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My English teacher really hates Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6227 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 97 of 194 10 November 2007 at 10:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Anything can be given a political interpretation. Many things are given utterly bizarre ones, supported by nothing more than the assertion that "x is intrinsically y!". For most values of x and y, this varies from silly to meaningless. I would argue that "Esperanto is intrinsically socialist" falls into the silly category. Esperanto is separate as a language and a world movement. There are very non-political, non-idealistic Esperantists, though I forget the exact name for the group that subscribes very strongly to this idea. I've seen so many different ideologies linked by various online commentators to Esperanto that I really can't seriously consider it to be strongly linked to only one. I've found the people I've talked to in Esperanto to not be particularly political - in fact, I don't think politics have ever come up in the discussions. I personally am somewhat political; out of respect for the rules of this forum, I won't state my personal political views here, beyond saying that it would take a distortion of epic proportions to cast me as a classical socialist, much less a Marxist or Communist.
Esperanto is internationalist; socialism, in practice, has been significantly less so (witness the difficulty associated with leaving the USSR). I wouldn't say that Esperanto aims for 'unity of the workers of the world'; it has a strong history of idealistic aiming for international understanding and cooperation, but to put this strictly in terms of one group or social class strikes me as misleading at best.
Would you abandon all planning of everything because it can be linked to socialism? Would you argue that the USA putting a man on the moon was inherently socialist, because it involved scientific planning? Leaving aside the very tenuous idea of socialism being linked to scientific planning of society, which seems poorly borne out in actual history as opposed to ideology, having something be congruent with scientific planning seems neither inherently bad nor inherently socialist to me.
To address this point thoroughly, I'd need to delve more deeply into politics than I feel is appropriate here, so I'll leave it alone after pointing out that there is a wide spectrum of non-socialist opposition to nationalistic chauvinism and militarism.
There's already mandatory education until around 16 years of age in much of the developed world - and first world workers already are largely emancipated, compared to the conditions which prevailed a century ago. Read Orwell's description of the conditions of the coal miners of yesteryear, and compare it to the majority of jobs today for an example of this. Aside from this, I see absolutely no link between use of Esperanto and education of workers: they're orthogonal. It's perfectly possible to be multilingual and ignorant, or a fairly well-educated monoglot - and the wealth of educational materials in Esperanto is beyond that of any major world language. This point seems like a cute rhetorical flourish, with nothing behind it.
That sounds like a conclusion that someone who likes both socialism and Esperanto would like to come to. I'd argue that whether or not 'the democratic spirit of Esperanto' (what a deconstructable phrase... but I digress) has some overlap with some of the more neutral goals of socialism (of the sort that many other ideologies also overlap with) is utterly irrelevant to any evaluation of Esperanto.
That URL points out that many major socialist leaders were strongly against Esperanto, and that both Stalin and Nazi Germany repressed Esperantists. This hardly strikes me as a glowing endorsement for how 'socialist' Esperanto is. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6258 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 98 of 194 10 November 2007 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Just a quick remark: for an interesting research on outside views of Esperanto throughout history, particularly when it comes to various regimes, read "The dangerous language" by Ulrich Lins.
It is true that supporters of Communism at some point found Esperanto to be very useful for their goals, but eventually the higher-ranking members of Soviet Communists found that the people corresponding with foreigners were less likely to believe in propaganda, e. g. how awful conditions for workers were in capitalist countries - and they also weren't ready to glorify and lie about their own situation as much as the government would have liked them to. Edited by Sprachprofi on 10 November 2007 at 12:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6326 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 99 of 194 10 November 2007 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Sprachprofi, do you find that Esperanto speakers are typically the bohemian type? The idea of it being an international auxiliary language is great, but it's only useful, at least generally speaking, to bohemians living in Europe and Japan, right?
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| epingchris Triglot Senior Member Taiwan shih-chuan.blog.ntu. Joined 6816 days ago 273 posts - 284 votes 5 sounds Studies: Taiwanese, Mandarin*, English, FrenchB2 Studies: Japanese, German, Turkish | Message 100 of 194 10 November 2007 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Somebody do use 愛斯不難讀, although it's very, very rare I think. It is unfavorable to use the phonetic of a foreign word as the translation for it is very inefficient and awkward to do that in Chinese - we have to both conform to the syllable forming rules and search for a syllable that looks/sounds/means appealing enough. To call Esperanto 愛斯不難讀 would be somewhat like to call "president" 伯里璽天德 (bo-li-xi-tian-de) (which people advocated, along with lots of other loaned words, during the initial ROC years). I just picked those as example randomly when replying, but come to think of it I think it is somehow very suitable in this discussion. Biological organisms, like languages, have come a long way during evolution and have adopted distinct shapes and characteristics, but humans have demonstrated many times that we could alter these traits and come up with an outcome that doesn't fit very well into older definitions. I'm probably off topic very seriously by now, but the bisyllability in Chinese is a very interesting and complicated subject which I would really love to elaborate more about. Maybe we could start a thread. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| remush Tetraglot Groupie Belgium remush.beRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6056 days ago 79 posts - 94 votes Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch Studies: German, Polish | Message 101 of 194 10 November 2007 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
By all means, do. The common believe is that Chinese is monosyllabic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6682 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 102 of 194 11 November 2007 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
For the record, since it has not been explained afaics and people who don't understand Chinese will not have been able to follow this little side track of the debate: Apparently the name being used for Esperanto in Chinese is 世界语, pronounced "shi4 jie4 yü3", literal meaning "World Language". I try to stay out of the debate on Esperanto myself, though I largely agree with Iverssen's observations and Volte's comments above, but whatever stand one takes, it could be interesting to ponder whether "World Language" is a fitting name for a language with an estimated number of competent speakers in the (low) hundreds of thousands. Edited by Hencke on 11 November 2007 at 5:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6174 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 103 of 194 11 November 2007 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I'll happily contribute to such a thread if it is created... For now, a quote from Wikipedia: Like Vietnamese, modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of her morphemes are single syllable, Modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that her nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| remush Tetraglot Groupie Belgium remush.beRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6056 days ago 79 posts - 94 votes Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch Studies: German, Polish | Message 104 of 194 11 November 2007 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Also read Le chinois: idées reçues et réalité or La ĉina : mitoj kaj realo (if you can trust the author:-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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