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Native Esperanto as a Test Case (...) | ||
Tags: Native Language | Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6469 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 9 of 43 09 July 2007 at 11:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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Of those people who know a constructed language, 99% know Esperanto. The remaining 1% (and maybe a few % for those who know Esperanto and one of the others) are shared by Klingon, Tolkien's languages, Interlingua, Ido, Volapük, Lojban, Toki Pona and so on.
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| Cage Diglot aka a.ardaschira, Athena, Michael Thomas Senior Member United States Joined 6623 days ago 382 posts - 393 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 10 of 43 09 July 2007 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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LilleOSC, yes perhaps..but don't Esperonto speakers get offended when the legitimacy of Esperanto is questioned because it has so few speakers compared to big natural ones such as Mandarin, English, Spanish which evolved naturally? Your comments could be deemed offensive to Klingon speakers. Their language may have far fewer speakers than Esperanto but it is still a constructed language like Esperanto, if on a smaller scale.
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| reltuk Groupie United States Joined 6815 days ago 75 posts - 110 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 11 of 43 09 July 2007 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think Esperanto speakers get upset because their language has few speakers; I think Esperanto speakers get "offended" when people talk about Esperanto as if they understand it, but their impressions are misconstrued or intentionally falsified. In reality, most of the time Esperanto speakers are simply voicing the correction, and are not really offended; sometimes they are agitated, to varying degrees, because they perceive the obvious falsehoods to be the result of willful ignorance or even malintent. I'm more inclined to think that the amount of misinformation regarding Esperanto is high enough that people whose understanding really is wrong are generally wrong through little to no fault of their own. I will say that I don't know any Klingon speakers. My instinct says that most Klingon speakers (of which there are a couple dozen) recognize that Klingon and Esperanto are two very different languages and serve very different purposes. Klingon was designed by a linguist specifically to be very hard to learn, it was designed in the context of a fantasy world and for the purposes of entertainment. The intent in designing it was not to create a general purpose language that would be used for huamn communication. Saying such things should not be considered offensive because they are the truth. -- reltuk 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 43 22 April 2010 at 12:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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In principle the beginnings of Esperanto are as artificial as those of Quenya and Klingon (or that new thing from the film Avatar) - one language was made by an idealist who wanted to save humanity, the other by film people who wanted to give at least one of their inane inventions a touch of realism (contrary to those who assume that all green bugeyed aliens speak fluent English).
The big difference is that Esperanto right now have millions of L2 learners (some quite proficient) plus a small number of native speakers - because some children of some of the more hardcore Esperantists have learnt it as one of their native languages. In principle Klingon could have as much success (measured in fluent speakers), and then then it wouldn't matter where it came from. If a language-like thing is so 'rich' (linguistically and culturally) that you can express yourself in it is well as in any natural language, then that thing is a language. Or in other words: if it smells like a language and feels like a language and behaves like a language then it is a language. In the article mentioned by Jeff Lindquist there is an important observation at page 50: "Bergen discusses five differences between what he calls Standard Esperanto and Native Esperanto. In the latter he has observed “the attrition of the tense/aspect system and of the accusative, the fixing of SVO word order, the irregularity of lexical stress, and the tendency for phonological reduction, especially of pronouns and certain verbal morphology” (p. 594). His results are based on a survey of the speech of eight children, aged 6 to 14 years, at a meeting of Esperanto-speaking children in 1998" If you want to see Esperanto as a true living language then this is the best thing since sliced bread. Irreverent use of the language and less reverence for Zamenhoff, that's exactly what you should wish for Esperanto as a fullgrown language. PS: and I should of course have written this in irreverent Esperanto ... OK, next time Edited by Iversen on 22 April 2010 at 2:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5584 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 13 of 43 22 April 2010 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
Very true. Last time I checked I think there are around 50 speakers of Klingon. That's smaller than a classroom in some cases. Either way I think it's cool :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hvorki_ne Groupie Joined 5385 days ago 72 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic | Message 14 of 43 22 April 2010 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know how dated it is or how fluent they had to be to count- but there was a study of klingon speakers. http://home.swipnet.se/~w-12689/survey.htm About 600 total in that study. http://www.crwflags.com/FOTW/FLAGS/qy_plan.html estimates 1,000 speak klingon & Quenya respectively. There were also 10,000 speaking Interlingua/Interlingue. No comments on the overlap. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7076 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 16 of 43 23 April 2010 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've always been more of an Interlingua kind of guy myself.
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