From: bas+@andrew.cmu.edu (Bruce Sherwood)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: Rick Harrison on Esperanto
Date: 19 Aug 92 10:28:40 GMT
Article-I.D.: andrew.oeYd=Mi00VQEQ2gbFw
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA

Rick Harrison's critique of Esperanto is well-informed and accurate.  I
agree totally with him that it is important not to lie to others about
Esperanto, and not to lie to ourselves.  I can work up a good deal of
anger at the kinds of ignorance or lying in this regard practiced by
some famous Esperantists, Waringhien being the chief offender.

The use of letters that don't occur in any other language causes lots of
difficulties.  I have seen empassioned defenses of our alphabet, and
empassioned attacks on the notion that there are any problems
whatsoever, in typed form in which the writer painstakingly went through
the document afterwards, adding the circumflexes by hand!  I have
suggested elsewhere however that the problem is much more serious than
the mere problem of representation in printing.  The more fundamental
problem is that these awkward letters are there because Esperanto has
too large a set of consonant phonemes, which leads to pronunciation
difficulties and even to spelling mistakes.  For example, the
distinction between gxo and jxo is very hard for French speakers to hear
or say.  The large size of the consonant set is in my view more serious
than but related to the pronunciation issues Harrison brings up.  

But note that there are limits to how far one can go in shrinking the
phoneme set.  I don't think it is feasible to eliminate the contrast
between lo and ro despite the problems this causes, because there are
far too many "international" words that make this contrast.  As another
example, pity the poor speakers of Chinese, who lack the distinction
between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants.  Again, there is a conflict
with the need to be able to express "international" (typically European)
roots that makes it very unlikely one could get by without this voicing
distinction.  One MUST make compromises.  In hindsight, I think Zamenhof
included a few too many consonants, which led to problems in orthography
and pronunciation.  I would like to see the community slowly introduce
new words to replace those that require circumflexes.  This would affect
a very small fraction of the vocabulary:  the accented letters are
actually quite rare.

Harrison's critique of the Esperanto vocabulary seems to me the weakest
part of his comments.  Here it is even more difficult and even more
necessary to make many compromises to get a system that works.  There
are theoretical and even some practical objections to Esperanto in this
area, but all one needs do is look at English or just about any
constructed language such as Interlingua to see that by far, Esperanto
vocabulary represents a significant linguistic and artistic success.  It
is not that one cannot find many things to criticize in Esperanto
vocabulary, it is that one cannot point to other examples of systems
that actually work and work well.  The Esperanto system really does work
remarkably well.

I do agree that having to memorize the transitivity of a verb is just as
burdensome and ultimately useless as having the memorize the gender of a
French noun.  This is no doubt largely due to the fact that English is
my native language, and so I feel little need to make such a
distinction.  Similarly, speakers of languages which do not routinely
use a plural must find plurality burdensome in Esperanto.  But I am
intrigued that agreement of adjective and noun in Esperanto is much less
of a problem for most speakers than one would theoretically expect, even
those who do not have such agreement in their native language.

Contrast this with the enormous problems almost all Esperanto speakers
have with the accusative.  The heavy dominance of SVO among all
Esperanto speakers, even speakers of languages with other orders, makes
it seem to these speakers that "Mi legis la libro" is perfectly clear
without the accusative marking (to say nothing of the semantics).  I did
some research on what Esperanto speakers ACTUALLY say in real life (not
in writing, but in speaking) and found this SVO dominance AND
significant numbers of accusative "errors."  On the other hand, I didn't
encounter significant "errors" with respect to adjective-noun agreement.

This leads me to urge that it is truly useless and counterproductive for
Esperantists to claim without honestly examining the data that Esperanto
is perfect and (say) that the accusative really helps people. 
Similarly, it is pretty useless to critique Esperanto on the basis of
theoretical objections, such as the "fact" that the distinction between
rad-ar-o and radar-o must be a big problem.  One must do what is done
with other languages:  listen to its speakers, read its writers, see how
the system actually works in practice.  It is in this kind of study that
we all can make progress.  

To be specific, I'm urging a more experimental stance.  If we find (as I
think we do) that agreement of adjective and noun is not in actual usage
a significant problem for speakers of Esperanto, then let's not worry
ourselves over the theoretical "necessity" of eliminating this feature
because many languages don't have it.  If we find (as I think we do)
that the accusative is a significant problem in actual usage even for
speakers of languages for whom this would in theory be non-problematic,
then we really do have a problem, and no amount of contrived arguments
of the Waringhien variety is of any use (he argued that the accusative
was essential for distinguishing between "Li trovis la vinon bonan" and
"Li trovis la vinon bona," a distinction which it is easy to make in
many other ways and is routinely made in other ways in actual Esperanto
speech).

I also want to repeat a point I made earlier:  As was shown most vividly
by Marx, it is easier to diagnosis than to prescribe.  It is easier to
see the flaws in Esperanto in part because it is a working system.  If
you look carefully at the history of other attempts to create a working
system, even attempts involving professional linguists, you come away
being really impressed with Zamenhof's achievement, both linguistic and
political (relatively speaking, of course -- relative to others who made
the attempt).  It is REALLY hard to set up a workable system, within the
need for many almost unreconcilable constraints and need for compromise,
and even harder to breathe into such a system enough autonomous life
that it could live on its own.  Just to take one counterexample, many
constructed languages foundered because they had no decentralized
mechanism for introducing new roots (Interlingua and Loglan may be
examples of this).

Finally, I very strongly agree with Harrison about the importance of not
lying -- not to non-Esperantists, and not to each other.

Bruce Sherwood
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto