15 messages over 2 pages: 1 2
J-Learner
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 6034 days ago
556 posts - 636 votes 
Studies: Yiddish, English*
Studies: Dutch
| Message 9 of 15 12 November 2008 at 4:17pm | IP Logged |
I only meant that English is more neutral in the sense that it is very widespread. It is less the property of the English and English speaking countries these days although certainly dominated by. I think any lingua franca takes on this property. I doubt there will ever be a neutral language. Simply because it is not the language but the thought process which is or isn't neutral.
I plan to learn Esperanto one day since I have a thing for created languages. It is good fun, I think. Not something I take all to serious though.
Shalom,
Yehoshua.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6443 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 10 of 15 12 November 2008 at 4:59pm | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
Sprachprofi wrote:
Culver is bitter, because he did not get certain positions in the Esperanto movement that he applied for. There's a counter-essay here if you care to hear both sides.
From my personal experience - which was mostly with events for young Esperanto speakers in Europe I must admit - the vast majority of Esperanto speakers is also interested in other languages and enjoys practicing these. I have never seen hostility towards krokodiloj except when somebody present wasn't able to follow the conversation because of this. I greatly enjoy the aligatorejo part of international conventions, where Esperanto is forbidden and so is your native language, so that everybody speaks other foreign languages. Throughout events, people are invited to share their culture and to teach their language. At the last Internacia Seminario (New Year's party lasting 7 days), that included lectures on Arpitan, Catalan, Chinese, German, Russian and some Caucasian language that I had never heard of. I go to Esperanto events mainly to meet other language lovers; it's the most sure-fire way of having a very diverse group with many native languages, and a group that mixes well, rather than people of one native language sticking together and people of another native language sticking together too.
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| In any case, reading his article makes me somewhat relieved why I'm not learning Esperanto. It has always seemed to me that by learning Esperanto, I'd be doing more than just learning some language, but also making an overt non-linguistic judgment that human conflict could be minimized if more of us speak a common idiom. Yet insults hurled in English between two Americans are just as bad as insults hurled in Esperanto between two Esperantists. |
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You don't have to believe that Esperanto reduces human conflict, that's up to everybody. I tend to believe it though, though not in the sense that you suggested. I simply believe that if say an Arab has a lot of Israeli friends, he's less likely to believe that Israelis are evil, no matter what other people say. However, as it is, to make Israeli friends you first have to learn Hebrew, and you probably wouldn't learn that if you didn't already think well of Israelis. The solution is a neutral language, which allows people from everywhere to meet without preconceptions, on the basis that everybody has made a small effort to come together (rather than one making an enormous effort and the other condescending to correct mistakes). This doesn't just go for Arabs and Israelis of course. And even if you learn Esperanto without setting out to overcome prejudices, you just might find yourself dropping them after accidentally meeting people from a certain country during a congress. I know I discovered a lot of lies and half-truths about other countries that the media had fed me... |
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I don't think that it's true that one must speak another's native tongue in order to be his/her friend.
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I don't think anyone said that - if it was said, I missed it (it would be a strange argument coming from an Esperantist, given that there are only perhaps a few thousand native speakers, and Sprachprofi's profile doesn't mark her as one of them). You do need a common tongue to have a meaningful friendship with someone, as you quite correctly noted.
If you want to be friends with people from a lot of cultures (say, more than a couple of dozen), your only realistic option is to have the common language(s) be something spoken non-natively by people of many cultures. I'd say any large language is tolerable in this regard, although some are better than others (looking at the absolute number of and percentage of non-native speakers).
What I think Sprachprofi's point was is, if you have a common language with someone you have prejudices about (and hence, wouldn't bother to learn the native language of), you can get to know people from that person's culture, and overcome the prejudice. As you correctly noted, it doesn't particularly matter if this language is English, Polish, Swahili, Esperanto, or Japanese - although I would argue that Esperanto speakers are probably more passionate about languages and interested in cultures than is typical for the world population, I'd also consider this to be a fairly minor point.
Chung wrote:
Look at yourself Sprachprofi, I'm sure that because of Esperanto you have been able to meet others whose native language is not one of the languages that you already know. You just communicated in what you shared: Esperanto. In a similar way, I have Polish friends who have good friends in Italy. The Italians don't speak Polish, while the Poles don't speak Italian. So they do the logical thing and use a shared language - in this case English. Their friendships are no less worthy than the ones you would have with Esperantists who don't speak a language that you're comfortable in.
As long as two sides can communicate in something common, then the possibility for friendship is open.
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Agreed; I don't think there was any imputation that using other languages was less worthy.
Chung wrote:
It doesn't matter what the language is, and in any case humans will find a way to communicate with each other when the need arises even if they want to insult each other.
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Optimistic, but not true, unfortunately. I've seen a lot of cases where communication fails due to language barriers, and even more where it would if third parties who just randomly happened to be around didn't step in and translate.
Chung wrote:
Esperanto isn't indisputably the better or more neutral way from a linguistic viewpoint. Is there an objective scale in linguistics that determines neutrality? (cf. subjective arguments about which language is "better"/"easier"/"more sophisticated" than another)
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Few things are indisputable, or unarguably objective. Subjectively, I'd say Esperanto is, by far, the easiest language I've worked with. I was able to communicate in it after less than a week in real-time chat, with the help of a dictionary - and this was when I was in high school, borderline monolingual, and knew nothing about language learning. I don't believe I could match that with any national language even now, despite knowing more about both languages and language learning.
Was I using Esperanto perfectly? No, and I still don't. It doesn't change that the barrier to using it understandably is remarkably low for people with a background in Romance/Germanic languages and/or English (due to the roots of the vocabulary), and quite low for others.
Chung wrote:
An Arab doesn't necessarily need to learn Hebrew in order to make Israeli friends if both the Israelis and the Arab can communicate with a shared language. Whether that intermediary language is English, Arabic, Hebrew, Greenlandic or Esperanto is irrelevant. Odds are rather high these days that this hypothetical Arab and the Israelis would use English, Hebrew or Arabic as the intermediary tongue. However that's not to diminish the role of other languages that could fulfill the same role if these people were to use something other than these languages.
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Absolutely.
Similarly, though, the simple existence of languages which are less loaded (for speakers of any two cultures at odds) than the native tongues of those cultures is probably quite helpful in fostering communication; I think it can be easier to meet on more neutral ground. Neutral, in this case, is relative to the languages in question, and I'd define it as "any language that doesn't have significantly closer ties to one culture or the other"; English and Esperanto would both qualify in the Israel/Arab example (please, no nitpicking about the foreign policy of various countries).
Chung wrote:
What I suspect is that Esperantists are only human
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(I quickly retract my tentacles). Yes, yes, absolutely; believe that!
Chung wrote:
and some still seek validation that what they're doing is approved or supported by others thus giving them the sense they're part of a popular movement or the "winning" team. It can make for something powerful when people feel that they belong to something that's greater than themselves.
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I don't get that out of Esperanto, but I don't consider myself part of a movement or team.
Chung wrote:
After all, the Esperanto conferences come across as a meeting of the minds with a pep rally kind of atmosphere and aren't like staid linguistic conferences that focus on topics in sociolinguistics or rather esoteric topics in morphology, phonology or corpus planning. This attitude makes me most uncomfortable as I feel that I'd be making a non-linguistic or political judgment merely by studying Esperanto. The old arguments by furyou_gaijin with some of the Esperantists on this forum remind me of how "non-linguistic" Esperanto can be. |
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You're comparing academia and hobbyists. It's equally relevant to complain that Linux user groups aren't like staid conferences where intuitionist logic and its relevance to second order type theory are discussed; the people there aren't (for the most part) in academia, and are enthusiastic enough to go to a meeting for members of the general public with the interest in question. Of course the atmospheres are different!
Similarly, it strikes me as senseless to measure hobbyists and people passionate about a topic, on an internet forum, by the standards of academic conferences. Different people, different norms, etc.
I happen to think Polish is utterly fantastic. For someone to decide not to learn a language because some people who put forth the effort to learn it happen to enjoy it and have some passion for it, rather than a staid, dispassionate attitude suitable for an academic paper strikes me as one of the poorer reasons not to learn it - no offense meant.
As for what it means to make a non-linguistic or political judgment just by studying a language: there are certainly such situations. To me, Esperanto is not one of them; to you, I suppose it could be, though I can't say I properly understand why (and I'd like to understand).
1 person has voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7160 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 11 of 15 12 November 2008 at 5:37pm | IP Logged |
Volte wrote:
Chung wrote:
Sprachprofi wrote:
Culver is bitter, because he did not get certain positions in the Esperanto movement that he applied for. There's a counter-essay [URL=http://74.125.39.104/search?q=cache:zDiEaBF9lscJ:co.uea.org/~tejo/diversity.doc]here[/URL] if you care to hear both sides.
From my personal experience - which was mostly with events for young Esperanto speakers in Europe I must admit - the vast majority of Esperanto speakers is also interested in other languages and enjoys practicing these. I have never seen hostility towards krokodiloj except when somebody present wasn't able to follow the conversation because of this. I greatly enjoy the [I]aligatorejo[/I] part of international conventions, where Esperanto is forbidden and so is your native language, so that everybody speaks other foreign languages. Throughout events, people are invited to share their culture and to teach their language. At the last Internacia Seminario (New Year's party lasting 7 days), that included lectures on Arpitan, Catalan, Chinese, German, Russian and some Caucasian language that I had never heard of. I go to Esperanto events mainly to meet other language lovers; it's the most sure-fire way of having a very diverse group with many native languages, and a group that mixes well, rather than people of one native language sticking together and people of another native language sticking together too.
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| In any case, reading his article makes me somewhat relieved why I'm not learning Esperanto. It has always seemed to me that by learning Esperanto, I'd be doing more than just learning some language, but also making an overt non-linguistic judgment that human conflict could be minimized if more of us speak a common idiom. Yet insults hurled in English between two Americans are just as bad as insults hurled in Esperanto between two Esperantists. |
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You don't have to believe that Esperanto reduces human conflict, that's up to everybody. I tend to believe it though, though not in the sense that you suggested. I simply believe that if say an Arab has a lot of Israeli friends, he's less likely to believe that Israelis are evil, no matter what other people say. However, as it is, to make Israeli friends you first have to learn Hebrew, and you probably wouldn't learn that if you didn't already think well of Israelis. The solution is a neutral language, which allows people from everywhere to meet without preconceptions, on the basis that everybody has made a small effort to come together (rather than one making an enormous effort and the other condescending to correct mistakes). This doesn't just go for Arabs and Israelis of course. And even if you learn Esperanto without setting out to overcome prejudices, you just might find yourself dropping them after accidentally meeting people from a certain country during a congress. I know I discovered a lot of lies and half-truths about other countries that the media had fed me... |
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I don't think that it's true that one must speak another's native tongue in order to be his/her friend.
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I don't think anyone said that - if it was said, I missed it (it would be a strange argument coming from an Esperantist, given that there are only perhaps a few thousand native speakers, and Sprachprofi's profile doesn't mark her as one of them). You do need [B]a[/B] common tongue to have a meaningful friendship with someone, as you quite correctly noted.
If you want to be friends with people from a lot of cultures (say, more than a couple of dozen), your only realistic option is to have the common language(s) be something spoken non-natively by people of many cultures. I'd say any large language is tolerable in this regard, although some are better than others (looking at the absolute number of and percentage of non-native speakers).
What I think Sprachprofi's point was is, if you have a common language with someone you have prejudices about (and hence, wouldn't bother to learn the native language of), you can get to know people from that person's culture, and overcome the prejudice. As you correctly noted, it doesn't particularly matter if this language is English, Polish, Swahili, Esperanto, or Japanese - although I would argue that Esperanto speakers are probably more passionate about languages and interested in cultures than is typical for the world population, I'd also consider this to be a fairly minor point.
Chung wrote:
Look at yourself Sprachprofi, I'm sure that because of Esperanto you have been able to meet others whose native language is not one of the languages that you already know. You just communicated in what you shared: Esperanto. In a similar way, I have Polish friends who have good friends in Italy. The Italians don't speak Polish, while the Poles don't speak Italian. So they do the logical thing and use a shared language - in this case English. Their friendships are no less worthy than the ones you would have with Esperantists who don't speak a language that you're comfortable in.
As long as two sides can communicate in something common, then the possibility for friendship is open.
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Agreed; I don't think there was any imputation that using other languages was less worthy.
Chung wrote:
It doesn't matter what the language is, and in any case humans will find a way to communicate with each other when the need arises even if they want to insult each other.
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Optimistic, but not true, unfortunately. I've seen a lot of cases where communication fails due to language barriers, and even more where it would if third parties who just randomly happened to be around didn't step in and translate.
Chung wrote:
Esperanto isn't indisputably the better or more neutral way from a linguistic viewpoint. Is there an objective scale in linguistics that determines neutrality? (cf. subjective arguments about which language is "better"/"easier"/"more sophisticated" than another)
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Few things are indisputable, or unarguably objective. Subjectively, I'd say Esperanto is, by far, the easiest language I've worked with. I was able to communicate in it after less than a week in real-time chat, with the help of a dictionary - and this was when I was in high school, borderline monolingual, and knew nothing about language learning. I don't believe I could match that with any national language even now, despite knowing more about both languages and language learning.
Was I using Esperanto perfectly? No, and I still don't. It doesn't change that the barrier to using it understandably is remarkably low for people with a background in Romance/Germanic languages and/or English (due to the roots of the vocabulary), and quite low for others.
Chung wrote:
An Arab doesn't necessarily need to learn Hebrew in order to make Israeli friends if both the Israelis and the Arab can communicate with a shared language. Whether that intermediary language is English, Arabic, Hebrew, Greenlandic or Esperanto is irrelevant. Odds are rather high these days that this hypothetical Arab and the Israelis would use English, Hebrew or Arabic as the intermediary tongue. However that's not to diminish the role of other languages that could fulfill the same role if these people were to use something other than these languages.
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Absolutely.
Similarly, though, the simple existence of languages which are less loaded (for speakers of any two cultures at odds) than the native tongues of those cultures is probably quite helpful in fostering communication; I think it can be easier to meet on more neutral ground. Neutral, in this case, is relative to the languages in question, and I'd define it as "any language that doesn't have significantly closer ties to one culture or the other"; English and Esperanto would both qualify in the Israel/Arab example (please, no nitpicking about the foreign policy of various countries).
Chung wrote:
What I suspect is that Esperantists are only human
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(I quickly retract my tentacles). Yes, yes, absolutely; believe that!
Chung wrote:
and some still seek validation that what they're doing is approved or supported by others thus giving them the sense they're part of a popular movement or the "winning" team. It can make for something powerful when people feel that they belong to something that's greater than themselves.
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I don't get that out of Esperanto, but I don't consider myself part of a movement or team.
Chung wrote:
After all, the Esperanto conferences come across as a meeting of the minds with a pep rally kind of atmosphere and aren't like staid linguistic conferences that focus on topics in sociolinguistics or rather esoteric topics in morphology, phonology or corpus planning. This attitude makes me most uncomfortable as I feel that I'd be making a non-linguistic or political judgment merely by studying Esperanto. The old arguments by furyou_gaijin with some of the Esperantists on this forum remind me of how "non-linguistic" Esperanto can be. |
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You're comparing academia and hobbyists. It's equally relevant to complain that Linux user groups aren't like staid conferences where intuitionist logic and its relevance to second order type theory are discussed; the people there aren't (for the most part) in academia, and are enthusiastic enough to go to a meeting for members of the general public with the interest in question. Of course the atmospheres are different!
Similarly, it strikes me as senseless to measure hobbyists and people passionate about a topic, on an internet forum, by the standards of academic conferences. Different people, different norms, etc.
I happen to think Polish is utterly fantastic. For someone to decide not to learn a language because some people who put forth the effort to learn it happen to enjoy it and have some passion for it, rather than a staid, dispassionate attitude suitable for an academic paper strikes me as one of the poorer reasons not to learn it - no offense meant.
As for what it means to make a non-linguistic or political judgment just by studying a language: there are certainly such situations. To me, Esperanto is not one of them; to you, I suppose it could be, though I can't say I properly understand why (and I'd like to understand).
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I think that the political statement that arises from studying Esperanto is that whatever the lingua franca is at that moment (be it English in most cases today, German, Russian, Lithuanian, Yiddish or Polish as was the case in Zamenhof's neck of the woods), somehow Esperanto would do it better (without specifying what "better" is or replacing one subjective argument with another).
On conferences, that's the very point. Esperanto conferences by necessity take on an atmosphere for a quasi-mass movement since you combine the enthusiasm of Esperantists ("Oh it's so much easier than [insert language here]! I wish that everyone would learn Esperanto!") with the inevitable question of why all Esperantists should come together. In my youth I had been attended conferences for the Francophonie and on reflection they were just excuses for us to beat our chests about how great French was, hear speakers talk glowingly about French, and that French-speaking people were just great. Now it seems like an offshoot of tribalism where one group which speaks a certain language or thinks in a certain way or belongs to a certain ethnicity somehow possesses something special and others not in the group aren't worthy or don't know any better. Academic conferences are usually different indeed, and they often lack the atmosphere of a quasi-mass movement. I'm just not keen on such movements.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6443 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 12 of 15 12 November 2008 at 5:49pm | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
I think that the political statement that arises from studying Esperanto is that whatever the lingua franca is at that moment (be it English in most cases today, German, Russian, Lithuanian, Yiddish or Polish as was the case in Zamenhof's neck of the woods), somehow Esperanto would do it better (without specifying what "better" is or replacing one subjective argument with another).
On conferences, that's the very point. Esperanto conferences by necessity take on an atmosphere for a quasi-mass movement since you combine the enthusiasm of Esperantists ("Oh it's so much easier than [insert language here]! I wish that everyone would learn Esperanto!") with the inevitable question of why all Esperantists should come together. In my youth I had been attended conferences for the Francophonie and on reflection they were just excuses for us to beat our chests about how great French was, hear speakers talk glowingly about French, and that French-speaking people were just great. Now it seems like an offshoot of tribalism where one group which speaks a certain language or thinks in a certain way or belongs to a certain ethnicity somehow possesses something special and others not in the group aren't worthy or don't know any better. Academic conferences are usually different indeed, and they often lack the atmosphere of a quasi-mass movement. I'm just not keen on such movements. |
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Ahh, that makes perfect sense. Thanks for explaining.
I guess, from my point of view, just because non-academic conferences exist on most subjects isn't a reason to study (or not study) them for me. Basically, I don't consider it a factor. I (casually and slowly) learn Esperanto because I like it and it has features that fascinate me, I intend to improve my French someday because it's a language that's useful to me, I learn Polish because there's so much I want to read in it and something about the language just feels right (I like the morphology, phonology, etc)... I know there are people in favor of all three languages in bombastic ways I'd disagree with, but that's life. I can think of situations where mass movements would be enough to make me decide not to learn a language; happily enough, at this particular point in time, none of them apply to languages I'm interested in, though a few cut closer than I'd like.
It probably helps that the semi-academic conferences (not linguistics/spoken human language related) that I've been to have been fairly pleasant.
With Esperanto in particular, I've never been to an Esperanto conference, but I intend to someday - for the language practice, to have a chance to leaf through some books in Esperanto, etc.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7160 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 13 of 15 12 November 2008 at 6:30pm | IP Logged |
Volte wrote:
Chung wrote:
I think that the political statement that arises from studying Esperanto is that whatever the lingua franca is at that moment (be it English in most cases today, German, Russian, Lithuanian, Yiddish or Polish as was the case in Zamenhof's neck of the woods), somehow Esperanto would do it better (without specifying what "better" is or replacing one subjective argument with another).
On conferences, that's the very point. Esperanto conferences by necessity take on an atmosphere for a quasi-mass movement since you combine the enthusiasm of Esperantists ("Oh it's so much easier than [insert language here]! I wish that everyone would learn Esperanto!") with the inevitable question of why all Esperantists should come together. In my youth I had been attended conferences for the Francophonie and on reflection they were just excuses for us to beat our chests about how great French was, hear speakers talk glowingly about French, and that French-speaking people were just great. Now it seems like an offshoot of tribalism where one group which speaks a certain language or thinks in a certain way or belongs to a certain ethnicity somehow possesses something special and others not in the group aren't worthy or don't know any better. Academic conferences are usually different indeed, and they often lack the atmosphere of a quasi-mass movement. I'm just not keen on such movements. |
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Ahh, that makes perfect sense. Thanks for explaining.
I guess, from my point of view, just because non-academic conferences exist on most subjects isn't a reason to study (or not study) them for me. Basically, I don't consider it a factor. I (casually and slowly) learn Esperanto because I like it and it has features that fascinate me, I intend to improve my French someday because it's a language that's useful to me, I learn Polish because there's so much I want to read in it and something about the language just feels right (I like the morphology, phonology, etc)... I know there are people in favor of all three languages in bombastic ways I'd disagree with, but that's life. I can think of situations where mass movements would be enough to make me decide not to learn a language; happily enough, at this particular point in time, none of them apply to languages I'm interested in, though a few cut closer than I'd like.
It probably helps that the semi-academic conferences (not linguistics/spoken human language related) that I've been to have been fairly pleasant.
With Esperanto in particular, I've never been to an Esperanto conference, but I intend to someday - for the language practice, to have a chance to leaf through some books in Esperanto, etc.
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It's not always about non-academic conferences. I still studied French even after attending those rah-rah conferences on the Francophonie. Esperanto just leaves me with an odd feeling. One one hand, the language itself is inert and I'm unable to get irked about its structure. On the other hand, what can irk me is when Esperantists turn their choice into something akin to tribalism and start claiming that we'd all be better off speaking Esperanto. We've heard comparable claims from people saying that we'd all be better off speaking English. It can even lead back to the argument that some languages are just better than others, something which I vehemently oppose - especially after learning and using (actively and passively) languages that belong to different families.
Notwithstanding Esperanto's raison d'etre for trying to eliminate communicative barriers, a logical extension of its goal can lead to some perverse consequences (as Culver points out). Replace English with Esperanto, and we have the same problem faced by speakers of minority or endangered languages - even though Esperantists (or for that matter many English-speakers) do not intend to push those minority or endangered languages into extinction.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6443 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 14 of 15 12 November 2008 at 7:07pm | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
It's not always about non-academic conferences. I still studied French even after attending those rah-rah conferences on the Francophonie. Esperanto just leaves me with an odd feeling. One one hand, the language itself is inert and I'm unable to get irked about its structure. On the other hand, what can irk me is when Esperantists turn their choice into something akin to tribalism and start claiming that we'd all be better off speaking Esperanto. We've heard comparable claims from people saying that we'd all be better off speaking English. It can even lead back to the argument that some languages are just better than others, something which I vehemently oppose - especially after learning and using (actively and passively) languages that belong to different families.
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Some languages are easier to get to a workable level in than others, as a second language; this is linked to what ones' L1 is, but doesn't seem to me to be entirely determined by it. I frequently hear that English is easier to get started in than German or Russian, due to features like (almost) not having cases, and lacking some difficulties with things like aspect and separable verbs. On the other hand, I also hear people claim that speaking German truly well is easier than English, as the language is more standardized, while English is more ad-hoc.
Similarly, a given language can be better, for a given purpose. If I want to study the literature or philosophy of culture X, it's ridiculous to try to do it seriously through any language other than X. If I'm going to move to country Y for 3 decades, I'd be foolish not to learn the primary language of the region of Y I'd be moving to. If I want to speak to a lot of people and in a language which has lots of fine lexical distinctions, I'm better off learning a language that isn't limited to 1 speaker who hasn't used it regularly in the last 20 years. In the general case, though (as opposed to specific, language-related purposes), I fully agree with you that one language is no better than another.
Aside from these points, I do agree with you; I don't think claims that we'd be better off all speaking Esperanto make more sense than claims we'd all be better off speaking English. From a purely communicative point of view, and with the idea that it wouldn't be a first language for most people (ie, that it wouldn't kill off linguistic diversity), it makes some sense - but it's offputting.
Like you, I dislike tribalism. I guess we have different ideas of how central it is to Esperanto, or chose to tolerate it to different degrees.
Chung wrote:
Notwithstanding Esperanto's raison d'etre for trying to eliminate communicative barriers, a logical extension of its goal can lead to some perverse consequences (as Culver points out). Replace English with Esperanto, and we have the same problem faced by speakers of minority or endangered languages - even though Esperantists (or for that matter many English-speakers) do not intend to push those minority or endangered languages into extinction. |
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Agreed; I made roughly the same point in another post in this thread. That said, in my lifetime, I don't envision this being a problem with Esperanto in practice; it already is and has been one with English. There is a danger in drawing logical conclusions from premises which are extremely unlikely.
An argument against Esperanto, as you and Culver have said, is that, if it replaced English, it would have many of the same problems and perverse effects; I agree, but I also don't consider this to be a particularly strong argument against it. "Something that won't happen within my lifetime, and probably will never happen, has a serious risk of being as bad as the current status quo", while not resounding praise, is hardly something I find myself able to take as a serious argument not to do something; I'd call it fairly close to irrelevant/neutral to my decisions, but I realize that opinions can vary on this point.
Edited by Volte on 12 November 2008 at 7:08pm
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