn't do it in the same way the French do he was dead wrong,
and set out to fix up the language. In other words, most proposed reforms
of Esperanto are definitely not for the better.
Mostly they end up in the garbage can ("dustbin", if you prefer)
of history. The EU would have the clout to ensure that, good or bad,
this would not happen. I think that the adoption of Esperanto by the EU would
be a step toward resolving a multitude of problems that plague the organization
-- including the serious one of making it more democratic. But I don't
think that it would do Esperanto any good, and so I'm not terribly enthusiastic
about the idea. And I know that there are other Esperantists -- including
many in the EU itself -- who agree with me.-- Don HARLOW
Another version of this article, entitled "A reply to some arguments against Esperanto,"
is at: http://ttt.esperanto.org/us/USEJ/world/kontraux.html
If you need information not included above, please send a message to
elna@esperanto-usa.org
Don Harlow has an "Esperanto Access" linkpage at:
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/esperanto.html
A MULTILINGUAL service is at
http://esperanto.net/
For a Webpage on Esperanto and Scouting, click:
http://ttt.esperanto.org/us/USEJ/other/selfaq.html
The following is adapted from that Webpage:
What is Esperanto?
Esperanto is the easy-to-learn language devised by Dr. L.L. Zamenhof,
of Warsaw, Poland, at the end of the 19th Century. Zamenhof saw the
need for the peoples of the world to be able to transcend the barriers of
language.
Esperanto is used as a second language for communication between language
communities.
Is Esperanto supposed to replace the national languages?
No. It is a neutral bridge-language between people of different language
communities
What does Esperanto look like?
Esperanta lingvo:
Esperanto estas neŭtrala ponto-lingvo.
D-ro Ludoviko Zamenhof kreis Esperanton por helpi al internacia,
intergenta komunikado.
Bela, facila, Esperanto estas la racia solvo al la monda
lingvo-problemo.
English translation:
Esperanto is a neutral bridge-language.
Dr Louis Zamenhof created Esperanto to aid international, inter-people
communication.
Beautiful, easy, Esperanto is the rational solution to the world language
problem.
-- Adapted from: USEJ at:
http://ttt.esperanto.org/us/USEJ/other/selfaq.html
Set yourself the task of finding the website of the Esperanto League of Western Australia.
A political Esperanto Webpage is at:
http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/skandalo.htm
Aspects of governments' attitudes to Esperanto, and some history of publications
and radio broadcasts, may be found at:
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/Esperanto/chap10.html
A free Esperanto course is at:
http://esperanto.org/espviva/
and courses are held in various cities around the world.
Esperanto-English database
gopher://wiretap.spies.com/00/Library/Article/Language/esperant.eng
Denis Keefe's home, linked to the Language Tree
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5183/ltesperanto.html
Tagged with AOLPress/2.0™ Saturday
12 December 1998,
spellchecked with Ms Word© and US spellings changed to Australian on 02 Oct 05,
last modified with Microsoft® WordPad©
on 12 Aug 07
DOC. 2: URL =
http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/esperant.htm
With AltaVista ® one may translate up to two A4 pages of Webpages using English,
Français, Deutsch, Italiano,
Português, Español, or Россия (Rossiya). For more than a dozen languages including Esperanta and Latina, one word at a time, try http://dictionaries.travlang.com/. Also see http://aquarius.net/. For more Esperanta try the Richardson Vortaro.
For general searches try
MetaCrawler which now
includes Google! at
http://www.google.com/
"Sociala Justeco kaj Ekonomika Libereco"
Just World Campaign, 46 Cobine Way, Greenwood, WA, 6024, Australia. Tel.: +61 ( 0 ) 8 9343 9532, Mobile 0408 054 319;
john.massam@multiline.com.au
