From: jardar@swix.nvg.unit.no (Jardar Eggesboe Abrahamsen)
Subject: Re: Los nin~os que hablan esperanto
Organization: Nettverksgruppa - UNIT
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 20:53:27 GMT

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

(...)
>>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.

A child with a French father and a German mother, the parents speaking
only their own native language to the child, will become bilingual. A
child whose father only uses German when speaking to the child, and whose
mother only uses Esperanto, will become bilingual. This proves that
Esperanto can be learnt just like any other language.

(...)
>
>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.

I wonder what "mixture of indoeuropean grammar" means. That the grammar of
Esperanto has something in common with IE grammars? It is of course true
that both Esperanto and German has an accusative, but they are not being
used in the same way. Every language has its own grammar.

But it is also true that Esperanto is agglutinative to a further extent
than any IE language. It is in fact as agglutinative as the non-IE
languages Japanese and Swahili (if not even more). Is this to ignore
"altogether the languages of the far East, Africa and Native America"?

The word roots are indeed very often European. However, it is an advantage
that word roots can be taken from ethnic languages, so that they do not
need being invented every time we need new roots. Look what happened to
Volapuk, and that language merely _changed_ the words to be
unrecognisable! In Esperanto noone can be prevented from borrow a word
from any language at all. - Anyway, words must always be learnt.

>
>>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.

The word "irregularity" only reflects the fact that a given language has a
grammar that doesn't fit into a given model of description. E.g. using the
non-ergative case model when describing an ergative language would make
that language full of irregularities.

Of course "irregularity" is no imperfection. But the statement that their
absence make languages more difficult, should not come from a linguist.
Objectively no language is more or less difficult than another. But if the
grammar is very different from the grammar in your own native language, or
if the grammar doesn't fit well into the grammatical model you are using,
then it's difficult to learn. An example is the germanic irregular verbs,
the system of which is not taught to any Norwegian 16 years old. I had to
learn the German verb "springen" (jump) with all its forms. Later I was
taught the ablaut rules, and the "irregular" verbs became regular to me.

(...)
>>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.

Pig latin implies a secondary coding of the language. Esperanto doesn't.


>>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.

If Edelmiro by "natural language" means "ethnic language", then he is
right. If he by "natural language" means that the changes in Esperanto
morphology and phonology is due to dictates, then he is wrong. And there
_are_ linguists in the Akademio.

If Esperanto syntax is parasitic on all the languages that it resembles,
then the same must apply to Norwegian? Unless one has read one's Saussure,
of course.

>
>>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.

It is hard to write poetry in machine language, unless one redefines
"poetry", of course. Concerning pig latin: Read again what I wrote above.

>
>>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. 

Sorry, Edelmiro! Before you say anything about something, you should know
what you are talking about.

>
>>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.

I don't need a translator. Mi ne bezonas interpretiston.
But I would need a translator if I was to talk to someone only
understanding Russian, Arabic and Spanish (even though they all are
international languages).

>>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...

"Loanwords" is not the same as "irregularities". Just like the English
"remote control" is "rimo-kon" in Japanese, with Japanese phonotactics,
the word "kontrolo" in Esperanto has been adjusted to fit into Esperanto
grammar. This happens automatically.

>
>>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.

When I learnt English, the grammar presented to me could just as well have
been a lye. I could not know wether my teacher was telling me the truth or
not.

Both the syntactic and the morphological _structures_ of Esperanto have
evolved naturally. E.g. at first it was very unusual to make a verb from a
noun just by replacing the -o with a verb ending. This has now changed.

By the way - if Esperanto is a Frankenstein language, what about English?

(...)
>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

"It can't happen, so if it happens afterall, then it can't be true." In
Norwegian we often talk about the map and the landscape. If the map
doesn't look like the landscape, then the map is wrong, not the landscape.

(...)
>The Enclyclopaedia Britannica (1973 ed) refers to the founder of Espranto as 
>an "occultist".

WRONG!!! The Encyclopaedia Britannica refers to Zamenhof as an _oculist_
(eye-doctor).

(...)
>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.

When learning a language it is always nice to have a dictionary at hand. I
have spoken German for 8 years and Esperanto for 5, and I speak Esperanto
much better than German.

(...)
>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.

Has Edelmiro once again forgotten Ferdinand de Saussure?

(...)
>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.

When I speak in Esperanto I don't have to think in Norwegian first. It's
much harder to speak English or German.

Frankly, I can't believe that Edelmiro is a linguist.


-- 
Jardar Eggesboe Abrahamsen            "Ili rigardis min kiel sian
  jardar@swix.nvg.unit.no               moralan chefon."
 studanto pri lingvistiko                              (L.L. Zamenhof)
   altlerneja kandidato