From: 72627.2647@compuserve.com (Don HARLOW)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Recalled for ... Evolution
Date: 18 Aug 92 01:43:44 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet

To: Esperanto >INTERNET:esperanto@rand.org

Dato: 920817

Reply to Craig Latta's two consecutive postings:

>        Hmmm. I recently came upon an allusion in this newsgroup that
>the specification for Esperanto was guided by some sort of referendum.
>I'd like some more information on that. Did it try to maintain some
>sort of consistency and cohesion in Esperanto's evolution? Or was it
>similar to attempts at keeping French "pure"?

>        What happened to it? Though I realize the difficulty and
>partial futility of committees and standards (I'm a computer scientist,
>among other things), having to wait generations for "natural change"
>bothers me. I thought one of the benefits of languages like Esperanto
>was being able to speed, organize and guide that process a bit.

The original, and still extant, "spec" for Esperanto was developed 
by L. L. Zamenhof, a Russian Jewish student (everybody says "oculist", 
but that came later). He did it by himself, so the language is more 
analogous to a painting than to the ANSI standard for "C". Zamenhof 
struggled for years to get Esperantists to agree on establishing a "Lingva 
Komitato" to guide possible changes in the language, and that developed 
into the current "Akademio de Esperanto". The current Academy, which 
elects its own members and is responsible to no one else, has some 36 
members, of whom two are women (poetesses Marjorie Boulton and Eli 
Urbanova) who must make really great coffee. Its charter, according to 
the "Jarlibro" of UEA, is "1) to conserve and protect the language 
Esperanto according to its _Fundamento_ and to keep an eye on 
(_kontroli_) its evolution; 2) to explore all sorts of linguistic questions 
that are concerned with Esperanto; 3) to criticize writings (_verkojn_) 
from a linguistic viewpoint; 4) to defend Esperanto against all sorts of 
competitors." The fourth point, about competition, is pretty well forgotten, 
since, certain writings that have recently appeared here notwithstanding, 
there isn't any, at least not from other planned languages.

No language with a significant number of speakers (perhaps no 
language with any number of speakers at all) can be easily modified. 
Fortunately, the original "standard" was quite good, and so the 
Academy's major duty remains, not to change it, but to keep others 
from trying to change it, a largely redundant task (but it keeps the 
people in the Academy out of trouble, usually). Aside from that, a 
"good" Academy basically does nothing but issue an occasional 
(average once every 15 years) list of new official roots that 
everybody else has been using for fifty years. (Most people will 
assure you that I am exaggerating. Half of them will assure you that 
I am exaggerating in one direction, and half will assure you that I am 
exaggerating in the other.)

>        Don Harlow (72627.2647@compuserve.com) writes (I think):

>> ... the "Esperanto Defects" posting, in its first day of existence on
>> s.c.e., has aroused all the violent reaction one might expect from a
>> torpid sloth.

>        Arf! Grrrr. Growl.

>        With all the forwarded messages, misquotations, dead and
>living languages, and conspiracy theories, I can't helping of Italo
>Calvino's "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" when I read this
>newsgroup. 

>        I love it.

Actually, I meant to say "torpid ground sloth", but it was a rough 
day. ("Sloth" estas la angla vorto por "bradipo", karaj.)

=============================================
Don HARLOW                                Redaktoro Esperanto U.S.A.
tel. (1 510) 222 0187
CompuServe [72627,2647]
Internet 72627.2647@compuserve.com

"To discipline Esperantists is to eat soup with chopsticks."
                                                          Confucius
=============================================


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