Some Comments on Ignorance About Esperanto
Linguists don't bother with artificial languages.
a rather offhand generalization. The field of linguistics
is extremely vast and there are quite a few linguists
who are also interested in that part of it.
The very idea of such a thing as
a functioning artificial language is hopelessly naive.
you observe it in its practical use. In countries like
Poland, Hungary, Finnland, Latvia, Russia, Japan, China,
Uzbekistan and many others, Esperanto proves to be quite
useful, especially in small towns, where English is
not of much use. I know of Americans who had a similar
experience in France. I've had access through Esperanto
to a segment of the local populations with which most
foreigners have no contact, and a possibility of discussing
in depth various topics with much more ease and comfort
than in any other language. Esperanto is no more naive
than E-mail. It's a method of communicating which has
many advantages over others and which doesn't need to
be available in every household to be worth the small
investment in time and effort. In my experience, it
is much more cost effective than English.
The successful examples (viz. Esperanto)
are an excellent reflection of Western imperialism.
but perusal of Esperanto publications and contacts with
members of the Esperanto community reveal this to be
a prejudice. A majority of people in this community
learned the language precisely to have at their disposal
a language free of political, economic and other power
connotations. Esperanto was not born in the West, is
not especially widespread there and is so different
from Western languages in most of its linguistic traits
that you would be very hard put to defend your opinion
on the basis of factual analysis. Only the word roots
(but not their semantic scope, which results from a
century of global interaction) are to a large extent
Western, but no serious scholar can base a judgment
on such a superficial feature. The lexical part of most
Caribbean Creoles is more Western in origin than Esperanto's.
If such a Creole language is used as a means of intercultural
communication, do you see it as a reflection of Western
Languages such as Esperanto reveal
considerable ignorance of the structures of other languages.
What other languages?
As I have established in my article "Esperanto:
A European or Asiatic Language?" (Esperanto Documents
No 22, Rotterdam: UEA, 1981), Esperanto is more an isolating language
than an agglutinating or flexional one. Derivation of 'my' from
'I' or of 'first' from 'one' (mi > mia ; unu > unua)
is something you find in Chinese and in Esperanto, but not in Turkish,
Hungarian or any Indo-European language. In no Western language
do you have infinite series like the Esperanto samlandano, samrasano,
samlingvano, etc, corresponding to the Chinese tongguo, tongzu,
tongyu, you have to use other words like fellow-citizen,
person of the same race, speaker of the same language. In Chinese,
you don't have to learn a special word to express the idea 'coreligionist',
you use the ready-made pattern: tongjiao, just as in Esperanto:
samreligiano. Structurally speaking, Esperanto has very little
in common with Western languages.
Languages such as Esperanto are
no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or
observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia,
especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans,
I made it a point to ask people how much time they had
devoted to acquiring the language. Since I was comparing
communication in international settings according to
whether they used English only, simultaneous interpretation,
consecutive interpretation or Esperanto, I asked the
same question of people using a language other than
their mother tongue. Most of these Asians with a rather
crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning
it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less
than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever
the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity,
nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is
based on erroneous data. (See my research report "Esperanto:
l'image et la realite'", Cours et Études
de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée
No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée
et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8,
1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris:
L'Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this
book can be found in Language in Society, 26
(1), 143-147, 1997).
Proponents of languages such as
Esperanto buy into the "language is/can be logical"
A linguist knows that a language should not be confused
with what its speakers say of it. Esperanto is based
on an all-encompassing law of trait generalization,
which is something quite different, and which is the
reason why it is so much more pleasant to use than any
European language. In Western languages, you cannot
generalize patterns. The student who has noticed the
pattern in farm > farmer, report > reporter
cannot generalize it to fish > fisher (fisherman)
or teeth > teether (dentist). In Esperanto
he can: farm' > farmisto, raport' > raportisto,
fiŝ' > fiŝisto, dent' > dentisto
I have to speak English I regret that it lacks a similar
structure. The last time I had to improvise a speech
in your language, I stumbled on the past tense of cost
and said costed, I said ununderstandable instead of
incomprehensible, I pronounced indict as rhyming with
derelict, convict and could not remember which syllable
to stress in alternative. So I always feel handicapped
in English, never in Esperanto, where none of such problems
Proponents of languages such as Esperanto pretend
that languages don't change or can somehow be regulated
This is not true. I challenge
you to quote a document emanating from the Esperanto community with
such an absurd pretension. Most users of Esperanto are well aware
that their language developed naturally, through usage in a kind
of diaspora, on the basis of Zamenhof's project, with which it should
not be confused. A fellow linguist, Jouko
Lindstedt, Head of the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages
at the University of Helsinki, Finnland, is the moderator of an
Internet list, "Denask-L",
whose participants are mostly members of binational families having
Esperanto as their family language and the children's mother tongue.
Simply reading their exchanges and comparing their language with
similar texts from before WW2 and with texts from the 19th century
proves beyond doubt that the language has never ceased to change,
not under any agency, but spontaneously, as any other tongue. On
that subject, see my article "A few notes on the evolution
of Esperanto" in Klaus Schubert, ed., Interlinguistics
No 42 of the series Trends in Linguistics - Studies and Monographs
(Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 129-142.
I believe that a scientific, scholarly approach is
as warranted in linguistics as in other fields. Many
linguists seem to be unaware that before spreading opinions
on Esperanto, it is worth taking one's tape recorder,
attending encounters of speakers of the language, visiting
families where it is in daily use, analyzing the tapes
and all kinds of published or written documents (handwritten
correspondence is linguistically quite interesting)
and, well, just behave as a proper linguistic scholar
does for any Bantu or Filipino language.
The amount of untruths to be found in linguistic
publications on Esperanto (as on Chinese) is appalling.
All the more so since they're formulated in good faith.
Isn't it an interesting socio-psychological phenomenon?