From: xeno@iastate.edu (Gary L Snethen)
Subject: Re: Ido vs. Esperanto
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
Distribution: inet
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 19:24:17 GMT

In <920906035832_72627.2647_DHJ34-1@CompuServe.COM> 72627.2647@compuserve.com (Don HARLOW) writes:

[...]

>[........] How many times 
>have you used a preposition to end a sentence with? How many 
>times have you forgotten to not split an infinitive? How often have 
>you shocked the person who you were speaking to by using the 
>wrong pronoun form?

I laughed quite awhile over this...  mainly because everyone looking
over my shoulder couldn't understand why it was funny...  ;)

The goal of language is to communicate.
Human communication involves much more than the transfer of facts from one
being to the next.  A human language must be capable of expressing emotions
(which are unique from instant to instant and person to person), humor,
analogy, and much impart a sense of attachment between the symbols we use
to describe our ideas and the ideas themselves.

When I was introduced to Esperanto, noone made any promises that it
was 'perfect'.  I didn't even realize that there were people attempting
to create such languages.

As a computer engineer, I can see advantages to such languages for storing
and communicating objective information.  If my goal was to describe a
situation in detail without the possibility of being misunderstood, then
perhaps I would choose one of these languages.  But this is not my reason
for learning Esperanto.  I don't want a language with zero ambiguities and
a finite combination of symbolic expressions satisfying the fundamental
grammatical requirements, I want to gain a new freedom of expression, with
which I may share emotions, humor, and culture with people across the globe.

I like Esperanto because it is flexible, because it's alive, because it was
conceived to do exactly what I want to do with it, and because it has
personality.  The fact that Esperanto is easy to learn isn't its strongest
point in my eyes.  It's the lightness of the language I like.  I wouldn't
enjoy a symbolicly perfect language.

At one time, people tried to make a computer language 'ordinary people'
could understand (???)...  They named this language COBOL...  unfortunately,
it is still used quite a bit.  Programmers hate it because it is difficult
to express programs compactly in it.  There is incredible redundancy
and verbosity in the language.  No programmer would ever choose it above
C, Pascal, or even BASIC.

My point in mentioning this is that I forsee the emergence of compact,
highly structured (human) languages from people attempting to design a
'perfect' language, and I think that these languages will encounter the
converse problem.  They won't be accepted by humans, because they are
stripped of the qualities that endear people to a language.


  A termite walks into a bar...
  He says, "Where's the bartender?"
  (Yes, the punchline is there...  think about it... ;)


  Have you heard of the new object oriented COBOL?
  They call it "ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL."
        


---Xeno

There must be embezzlement in the net...              Xeno
Everyone keeps throwing in their two cents,     xeno@iastate.edu
and none of us have gotten anything back.             oneX