From: ez000281@hamlet.ucdavis.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto,soc.culture.latin-america
Subject: Re: Los nin~os que hablan esperanto
Date: 24 Jan 93 18:32:25 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.esperanto
Organization: Computing Services, UC Davis

Dear Mr. Slootmans:

>I do apologize to the readers of s.c.latin-america for not posting this
>in Spanish.

Don't worry, we take both Spanish and English in s.c.l.a., we're not into 
Spanish Only around here.

>Dear Edelmiro,

>Starting from a certain prejudice you seem to have a counter-attack for
>every point one makes in favour of esperanto.  

No, I only argue anything which seems irrational to me, something which has 
nothing to do with prejudice.

>So maybe i'm stupid to
>write this, because of course you will respond with some clever answers
>again.  

Thanks for the compliments.

>And since you are the linguist, you might know better some
>things from a linguistic point of view, but that doesn't make you Mr.
>God, or the all-knowing.

God (if he exists) forbid!!  I've always aspired to be a humble mortal.

>   Anyhow you have a response for every point
>made, but blinded by your need to selfconfirmation, you don't really
>listen to the arguments of others, do you?

Well... at least I read them.

>Well, i'm not a linguist, so i won't argue with you about the need of
>this or that grammatical niggling property for a language to be called a
>language.  But as a physicist, I do know a lot of LOGIC!  And I will
>point to some arguing which seems to be ILLOGICAL to me.  And as far as
>I know also linguists do need logic if they want to proove something!

Of course we do, and if you want to know some more about the linguists who do 
need logic, or the logicians who do need language, I will refeer to you to the 
work of Richard Montague.

>1) Fact: The whole discussion of esperanto being a language seems to
>concentrate on the existance of MONOlinguals.

Perhaps its becuase all natural languages (you know, the ones native speakers 
can learn as children) have had monolingual speakers at some moment in time.

>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.

>However
>some people do raise their children bilingual, and so there do exist
>native speakers of esperanto.

Pardon me Captain Slootmans, I do not see how it is possible to confuse 
bilingualism with the existence of monolinguals.  Yor see Captain Slootmans, 
most bilinguals (and all esperantists) of this planet have one native language 
(definitely not esperanto), and another in which they have limited profiency.  
Hence, assuming your assumption are true of this world, the invocation of 
"bilingualism" serves no purpose other than to stray us away from the issue of 
monolingual esperantists.

>1 Comments:
>Why neutral?
>Imagine a Brazilian speaking to a US-citizan.  If they would speak
>Portuguese, the Brazilian would be in a favorized position because he
>knows portuguese better then the US-citizan.  But of course they speak
>English and as such the US-citizan is in a favorized position.  However
>if they would both do some effort and learn a neutral language like
>Esperanto they could communicate without favorizing one or the other.
>(Of course this idea of neutral language is not favorized by the old
>colonial languages like English and French, who rather like people to
>learn their language so they can patronize them afterwards.)

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.

>Why easier?
>Esperanto has a regular grammar, stripped of a lot of irregularities
>which characterize the so called natural languages.  

And this is precisely why its more DIFFICULT, for the "irregularities" in 
language are there for a purpose, they are no "imperfection" of language, but 
acutally ways in which languages mark forms in order to make patent linguistic 
oppostions.  But of course, you are a physicist and I am mere linguist, and I 
should not tell you that irregurlarities are necessary in language.  BTW thank 
you for giving me more ammunition by confessing you have stripped esperanto 
from the irregularities which are present in all natural languages.

>As such it isn't to
>interesting for linguist, since they can't make huge investments about
>the origin of this or that property.  Neither can they get government
>money for such studies, so they just don't look at it at all and ignore
>it's existance.

Why don't you tell this to the linguists as the CSLI at Stanford.  There they 
spend millions trying to figure out what the grammars of natural languages are 
so that they pentagon and other people like XEROX can try to make machines 
"think" and understand voice operated commands.  If your PC happens to have a 
voice imput device, or if your WP program has a spelling/grammar checker, you 
should be sure that at the other end of the line there was a computational 
linguist, but since you happen to be a physicist, this is much to trivial for 
you interests.  As for our lack of interest in the origing of this or that 
propoerty, I would like to refer you to an April, 1991 article in Scientific 
American.  It goes by the title of "Hard Words", and I'm sure that as an 
esperanticists/physicist you will be very interest in seeing how historical 
linguists are in search of the protolanguage.


>But esperanto on the other hand works.  Just join one of the many
>meetings or congresses where esperanto is the working language and you
>will find out.  But of course you feel yourself too worthy to give it
>try.  But i should know that you don't listen to this argument because
>of this:

Of course it works.  Pig latin clubs would work just a well.


>I sea in your answer some desperate try to ignore esperanto as a
>language.  The fact that people do speak it makes it language, what else
>would you call it? It's not just bits of pieces of a few European
>languages, since it has its own syntax, morphology, grammar,...etc.

Er, pardon me Captain but this is not logical, you have eliminated my 
adnominal modifier when I stated that esperanto is not a NATURAL language.  
Bee's have "language" too, more natural than esperanto, but simpliciter 
relative to English.  Furthermore Esperanto's "own" syntax is not its own, it 
is parasitic on the few Indoeuropean languages that its founders and its 
"Academy" (the sort of place hated by lingusits) dictates.


>You might be a linguist, but you are sure not a literary man!  You would
>give all the credits for a succesfull book to the TRANSLATOR and none
>for the WRITER???  If indeed Madonna's "Sex" was translated to Swahili,
>you would say "Sex" itself was worthless, but it sold good because the
>TRANSLATOR was very good???
>Besides the original statement was about a book originally written in
>Esperanto!  And you jump to a translation to esperanto, as if you
>couldn't believe that books and poetry is written originally in
>Esperanto.

Again, Captain, books can also be written originally in machine language, or 
even Pig Latin, and this does not make machine language a natural language.

>So you are comparing apples with mellons wich is unscientific from a
>logical point of view!

Pardon, me Captain, but it is you who are comparing apples with melons by 
comparing Esperanto with natural language. 

>Besides, of course one does need a translator to sell the book in Japan and
>not to make it better as you seem to think, but just because there are
>more Japanese that speak Japanese than there are Japanese that speak
>Esperanto!

Even if we assume the lunacy that Esperanto is a natural language, you will 
need translators from esperanto into Japanese becuase nobody will understand 
you (excluding the few esperantist who speak Japanese).  My best proof is 
simply to ask you to reply in Esperanto and only Esperanto.  I will not even 
need to counter, since you will only be able to convice the convinced 
(esperantists) whereas, I can reach a broader international public by using 
English.  To read Esperanto, we need translators.

[...]

>Wrong!  It was not insane, on the contrary it worked great!  True, you
>can't refer to the universe with a thousand roots.  But Esperanto was
>not fixed.  The 1887 book was merely a framework.  Once published
>Esperanto started to evolve, it wasn't fixed you see.  Yes indeed,
>it wasn't an artificially engineered mix.  Loanwords can be found in
>Esperanto.  It's not a pure language.  

Whew!!  I thougt it had erradicted all irregularities...

>But loan words, once incorporated
>in the social network of people who talk Esperanto, are incorporated
>respecting the phonology and syntax of the host grammar.  For example
>the word "lasero" when refering to a laser.  There was a need for this
>loan since there was no Esperanto equivalent for laser.  Note however
>that the word was borrowed into Esperanto to be genderless, as all
>substantives in Esperanto.  So please note that languages can't mix
>anything at will.  What are borrowed are lexical morphemes (i.e.
>"roots"), and even they must accomodate to the Esperanto grammar!

Fist, I do not claim that esperanto cannot borrow lexical morphemes and 
incorporate it into its Fankenstein grammar, I claim that natural language 
cannot incorporte syntactic and morphological structures at will (as the 
"planners" of Esperanto have done) in the same way it incorporates borrowed 
words.  So,when esperanto "grammar" borrowed "lasero" and incorporated it into 
a genderless language (there are a few classifier languages with no gender) so 
you are still selecting the lexical morpheme and sticking into a partial 
grammar of esperanto.  BUT ESPERANTO HAS ADDITIONALLY INCORPORATED SYNTACTIC 
AND MORPHOLOGICAL STURCTURES OF NATURAL LANGUAGES AS IF IT WERE POSSIBLE TO 
ENGINEER THE SYNTAX WITHOUT KNOWING THE RULES OF ANY NATURAL LANGUAGE (we still 
are trying to figure them out).  The aleatoric (sp.?) combinations of word and 
morpheme order are not natural, and have never proven to be learnable as 
natural language.  For example if all phrases in English are left headed (i.e., 
there head is to the left of base constituent in the phrase) what would happen 
to the syntax if we decide to invert it like japanese, and instead of saying: 
"The black bull that I saw" we say "that I saw the black Bull", and so fourth?  
The rules governing natural language grammars are so intricate, interrelated 
and complex that the possibilities of engineering bits and pieces of languages 
without know the consequences of such changes creates a defective end product 
which cannot be learned by the infant as any natural language would.  That's 
precisely why syntaxes aren't borrowed (like Esperanto) across languages as 
words are.

>(say this sounds familiar, doesn't it?)

>Now this is what made Esperanto work.  It was not just a one man's
>project.  It grew together with the people that started speaking it.
>Just a pity that linguists don't take interest in this evolution.  They
>could do great research on this evolution.  But one way or the other
>they seem to be afraid to burn their fingers, because the general
>attitude to constructed languages inter linguists is one of disapproval.
>So, oh no, one couldn't break through this general attitude, and thus
>you just keep running along this mean road.  You even don't feel worthy
>to consider Esperanto as a language, after all "Is the moon made of
>cheese?"

>4) About the creator:
[...]

>What do you know of Esperanto "grammarians"?  Have you met one?  Have
>you read one of their works?  Are you familiar with the Academy of
>Esperanto?  Clearly the Academy is rather registrating how people speak
>rather than telling people how to speak.  This practice can hardly be
>called the `steps of medieval monks'.  If you want to attack the
>Esperanto Community on points like this you should be sure to be
>documented firstly.

The Enclyclopaedia Britannica (1973 ed) refers to the founder of Espranto as 
an "occultist".  As far as academies are concerned, linguists are never 
prescriptive and we never tell people what to speak, we only try to describe 
what they speak, not prescribe it.  Language Academies are precisely that: 
vestiges of medieaval monasteries, with no useful function other than dictating 
ortographic standards. Their linguistic values are nill.

>5) About code and binary:

>> German codes effectively communicated during WWII, are they a "natural"
>> language?

>No, but then they needed a code-book to read the messages, didn't they?
>Apart from beginners with dictionnaries, I haven't seen wandering around
>esperantists with code-books. 

Sure, and we need code books and "grammars" of esperanto in order to read it.  
Sounds to me that if we spend years working hard at it we won't need the books 
anymore.

> Turning letters by means of a key into
>code doesn't make the code a language.   Decoding is only possible to
>exactly the same language.  You can't compare Esperanto with code.

Why not??  It simply a code that would have been childs play for Alan Turing.

>Anyhow, do you know examples of litterature originally written in
>German code?  Have you met Germans, who were able to speak in German
>code?  I was in Germany before and noone spoke as :`cokoekjaol ldoekjg
>lskuoelk  aldijelja'!

If the germans would have learnt the code they could eventually "speak" it 
like esperanto, but, of course, it would have been useless for the military 
purposes it was intended for.

>What else is binary than some form of code, turning each letter in some
>binary form, this makes the comparison as worthless as the one with
>german code.

And that is precisely esperanto, a code built up from other codes in natural 
language.  It is a meta-code or better yet a parasitic and deformed code 
stripped of the "irregularities" of its base codes.

[..]

>You say they CAN'T be because of some grammatical properties.  We say
>the CAN'T be because of political and environmental properties.  Where
>could a MONOLINGUAL esperantist live?  Hey, we are not a secte with
>medieval monks devigating people only to speak esperanto.  We're people
>like everyone else who have to go to school and grow up like anyone else
>and so we have to know local languages as well, so forget about this
>MONOLINGUALISM, it just isn't realistic in this environment.


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.  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.

>Says who? You? Wright, all these statements you make are just your own
>opinion, isn't it.  Instead of just stating this, you could at least
>investigate it!  And it is not because it wasn't done before by one of
>these 4000 members who had money enough to pay their fee to the Linguist
>Organization of the USA, that it couldn't be done!
>As a matter of fact a study will start in Rome towards Bilingualism
>starting from birth and that study will include Esperanto.
>I will look up the professors name if you like!

I'm sure this professor (plesae send the reference) will not find a shred of 
evidence that shows that there esperantists who are coordinate bilinguals.  You 
see, bilingualism has been studied by experts and there happens to be consensus 
that there are degrees of bilingualism and the "perfect" bilingual will happen 
to be a native of both languages.  There are foreign language department with 
Ph.D.'s in a language other than your native language who will NEVER attain the 
proficiency of the native speaker of the target language.  Esperantist are 
natives of some natural language first and then take on this complex Pig Latin 
as their second "language".  PLEASE send the reference of the article.

Edelmiro