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My English teacher really hates Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 9 of 194 02 November 2007 at 8:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Esperanto's ease is primarily geared towards those who speak Indo-European (especially Romance) languages. I actually am aiming for efficiency in my friendship in this case since it would be time-consuming for both of us to learn Esperanto (despite its ease - especially for me since I speak English and French fluently).
Honestly, I find the Esperanto movement to be a little unusual nowadays. It evolved from a movement to create a dominant common language to something more akin to a linguistic curiosity (albeit a modestly successful one when compared to the history of Volapuk, Slovio and Interlingua). The spirit of Esperanto users reminds me somewhat of fans (in this case lingophiles) who use their own "secret code" amongst themselves. It seems a bit reminiscent to Star Trek fans who revel in communicating with each other in Klingon. :-P Hey, whatever floats your boat. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7223 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 10 of 194 02 November 2007 at 11:40am | IP Logged | ||
When it comes to monetary gain I agree. There are other benefits to learning Esperanto and when I mentioned the Pasporta Servo to him. He just ignored it. The Power-glide Latin text suggests Esperanto as a practice hill, in order to climb the Latin mountain. In my experience there hasn't been anytime someone suggest learn Esperanto and stop there. It has been learn Esperanto and continue learning other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| remush Tetraglot Groupie Belgium remush.beRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6270 days ago 79 posts - 94 votes Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch Studies: German, Polish | Message 11 of 194 02 November 2007 at 11:53am | IP Logged | ||
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It's a common opinion people can't usually back up.
I am interested to know how people can have such an opinion. Can you produce some facts? About Indo-European: you did not read Claude Piron. About your friendship: OK go on; wait until you get a friend who speaks Esperanto, and no English nor French (you might have to wait very long). About dominant language: who? when? where? About secret code: Klingon is a better choice. About French+English: don't confuse passive knowledge with active knowledge. Et ne croyez pas que parce que vous parlez Anglais et Français que vous avez un avantage décisif; vous risquez de tomber dans des pièges qu'un asiatique éviterait. Vous ne lirez probablement pas Claude Piron, car votre avis me semble définitif. Il m'étonne que des personnes apparemment ouvertes à tout, soient complètement fermées à l'espéranto, pour ne pas dire opposées par principe. C'est de toute évidence un autre paradigme.
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| virgule Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6842 days ago 242 posts - 261 votes Studies: Korean | Message 12 of 194 02 November 2007 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Not taking sides, but sharing my experience... I'm not sure which of Claude Piron's texts you refer to, but knowing a Germanic and Romance language, perhaps a hint of Greek, and you practically get all of Esperanto's vocabulary for free. It's true that in terms of grammar, Esperanto doesn't fit as neatly with Indo-European languages as it does with vocabulary. As for friendship, I think this would be a true motivating factor for me to take up Esperanto again. However, all the people I met using Esperanto could also communicate in one of the other languages I speak (and do so more efficiently). If the the language itself is secondary, and you focus on communication, in a world where English is so wide-spread, Esperanto was to me of no practical use. It is in this context that I would agree with artificiality and find the likening to Klingon appropriate. Of course you could travel with the Pasoporta Servo, but why restrict yourself when English gives you access to many much more extensive networks (e.g. Hospitality Club). I still like many aspects of the Esperanto spirit, if you will, but I see actually little need for a new language or Esperanto for that. You can travel and meet other open-minded people using English. What Esperanto lacks is an economy, which motivates people to learn a language. I believe that people who learn Esperanto do it for different reasons than those who learn English (much more ideological). Ultimately, it's being able to do business in English that makes English the dominant language of the day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 13 of 194 02 November 2007 at 12:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey, hey, no need to get testy.
Actually, this is the most striking thing about Esperanto speakers for me. Many of them in spite of somewhat encouraging the spirit of tolerance and worldwide cultural understanding (per Zamenhof's original idea), seem to get very defensive or uneasy when meeting otherwise similar people who don't share their enthusiasm for Esperanto. If I may: Il m'étonne que des personnes apparemment ouvertes à tout, soient complètement fermées à celles qui ne sont pas enthousiastes pour l'espéranto, pour ne pas dire opposées par principe. C'est un paradoxe, non? Here're some thoughts that sum up my view of Esperanto and other constructed languages quite succintly. http://www.rickharrison.com/language/farewell.html If you don't believe me that I don't have a decisive advantage because of my fluency of English and French (not to mention my earlier study of Latin, German and Slavonic languages) if I were to start learning Esperanto, I don't know what more to say. While I don't hate Esperanto as that English teacher mentioned in the original post, it's reactions like Remush's and those of other Esperanto enthusiasts that make me question the supposed nobility and motivation of the Esperanto movement (as well as heated battles between Esperanto-speakers and non-Esperanto speakers on this forum). In the end, I consider it as just another language with its own relative strengths and relative weaknesses. Any arguments about its superiority and implications that the entire world would be a better place by speaking a "culture-neutral" language based primarily on Indo-European principles, seem to be pointless since it's all relative to begin with. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| remush Tetraglot Groupie Belgium remush.beRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6270 days ago 79 posts - 94 votes Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch Studies: German, Polish | Message 14 of 194 02 November 2007 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was expecting facts, not unsustained assertions.
A good question would be: why most (not all) of those who practise Esperanto are so enthusiastic about it? Is is because learning this language somehow impaired their judgement.? This would be an argument in favour of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Not that I think that this hypothesis is sheer nonsense, as one reason I started learning Esperanto was just that: get a first-hand experience, and Loglang was not stable enough to put my time in it. What I notice is that the level of understanding of the word "logical" changed, now that I master this "constructed" language. Most Esperantits, like myself, did not share the kind of enthusiasm you speak of right away. It comes with the time, the use, the relationships. What we all learned is indeed: there is no perfect language for perfect people, and we have to live with imperfection. Read http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgh4mq6j_11ddrv6g#033 and around. The attitude of Esperantists was very long to ignore those who spread false information about the language. You may perceive as enthusiasm what is only a try to put things right. Quoting: Il m'étonne que des personnes apparemment ouvertes à tout, soient complètement fermées à celles qui ne sont pas enthousiastes pour l'espéranto, pour ne pas dire opposées par principe. C'est un paradoxe, non? Unquoting. La perception de ce qui est paradoxal change suivant la langue et le contexte. Dans votre logique vous avez certainement raison; dans la mienne: personne (ni rien) n'est parfait. Rick Harrison dans http://www.rickharrison.com/language/farewell.html est relativement honnête, et a le droit d'émettre une opinion. Moi j'ai une autre expérience, mais apparemment vous préférez la sienne. Je comprends que mon opinion ne compte pas pour vous puisque je suis déformé par la langue. J'ai eu bien d'autres objections plus comiques que celle mentionnée par Rick. Elles me semblent maintenant tout à fait ridicules. Vous en trouverez quelques-unes dans http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgh4mq6j_11ddrv6g (pas toutes les miennes). Quoting: If you don't believe me that I don't have a decisive advantage because of my fluency of English and French (not to mention my earlier study of Latin, German and Slavonic languages) if I were to start learning Esperanto, I don't know what more to say. Unquoting. This is precisely my case. You mix passive and active knowledge and passive knowledge sometimes gets in the way. See http://personal.southern.edu/~caviness/KonfuzoListo.html and http://www.wfi.fr/volterre/sheen.html Even better (for those who know French and learn Esperanto): "Voyage au fil des Mots" by André CHERPILLOT ISBN 2-906134-26-0 To build words correctly in Esperanto, you need to know their meaning and grammatical category (-a -e -i -e -iĝ -ig). It's not as easy as it looks like. Quoting "... the supposed nobility and motivation of the Esperanto movement ". Unquoting. What movement are you speaking about? Is it the one which wrote the Prague Manifesto: http://lingvo.org/xx/2/3 ? There are hundreds of organizations. Quoting " In the end, I consider it as just another language with its own relative strengths and relative weaknesses." Unquoting. Agreed! Quoting "Any arguments about its superiority and implications that the entire world would be a better place by speaking a "culture-neutral" language based primarily on Indo-European principles, seem to be pointless since it's all relative to begin with." Unquoting. Perhaps. But we should not reject English because it's I-E, or should we? Mon opinion reste malgré tout que la diplomatie mondiale en Anglais n'a pas prouvé qu'elle était supérieure à celle pratiquée en Français. C'est bien sûr un avis doublement suspect d'un Esperantiste francophone. Dans ma religion minoritaire, même Dieu est imparfait, et je l'aime bien comme ça. -- Raymond GERARD ЄЭ Remuŝ (Belgio)- perSkajpe: RemushBE
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| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6945 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 15 of 194 02 November 2007 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
A good answer: Most Esperanto practitioners are hobbyists, and hobbyists are generally enthusiastic about their hobbies. P.S. The profile of the most enthusiastic person on the planet: (a) owns a Mac computer, (b) says that martial arts have changed his life, (c) rides Harley-Davidson or Gold Wing, (d) speaks fluent Esperanto. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 194 02 November 2007 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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This enthusiasm (or "setting things right") about Esperanto is what makes me wonder. It's a bit like Croats and Serbs who often "educate" outsiders about Serbo-Croatian vs. Croatian and Serbian. In the end, does it really matter? Foreigners who want to learn the language will come to their own conclusions, while those who don't care in the first place, may or may not change their attitude. Would that apathy necessarily affect the survival of the language? There seems to be a close association between Esperanto speakers and the inanimate set of rules and code called "Esperanto". I don't have the same association with English. If you insult English, I just shrug. English is just a combination of sounds, letters and rules. If I had been born somewhere else, I may have been a native speaker of some other language.
I still find it more rewarding for me to learn the native language of my foreign friends when travelling, no matter how imperfect or difficult that foreign language may be. It acknowledges the fact that Esperanto speakers are spread out throughout the world but their numbers are at approximately 1.5 million. The odds of my finding a speaker of Esperanto (thus justifying my need to learn the language) all else equal are much lower than finding someone who for example speaks French. I never even implied that we should abandon English because it's Indo-European. However, there is a large obstacle in Esperanto becoming a global intermediary language as Zamenhof intended. The sheer number of native and ubiquitousness of native speakers of English in the world today make it more economical and efficient for non-native speakers to learn English for working or educational purposes - cultural and aesthetic objections notwithstanding. Another point is that if every government in the world were to mandate that Esperanto would be the second official language of their respective countries, it would be time-consuming and costly to establish. While it would benefit the prestige of 1 or 2 million speakers of Esperanto (hint, hint job opportunities for them to teach), it would mean that up to 5.5 billion other people would have to go back to school and learn Esperanto, thus "devaluing" their time spent learning other foreign languages which had been up until then had value (e.g. English, Mandarin, German, French, Arabic, etc.). Perhaps in the future our descendants will speak Esperanto as native tongue, but that's just conjecture. Until then, Esperanto has a long way to go towards realizing its creator's goal. While the mechanics of Esperanto are intricate enough, my point was that as a fluent speaker of English and French with semi-active (or semi-passive depending on your point of view) knowledge of other languages, I have an advantage in learning Esperanto than someone who has no background in such languages. Mentioning that it's agglutinative like doesn't necessarily act as an incentive to students whose native languages are agglutinative. The vocabulary is primarily derived from Romance or Germanic languages while it uses a modified Latin alphabet with tenses and moods. The general rule is that a target language becomes "difficult" for a student when it has features that are absent from the student's native language or second/third/etc. language. A prospective Chinese student of Esperanto would still have need to learn how to think about conjugations and rather free word order - things that aren't present in Chinese. In another example, a Hungarian student wouldn't be thrown off by the agglutination in the language, but has no such advantage with vocabulary as Esperanto's vocabulary is hardly transparent with that of Uralic languages For a laugh, I read a sample of Esperanto as a high school student and was surprised then at how easily I could get the gist of the text based on my knowledge then of English, French, German and Latin. For a purported international auxiliary language, it's certainly easier to acquire and grasp if I speak languages that belong to a certain family of the world's languages. Oui, j'ai lu plusiers articles plus pires que ceci de Rick et comme vous, je ne les prends pas trop au serieux. L'article de Rick est assez equilibre et il ne devient pas emotionnel comme autres critiques. Je ne suis par contre la langue et si les personnes veulent l'etudier, pourquoi pas? C'est seulment la forte emotion pour la langue qui me semble un peu extreme et me rend prudent. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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