From: ghbr@fmg.bt.co.uk (Hossein Bagherzadeh Rafsanjani)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: Los nin~os que hablan esperanto
Date: 25 Jan 93 17:34:10 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.esperanto
Organization: British Telecom

In article <21730@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> ez000281@hamlet.ucdavis.edu writes:

> >1) I say: Esperanto was never purposed to be a language for MONOlingual
> >use.  The purpose of esperanto is to offer a neutral, easier language
> >for the use as SECOND language in international communication.  As such
> >you are looking for something which was never ment to exist.  

> Not logical Captain Slootmans!  English is the preferred lingua franca of this 
> Century, with speakers in every country of the World, and since esperanto is a 
> eurocentrically concieved language, it is better to have a germanica NATURAL 
> language as English, with hundreds of millions of speakers, as language of 
> international communication, since esperanto is only translatable by 2 million 
> aficionados.

Well, Let me add my own personal view on this (not a  "scientific" one).

I am Iranian.  I learnt English first and Esperanto next.  I have spent
(wasted) years of my life learning English, and still not confident enough to
communicate freely with a native English-speaking person.  In contrast, I spent
just a few months learning Esperanto.  Yes, I did try to learn German and
French after I had learnt English, but had to give up both soon because of
their complexities.  (And before that, I spent years learning Arabics.)  

For me, it wouldn't matter if, liguistically, Esperanto is "natural"
or not.  I NEED to learn a second language so that I could communicate
with the outside world.  And it is sufficient for me if it has some
resemblanece to everyday languages spoken around me.  

And I hate spending my life learning somebody elses language only for
the purpose of talking to that somebody.  I am not a linguist (so
study of languages is not my interest) and I think it only fair if
natives of two different languages share the burden of learning an
extra language for mutual communication.  The fact that only "2
million" people speak it means of course that there is a need for some
investment to make Esperanto the universal second language.  But it
would have a much better long term return than what is currently spent
on lerarning English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese end tens of
other languages (excluding those done for scientific purposes).

> Captain Slootmans!! You have provided no argument in favor of the claim that 
> Esperanto is a "nuetral" language, particularly when it is a well known fact 
> that this so called language is a mixture of indoeuropean grammar and word 
> roots, and hence is "neutral" only among these languages, but is totally 
> infefective when dealing with non-indoeuropean speakers.  So, Esperanto is, in 
> and of itself, a colonial "language" just like Portuguese.  A non-neutral 
> languae which has ignored althogether the languages of the far East, Africa, 
> and Native America.

No.  The fact that Esperanto is indoeuropean does not make it
"colonial".  A colonial language is one which has to be learnt because
of political, economic or social hegemony of one nation against the
other.  Almost all non-Esperanto second languages learnt in the world
have this characteristic - but not Esperanto.

> No.  I say esperanto can't be spoken not ONLY becuase of gramamtical 
> properties, I simply say that it is better to teach a natural language such as 
> English, German, or Chinese, as a second language rather than torturing 
> children to learn this purified meta-code.  

No, thank you!  I have been tortured enough learning English, and
Arabic.  And still when I go abroad, people expect me to speak German,
Russian, Japanese etc.

> Of course you guys have to speak 
> natural lanugage, if you wouldn't it would be impossible for you to think.  As 
> a matter of fact I bet you think in your native language first and then in a 
> few seconds translate to Esperanto, for it is impossible to think first in 
> Esperanto without parsing whatever you think with correpsonding strings in your 
> native language first.

It has nothing to do with "natural-ness".  I do the same here as I
write: think in Farsi and write in English.

-hossein
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto,soc.culture.latin-america