From: pcj1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Pierre Jelenc)
Subject: Re: Los nin~os que hablan esperanto
Followup-To: soc.culture.esperanto
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 00:01:05 GMT


Dear readers,

I apologise for yet-another-reply-to-Edelmiro. Any of you who already
feel nauseous, please hit your n key.

This is very long. Be prepared.




In article <21874@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>(Edelmiro) ez000281@hamlet.ucdavis.edu
 writes:
>
>----
>
>[As you can see all of these artificial languages are based on natural 
>language and are thus parasitic on it.  It seems they have confronted
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  What on earth does this nonsense is supposed to mean? Do you have even
  the faintest idea what "parasitic" means?

> the same fate of the logician, who must return again to language in
> search of new inferences upon which to build his logical system]

  No one returns to anything. Esperanto is perfectly safe and stable on its
  own cultural and literary legs. Indeed its seems to me that it is English,
  French, Spanish, and all these other "languages" that must return time and
  time again to Latin and Greek in order to build up their vocabulary, because
  they have ossified and became incapable of productive derivation.

>
>"In constructed language, both those derived from and those actually based on 
>natural languages, a number of common features can be found. (1) they strive 
>for simpliticy (being five to 15 times easier to learn than a natural 
>language)."
>
>[The author ignores that whereas this fiction of easier "learning" might be 
>true, it will also increase in comunicative inefficiency.  All one has 
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 Utterly wrong. Simplicity has nothing whatsoever to do with "communicative
 efficiency". Esperanto can and does express any human thought both precisely
 and efficiently, indeed often much more efficiently that many other languages
 that are burdened by a baggage of nonsense which forces the ideas to
 contort themselves into an unnatural shape to conform to the "natural rules"
 of an irregular language.

>to do to test this principle of the simpler, the worse, is to try to
> sanitize natural language, say Spanish, from its irregularities, and
> make it "simple" in the learning process of adult speakers.
> The end result is that the adult speakers have learnt this  Spanish
> much easier, but are unable to establish a conversation of with a
> Native Speaker of Spanish, and simply babling things like:
> 
>"Yoe seir muy embarasadoe dei seir aquii."

  Eh? Do I detect discrimination based on national origin? Bad boy!
>
>An other sorts of incomprehensible bablings wich are "simple" to learn.]

  So what? What does Pidgin Spanish have to do with the question? Esperanto
  does not aim at being understood by people who have not learnt it. Esperanto
  _cannot_ be understood by someone who has not learnt it.

>
>[As we may see these are old world eurocentric "movements" which have decided 
>to plunge the entire world in the absurd ideas of speaking a language with a 
>indoeuropean base (syntax -certain free word order, limited gramatical 
>categories- phonology -sounds-) So, we are sitting before another imperialist 
>attempt from the old world to shove their language down non-indoeuropean 
>peoples.  That's why its relatively simple to read Esperanto in the event you 
>know romance.

  The grammar of Esperanto is very little like that of Indo-European 
  languages (Which _are_ the largest language family on earth), and much
  more like that of such languages as Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish.

  It is impossible to read Esperanto by just guessing from Romance, or Germanic
  languages. It flatly cannot be done, because the grammar of Esperanto 
  cannot be guessed at, especially when it comes to word morphology. You
  may _think_ you can, but your guesses will be wildly off the mark.

>As far as the author is concerned, he seems to be living in the 
>linguistics middle ages,for the idea that langauage is a set of "habits" died 
>with the linguistic behaviorists, specifically Mr. Bloomfield.  Now what is 
>certianly ridiculous is that they somehow have devised a shceme of phonemes for 
>esperanto, but they provide no allophic rules in the phonology, in fact we

  That's because Esperanto is a natural language. Allophonic rules are not
  "provided", they just arise from the speakers. Who "provided" the rules for
  English?

>don't even know what the fonology is, other than what the fonetic system

  _You_ don't know.

> represents and any combination of these thereof is a mystery, for every speaker
> of this invention will evidently have to come up with his own phonology
> (obiously following that of his native language).  So, if they are incapable

  Wrong. The phonology of Esperanto is perfectly nice and stable, and has
  much less variability than that of English or Spanish.
>
> of positing rules for alophonic variation, they certainly will be in problems

   Therefore this argument is again utter nonsense.

> when the time comes to derive strings from other string, or simply propose
> basic rules of phrase structure.]
>
> [The article goes on to state that the "language" has not been recognized
> anywhere in spite of its relatively many adherents (100,000) in local "clubs",
> and later goes on to mention other experiments such as "volapuk", "ido",
> "novial", "interlingua" and other less popular inventions.  What is of interest
> for me, as a semanticist, is that:]
>
> "verbs are all regular, and have only one form for each tense or mood, they
> are not inflected for person number".
>
> [So, this pure and simple language, in which any stutter or sneeze while
> pronouncing a subject pronoun will creat havoc with a listner who will never
> know nominative referece, since verbal morphology will not repeat it, happens

  Numerous languages forgo entirely personal endings in verbs. Black English
  being an example close to home.

  What happens when you sneeze at the _end_ of a Spanish verb? There is for
  the most part no pronoun to refer to!

> also to have one form for each tense or mood.  I imagine they has aspectual
> morphemes some place in the picture, or perhaps they have simply eleiminated
> them, and reduced the whole tense system to past, present and future,

  Are you perhaps confusing tenses and aspects? Tsk, tsk!

> eliminating thus the hundreds of temporal possiblities of natural language.  I
> imagine pronominal clitics and affixal NP arguments have ceased to exist
> withing the verb and that serial verbs and verb complexes have also been
> simplified, especially when the abound in so many forms acrosss languages.
> Given this description, the world for Esperantists must be a very dull and
> simple place too, for they are unable to refer, say to an complex
> verb such as:
>
> "se me pudo haber quierdo estar matando"

  Talk about "communicative efficiency". I asked 4 native speakers, all
  college educated. Not one could figure it out. Spelling counts, too.

>
> with only one verb. And in such a case they would need thousands of
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  I count 5 verbs here

> inflections for expressing all possible "tenses".  But since simplicity is the
> name of the game, temporal reference must lay aside with Occam's Esperanto

  Esperanto expresses precisely any temporal reference needed, from the
  simplest to the most intricate, thanks to an amazingly rich -yet simple-
  conjugation. However, only those temporal references actually needed by
  the speaker need be expressed. One is not burdened by obligatory complex
  expressions that bring nothing to the story.

  In addition, Esperanto's powerful inchoative, iterative, imperfective,
  perfective, medial, factitive, etc, bring fine-tuning in verbal
  expression to a level unequalled in most other languages.

> razor.  Now, lets leave this asid and answer Mr.Greely]
> -------
>
> Mr. Greely says:
>
  (............)

>>Funny you should mention this. I know some people who can read and
>>write good Esperanto (how well they speak I can't say because I've only
>>met them through the Net), but who are apparently incapable of doing a
>>good translation from Esperanto into their native language.
>>Esperantists do not *translate* Esperanto. They speak it. They are
>>usually just as bad at translating as any other bilingual people who
>>have never deliberately studied the difficult art of translation.
>
> Perhaps they are even worse, since the natural languages from which it feeds
> has been "simplified" so much that zillions of possible translations are
> available for each discourse structure.

  Wrong again, it's the other way around. Esperanto can express any concept
  that you can throw at it. This does not work in the reverse: it is not rare
  for instance to be able to translate an example from Esperanto to English
  but not French, or to French but not English.

>
>
>>It is irrelevant whether the etimology of the words is Indo-European or
>>not. A typical speaker is not even aware of the etimology. What matters
>>is who defines their meaning and usage. One country that has had a
>>disproportionately large influence on the development of Esperanto is
>>Hungary, where they don't speak an Indo-European language. There is a
>>European bias in Esperanto, a bias that will, one hopes, disappear with
>>time, but this bias has nothing to do with etimology; it is because the
>>language started its life in Europe.
>
> Sure its relevant, try to sell your product to the Chinese and see if
>they buy it.

  They sure seem to! and the Japanese, the Hungarians, the Finns too.

> As anyone here who speaks Spanish notes, its fairy easy to get the picture
> of what you have written in Esperanto by taking a look at the Latin roots.

  Nope it ain't. You think you can, but you'll go wrong all over.

> Esperanto started in Europe and has had few fans wherever a non-european
> language is spoken.  Does'nt this say a lot about the ideology of your
> "movement"?

   Then how come the most succesful Esperanto movements in the present time
   are to be found in East Asia (Japan, China, South Korea), Iran, and Hungary?

>
> |>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
>
>>Of course the pronoun "they" refers here to the tax-payers
>>(unmentioned), not to the linguists...
>
> Sorry, but the CSLI is primarly funded by XEROX, not by the tax-payers.  They
> don't need "clubs", "associations", or a "movement" to study language.

  Meantime in Holland they already have a working translation system that
  uses Esperanto as a bridge language.


>
>>Stop using this stupid analogy with Pig Latin. Pig Latin is a coded
>>form of another language (English say). Esperanto is not a coded form
>>of any other language.
>     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> No, it is a coded form of other languageS, not a particular one.

  You do not seem to understand the meaning of the word "code". Please look
  it up.

>
>>If anyone thinks it is, they should try to think
>>which other language it is supposed to be a coded form of, then try to
>>describe the algorithm used to do the coding/decoding. They will fail.
>
> I believe tha article quoted above states that is lives of English, Russian,
> German, and Latin.  Of course, you have confessed below it also lives off
> Hungarian.

  What do you mean? Esperanto does not refer to any other language at any
  time. It is both self-consistent and self-contained.

>
>
>>In Esperanto adverbs can take the ending "-n", which in traditional
>>terminology is called the "accusative ending".  It may be the case that
>>Zamenhof borrowed this idea from some Indo-European language, but that
>>has to be irrelevant because most speakers are not aware of the analogy
>>with any other language.
>
> Sure, and most speakers of Spanish are unabwar of the "analogy" of Spanish
> with Portuguese and can easily speak with a Speaker of portuguese in spite of
> the fact they do not know that they are sister languages with a same base.

  Give us a break! Most speakers of Spanish are unaware of its cognate
  relationship with Portuguese??? Is it something in the water?

>>Esperanto has its own grammar which is by no
>>means "parasitic" on any other language.
>
> Well, I'll take your word on it for a moment.  Could you please indicate in
> the Space below what are the rules for generating a Noun Phrase in Esperanto:
>

  [article | demonstrative | interrogative | null] [[adverb] [adverb] ...]
  [[adjective + ending] [adjective + ending] ...] [[root] [root]....]
  root + endings [[adverb] [adverb] ...] [[adjective + ending]
  [adjective + ending] ...]

  simple and effective


>>I can read Esperanto without a translator. I can write Esperanto
>>without a translator. Sometimes I write something in Esperanto and have
>>to think very hard to work out how to translate my own words into
>>English (my first language).
>
> Of course, its "simplicity" generates an enormous ammount of ambiguity, and by

  No, not unless you deliberately chose to indulge in ambiguity for the sake
  of poetry or puns.

> the time you decide which is the corresponing English expression, you have
> fallen asleep.  Its funny that you state you have so much difficulty
> translating from Esperanto into English, when I can do the same from Spanish
> to English (any clause whatsoever) in less than a second  Perhaps its
> 'cause I'm a native speaker of both languages.

  Wait a second! *You* are a native speaker of English? You gotta be kidding!
  Or it is a sorry comment on the total disintegration of the US school
  system?

  Incidentally, how do you say "privacy" in Castillan?

>
>>It is not true that all Esperanto speakers are convinced about the
>>utility of Esperanto. There are several hundred people who speak
>>Esperanto because it is their native language but who have no interest
>>in the Movement whatsoever.
>
> Fortunately, Spanish needs no "movement" in order to have 400 million
> speakers.
>
>>There are also people who have leant the
>>language because of scientific interest,
>
> Certainly not linguists who don't waste their time.

  Considering that the president of the World Esperanto Association is
  a linguist, and so is the previous one, this is yet another example
  of ignorance parading as fact.

>
>>people who have become disillusioned and deserted the Movement,
>
> Just like those who desert any sect...

  Yep. That is no doubt true.

>
>>and there are even a few
>>people who learnt Esperanto because of their job. Plus a few who were
>>"forced" to learn Esperanto at school. Quite a lot altogether.
>
> Perhaps we should report those schools who are "forcing" esperanto on children
> to the authorities.  This type of child abuse is unheard of.

  They are the Japanese and Hungarian kids who learned Esperanto, and then
  English or Russian faster and better than it took the control groups to
  learn only English or Russian. Poor kids.

>>This difference between "prescriptive" and "descriptive" is stale old
>>cant. In practice learners of foreign languages treat the "descriptions"
>>as "prescriptions",
>
> Unfortunately it seems you have not learned the difference between the learner
> of a foreign language and a linguist.  Second language teaching involves a
> certain ammount (the least the better) of prescription, but a speaker does not
> "know" the rules of his grammar in order to use it.  I don't need to "know"
> that in Spanish predicate adjectives agree in gender/number with the nominative
> argument in order to utter:
>
> "Los eperantistas estan locos."
>
> I simply say it.

  Just like "Edelmireto frenezadas"

>
>>and Academies treat the descriptions of how the
>>best writers use the language as "prescriptions" for the language in
>>general. There isn't really a rigid distinction between the two
>>practices.
>
> For a linguist there is.  A linguist will never tell native speakers of a
> language: say this like this...  A linguist will study the language to
> describe, explain, and reproduce the grammar of the speaker.  He want's to
> study language as his object in the very same way a botanist wants to study
> flora without telling a flower: Open your petals quickly for its better for
> your gemination..."  Language Academies are language police.  They see to

  You've got to pity French and Spanish. You _do_ know about the Spanish
  Academy, don't you?

> standardize writing systems and some even try to do the same with speech to no
> avail.  Language Academies have the mindset of language commisars (just like
> esperantists), who wish to shove their view of how the language SHOULD be down

  While Esperanto just evolves as people use it, blithely ignoring whatever
  the Academy says. And there is no language police either.

> people's throat.  Linguists, on the contrary, try to figure out what languages
> ARE.  But if this is too dificult for you to understand, ready any book by
> Joseph Greenberg on the matter.  He happens to be the most respected authority
> on language universals who's around, and can give you a good talk on the
> descriptive nature of the field.
>>If Esperanto and English are both coded forms of Albanian (say), then
>>probably we can deduce that Esperanto is a simpler code, because
>>experiments have shown that people can learn Esperanto faster than
>>English. The funny thing is that most of the learners couldn't speak
>>Albanian either before or afterwards...
>
> Of course non native of English can learn esperanto faster than English, but
> once they do thay can't communicate with the same efficiency as with English
> (see my comments above on simplicity and lack of communicative efficiency).

  Yes they can, and your comments are sheer poppycock.

>>Can you prove this? Were the German codes really so simple that a human
>>could process them mentally in real time?
>
> I guess this is a question which Alan Turing, the father of computation,
> should have answered.
>
>>I can process Esperanto
>>mentally in real time, and so can thousands of people I have met.
>
> Apparently no so fast, since you have trouble parsing it into English (see
> above).

  Esperanto being more expressive than English, there are things that you
  just cannot translate simply from Esperanto.

>
>>You see, there a lot of words and expressions in Esperanto which I can
>>only translate by means of a paraphrase into any of the other languages
>>I speak, and I usually have to think quite hard in order to find the
>>paraphrase.
>
> I don't, I can translate Spanish into English simmultaneously.

  Really? You are wasting your time then. Simultaneous translation is in
  high demand by those benighted souls who  have not yet discovered
  Esperanto. On the other hand, considering how poor your English is,
  if your Spanish is just as poor, even a small turnip could do the job.

>
>>I have learnt both German and Esperanto as "foreign
>>languages" and know what I am talking about. I speak German with my
>>wife (usually) and I think in German when I am speaking German.
>
> Definitely, that's were the trouble lies.  You're not a native speaker of
                              ^^^^^^
   What trouble is that?

> Esperanto (as we can inductively assume for every one in the "movement")
>

  Now, Edelmiro, come clean. You are a freshman, who just took linguistics
  101, and you fell in love with the big words, right?


Pierre Jelenc                        pcj1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu 
                                    Columbia University, New York