From: LAWCROWN@NUSVM.bitnet (Barry Crown)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: Difficult
Date: 15 Oct 92 10:20:14 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
X-Unparsable-Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 17:22:09 SST

>Cleve Lendon writes:
>
>Difficult compared to what?  English?  Chinese?  Spanish?

I think you have changed tack here.  Previously you argued that Esperanto
is an *easy* language.  Now you are saying that it is *easier* than
language X or language Y.  These are two completely different propositions.
I think the first proposition is fallacious.  So far as the
second is concerned, it all depends what other language you are comparing it
with and who is the person learning the language.

I agree that for most speakers of west European languages Esperanto is easier
to learn than any other language because it is very similar to their
native languages.  (Of course, there may be exceptions, e.g. Catalans
learning Castillian Spanish, possibly.)  For most non-Europeans I think
that Indonesian is much easier to learn than Esperanto.  It has a
much simpler grammatical structure than Esperanto and it makes liberal
use of affixes to reduce the number of root words you have to learn.
Even Europeans generally say that Indonesian is an easy language to learn.
As a native speaker of English, I would say that Indonesian is much easier
to learn than French, but I found Esperanto even easier to learn than
Indonesian.  The reason is because, as a English speaker who had
previously studied French and Latin, I had little trouble with either the
vocabulary or the grammar of Esperanto.  Of course, there may be other
languages even simpler than Indonesian, but I can only speak from my own
experience.

>
>Unless I misunderstand, you are saying that Esperanto has too many words.
>Here's another opinion:
>
>"Dum la nacilingvaj vortaroj havas proksimume la saman ricxon, la esperanta
>vortaro, ecx PIV, nanas kompare al ili, malgraux siaj kunmetajxoj eblaj kaj
>neeblaj. "
>
>Fernando de Diego
>en esperanto, aprilo 1992
>
>My translation:
>While the national language dictionaries have approximately the same richness,
the Esperanto-dictionary, even PIV, is a dwarf compared to them, in spite of
>its combinations, possible or otherwise."
>

Yes, you understand me perfectly.  I would just like to make it clear that
I have nothing against the liberal use of affixes and compound words to
make new words.  I am saying that Esperanto has too many root words.

Turning to the quote from Fernando de Diego, what national languages is
he comparing Esperanto with?  Judging from the rest of his article, it is
fairly obvious that he is comparing it with the major western European
languages.  In which case, I agree.  PIV is much smaller than the Oxford
English Dictionary.  I have PIV on my desk as I am typing now.  I also
have a comprehensive modern Hebrew dictionary on my desk.  PIV looks
bigger to me.

>And now for my two bits :-)
>
>Obviously, Esperanto's vocabulary is not perfect. But I think that when
>compared to any national language, Esperanto's inconsistencies are relatively
>few.
>
>Klivo

Again you're changing tack.  Esperanto may well be more consistent than
any other language.  However, mere consistency does not necessarily
make a language easy to learn.

Barry
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto