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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| T0dd Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6555 days ago 17 posts - 106 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: French | Message 9 of 351 25 December 2006 at 8:06am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Note that tne association of head-scratching and puzzlement is not specifically a *linguistic* one. If it exists, it's a behavioral correlation. As such, even if one's native language doesn't include a ready-made expression that exploits the correlation, it would be understood. That is, it's not necessarily idiomatic. It's a figure of speech that alludes to a behavioral correlation. To the extent that such correlations are widespread, the figure of speech is understandable. I can't say whether this particular figure of speech would be understood everywhere. When I used it, I was chatting with some other Esperanto speakers in the Esperanto Museum in Vienna. One group was from Hungary; the other individual was an Israeli. There was no problem of comprehension. I can say that similar figures of speech are routinely used in Esperanto, by Esperantists from all over the world, without difficulty. Another example is "korŝira", which literally means heart-tearing, but which we would render in English as "heartbreaking". Just as no one in that museum in Vienna thought I was saying that my problem was causing a skin rash, no Esperantist would infer that a "korŝira" situation is one that causes a weird cardiac condition. In short, Grice's Principle of Charity is as much at work in Esperanto as it is in other languages. People assume that you're saying something that makes sense, and they make an effort to understand what it is. I don't suggest that one can simply translate literally from one's native language into Esperanto. That is as disastrous in Esperanto as it is in other languages. The key is to develop a feel for what things are idiomatic, and hence not literally translatable, and which are not. It is a common mistake of beginners (in the study of all languages) to try to use the new language as a relexification of their native language. The point I was making in my previous message was that creative ways of using words are expected in conversational Esperanto, and their is less reliance on "canned" expressions.
No, that's completely wrong. Spoken Esperanto is not a creole. The study that you cited, by Bergen, also doesn't conclude that spoken Esperanto is a creole. Bergen does conclude that the particular L1 Esperanto spoken by a sample of children who learn from a single parent shows signs of creolization. That's a very restricted claim. For one thing, in the Esperanto speech community, the speech of L1 speakers is *not* normative. Certainly, an Esperanto speaker will borrow expressions from his or her native language, *if those expressions will be understood*. By the same token, Esperanto speakers soon learn to say things in Esperanto in ways that bear no resemblance at all to their native language. When one learns any L2, the first phase of learning is one in which the learner tends to stick pretty close to L1 expressions and patterns. This doesn't usually work well, and is the mark of the beginner. It's only by getting past that level that one can achieve fluency. My "kapgratiga" example was not meant to illustrate fluency or the pinnacle of expression in Esperanto. It was only meant to illustrate how it's possible to make the language work, to coin a word when needed, and be understood without being judged an inferior speaker. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Timbaland Newbie United States Joined 6573 days ago 36 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 351 31 December 2006 at 3:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Reading this thread - and the very informative posts by the two Esperanto speakers - has got me curious about the language. For what it's worth, as someone who also studied a "useless" language (Italian), I will say it certainly wasn't a wasted endeavor. Time invested in a language - in any language - is time far better spent there, than in front of a television.
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| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7152 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 11 of 351 01 January 2007 at 12:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I too have been impressed by the posts from the Esperanto speakers. I also feel that some of the critics have been unfair.
I began to learn Esperanto after giving a lecture on learning languages at a library and found a book on Esperanto there which I borrowed. I was impressed by what I read. I found a website, Lernu, which has a complete course for learning Esperanto for free download. I wish there was material this good for learning other languages. I haven't taken the study of Esperanto too seriously. I give precedence to other languages.But, I don't criticize anyone for choosing to learn Esperanto. There are more than a million people who can speak Esperanto. There are only a few hundred thousand people who speak Icelandic. No one is critical of forum members who learn Icelandic. (It is one of my own goals for the future.) The library book I read states that studies have shown that people who learn Esperanto for a year take a year from their study time of other languages, like French. So, the time isn't lost. Even if it were, I still think the choice of language we learn is a private decision. You may not agree with the choice, but let's not criticize it. Let's support each other in our efforts to learn. 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 351 01 January 2007 at 5:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Long ago I had a brief look at Esperanto and decided not to learn it because it seemed insipid and too easy to take seriously, and also because the other languages I could choose were in fact spoken somewhere in the world by a native population.
However some of the arguments in this thread have made me reconsider (though without pushing me to the limit where I actually start doing something about it). One argument is that those scattered people who actually speak it apparently take it seriously enough to almost form an international community, - that may compensate for the the lack of a truly native population. The other factor is a purely lingistic one: the remarks by TOdd suggest that Esperanto is closer to becoming an agglutinating language than I thought, but without being as 'exotic' and incomprehensible as the true agglutinating languages. Of course the use of words with affixes constitute a strong agglutinating element in otherwise inflectional languages, but it seems that Esperanto would be an even more interesting test of the rationality of the traditional simplistic division of languages in isolating, agglutinating, inflectional and polysynthetic. Edited by Iversen on 01 January 2007 at 5:15am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7169 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 13 of 351 01 January 2007 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Here's an old article on artificial languages (mainly Esperanto, the more esoteric Loglan/Lojban and Klingon) from Wired.
It turns out that the Klingon Language Institute filled the gaping wormhole left by the FSI's non-publication of 'Basic Klingon' with the Conversational and Power Klingon audio courses... (No slight meant to the Esperantists!) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6874 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 14 of 351 01 January 2007 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm pleased to hear from other Esperantists. The first foreign language I ever really studied with actual aims to learn was French in high school, but Esperanto holds a special place in my heart because it was the first foreign language I ever taught myself or reached a real depth in.
Unfortunately, I've lost most of the skills I've had with the language from disuse (relearning it and finally bringing it to fluency is actually one of my New Year's resolutions). While I haven't had much success with the language outside of chatrooms (meaning I've never found any Esperanto club where I live, and also as far as I know I've never crossed paths with another Esperantist) I don't think the language is a waste of time at all. I don't regret the time I've spent on it, even though my family thought I was crazy to study it. When I tell people what languages I speak (even a little bit of) I usually have to decide whether or not to mention Esperanto, because there's the feeling that people generally brush it aside, and it wouldn't therefore be worth mentioning it, even though I have spent (on and off) several hundred hours over the past 5 years or so learning it or relearning from not practicing. So I feel a little proud and encouraged to see here that it is receiving a good reception on this thread. Of course it's not everyone's thing (a bit ironic as it was intended as an international language! :-)) but it is definitely a work of art, and if someone was interested in learning it, even if only out of curiosity, I think more good would come if it were encouraged. People who learn Esperanto are probably those on the path to study other languages as well, anyway. :-) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| T0dd Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6555 days ago 17 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: French | Message 15 of 351 01 January 2007 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That the Esperanto speech community exists as a global diaspora is beyond dispute, and that fact is, to my mind, truly fascinating and unique in human history. This makes Esperanto similar to other languages in some respects, but quite different in others. For example, as I've already mentioned, the speech of L1 speakers of Esperanto is not normative, as it is in other languages. Another point is that Esperanto speakers are well aware that the language's very existence depends upon a kind of solidarity among its speakers in support of the stability of the language. An Akademio of Esperanto exists, part of whose role is to "officialize" new words. This is done very much descriptively, however, after usage has already been established. For example, as computers became more and more important, it also became increasingly important to have an agreed-upon word to refer to them. Some speakers instinctively took the verb "komputi" and added the suffix meaning "instrument," "-ilo", to create "komputilo." Others, however, preferred to coin new roots such as "komputero" and "komputoro". This competition among forms went on for a couple of decades, with members of the Akademio also weighing in with their own views. The objection to "komputilo" was that the original Esperanto verb "komputi" did not mean "to compute," in the sense of information processing. It meant something more like "to meter," the way one's water meter keeps track of how much water one has used. So, to use "komputilo" to mean "computer" would be to change the meaning of "komputi." Well, "komputilo" won out, and eventually the Akademio baptized the word, noted the change in the meaning of the verb "komputi," and that's what everyone uses now.
Esperanto is also interesting in that almost all of its affixes may be used as words in their own right, which makes Esperanto a somewhat paradoxical hybrid of agglutinating and isolating. For example, to talk in general about a tool or implement, you could use the suffix "-ilo" mentioned above. The suffix "-eg" enlarges or intensifies the meaning of the root. Thus, while "laca" means tired, "lacega" means really tired or exhausted. But speakers will very often take "-eg" and turn it into the adverb "ege" (derived adverbs end in -e), meaning "greatly". So, instead of saying "Mi estas lacega" for "I'm very tired" one might say "Mi estas ege laca". Both are not only acceptable but commonly used. As far as I know, Zamenhof did not foresee this use of affixes as independent words, but it caught on very early. Interestingly, it is not allowed in Ido, the early "reformed" version of Esperanto created by some who were unhappy with certain aspects of Esperanto. Professor (emeritus) John Wells, a distinguished phonologist at University of London click, is also an Esperantist and has written extensively on linguistic aspects of Esperanto (He also authored a useful Esperanto-English dictionary). A sample of his thinking about it is available from the above web page. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6588 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 16 of 351 01 January 2007 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Getting pretty interested over here. Seeing as I've recently found out that my town of Karlskoga is pretty big in Esperanto, and that the school where my father is the Director of Studies has a bunch of classes (there's even an Esperanto House of sorts not long from here!), I'm thinking of trying it out. But not until I've reached working proficiency in Mandarin, which will take a good while.
One reason I can think of to learn it is to help the learning of subsequent languages. Every language you know helps to make new languages easier to learn, no? And as I've understood it, Esperanto is supposed to be easier to learn than most natural languages. Is that so? How much faster is it? Say you're studying an hour a day. How long time will it take to be able to attend Esperanto festivals and speak with the others freely? If nothing else, I want to learn it because it's kooky. I like kooky. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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