From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: typology of Esperanto
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Distribution: usa
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 92 19:02:12 GMT

In article <1992Aug20.214711.24506@spss.com>, markrose@spss (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <1992Aug20.023350.2629@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU 
>(Rich Alderson) writes:
>>
>>I'm not sure what you mean by prototype theory.
>
>As found in Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things._

I have to admit that I haven't read it.  I'd have appreciated a quick summary
rather than a reference, but I'll check this out now that I have some time.

>>>In any case, I think it's misleading to simply declare that Esperanto (or
>>>Papiamentu; the same problems come up for creoles) isn't an Indo-European
>>>language; this is certainly not true in the same sense as it is for (say)
>>>Chinese or Dyirbal.
>>
>>Yes, it is true in that sense.  And Papiamentu either has an Indo-European
>>core, or it is not Indo-European, any more than Esperanto or FORTRAN.
>
>You mean to tell me Esperanto isn't an IE language in exactly the same sense
>Chinese isn't?  Come now.  Your own definition talked about being able to
>regularly derive the language from pIE.  The definition only makes sense for
>languages which arise out of normal historical change, like French or Chinese.
>Your definition doesn't apply to Esperanto any more than it does to pigs 
>or symphonies, because none of these things are the sorts of things to which 
>it can apply at all.

The same definition by which I exclude Esperanto as an Indo-European language
works a fortiori for Chinese:  Certainly the vocabulary of the various Chinese
languages is not derivable from PIE.  It precisely because of its exclusion of
the possibility of viewing Chinese as Indo-European that the definition works,
must work, for Esperanto as well.

>To put it another way, Esperanto fails to be an IE language (in your sense)
>because its vocabulary, though it entirely derives from IE sources, does
>not do so *regularly.*  (You can't predict which language Zamenhof will use
>as a source for each word.)  Chinese fails to be an IE language because its 
>vocabulary does not derive from IE sources at all, regularly or not.

Yes?  One is merely a stronger case for rejection than the other.

>How would *you* characterize the difference between the artificial languages
>Esperanto (which is IE-derived) and Solresol (which is not)?

That Esperanto was devised by someone who used randomly chosen words from a
small group of Indo-European languages as the basis for its vocabulary, and
Solresol was not.  None of which has anything to do with whether Esperanto is
to called Indo-European.

>>(Actually, FORTRAN is a better candidate--all its vocabulary is derived from
>>English.)
>
>I hope you're joking.  It's a computer language, whose syntax, semantics,
>and mechanisms of change are entirely different from those of human
>languages.  Nor is the derivation of Fortran mnemonics from English words
>much more regular or predicable than Zamenhof's construction of Esperanto
>from IE roots.

Yes, I was joking--to an extent.  I hoped that the comment would lead you to
think about the claim you are making, and see the irrelevance of vocabulary
source for classification.  The intended use of Esperanto may differ from that
of FORTRAN, but they are equally artificial.

To take a classic example, do you consider English to be a Germanic language,
or a Romance language, or even a Hellenic one?  After all, more of the extended
vocabulary of English is derived from Latin (via Norman French or not) and
Greek than from Proto-Germanic.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_