From: LAWCROWN@NUSVM.bitnet (Barry Crown)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: Esperanto - a difficult language to learn
Date: 15 Oct 92 10:57:50 GMT
Article-I.D.: rand.199210151025.AA26945
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
X-Unparsable-Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 18:18:19 SST

Pierre Jelenc writes:

>The point is that Esperanto is _easier_ to learn than any of the available
>alternatives, regardless of linguistic background.

Is Esperanto one of the available alternatives to English as a world
language?  You and I think so and therefore we are a member of that
small group of people called "Esperantists".  Most of the rest of the
world - if they have ever heard of Esperanto - think that we are
crackpots.  If Esperanto is a difficult language to learn (as I think
it is), then we can't expect people to take seriously our pretensions
to become a world language.  Simply saying that Esperanto is *easier*
than English or French is not enough.

Just the other day, I heard an item on the BBC World Service.  The
announcer was introducing someone who was going to speak about a new
constructed language, called Glossa.  In his introduction the announcer
mentioned Esperanto and other attempts to create an international
language, which he said had failed because they were too difficult.

>Also, we should
>remember that a majority of the world's population _does_ speak an Indo-
>European language.

Actually, I thought it was the other way round.  However, it doesn't matter
because I fail to see the relevance of the point you are making.  Just
because two languages are Indo-European doesn't mean that they have
many words in common.  After English and Spanish, the two Indo-European
languages with the largest number of speakers are Hindi and Bengali.
Do they have many words in common with Esperanto?

Actually I have some personal experience of this.  When I was at school
I studied English (as my mother tongue), French, Latin and Russian.
All four are Indo-European languages.  I remember being surprised how
few words in Russian bore any resemblance to words in the other
languages I was learning.

Just for the fun of it, I asked one of my colleagues, an Indian professor,
to give me a few simple words in Hindi to see how similar they were
to Esperanto.  (Please don't flame me for this list.  I don't speak
Hindi.  The Roman transliteration of the words may not very good.
Also I know that a short list is not a scientific test.)  Here it goes:-

libro (book) - pustak
pano (bread) - roti
tablo (table) - maiz
filo (son) - putra
cup (taso) - piala
sun (suno) - surya
paper (papero) - kaghaz
light (lumo) - ujwal
night (nokto) - radh
day (tago) - din
world (mondo) - prithvi
chair (seg^o) - kursi


>Anyway, vocabulary is but a small part of the burden of learning a language,
>and especially so in Esperanto because of its structure.
>

I don't agree with this.  It's true, however, that the grammar of
Esperanto is an absolute nightmare for most Asians.  Many Asian languages
have a much simpler grammatical structure than Esperanto.  However, it's
interesting to note that Asian Esperantists usually say that, if you want
to simplify the language, you should work on the vocabulary.  HOTTA Hirohiko
(please forgive me if I've misspelt the name) made this point not long ago
on this network.  Professor Liu Xiaojun made the same point in the article
in Esperanto I mentioned in my previous post.

If I had posted an article suggesting changes to the grammar of Esperanto
rather than to its vocabulary, would you have supported me?  I know that
any such proposal is doomed to failure.  Vocabulary reform is the only
route open to us if we seriously want to make the language easier to learn.

Barry