From: dfkihueg@RZ.UNI-SB.DE ("Edmund Grimley-Evans")
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Interlingua?
Date: 20 Aug 92 18:07:59 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet

A reply to PAUL ANDREW DENISOWSKI:

Somewhere (Don HARLOW can probably remember where) there was published
a letter from Gode in which he explained very clearly the important
difference between Esperanto and Interlingua.

This difference has nothing to do with linguistic technicalities but is
ideological. Your complaint about "world peace/brotherhood/whatever" is
precisely Gode's complaint as well.  Esperanto is intended to be the
carrier of a "neutrally human" culture for all of mankind; Interlingua
is intended for scientific abstracts.

You are absolutely right in thinking that for most Esperantists it is
rather irrelevant whether Esperanto is "catching on". A lot of
Esperantists think that Esperanto is ideologically incompatible with
the present World Order and regard the fact that today's politicians
are not interested in Esperanto as a point in Esperanto's favour, if
anything.

Interlingua *might* be easier than Esperanto for *educated* *West
Europeans* to learn to *read*, but if you delete the word "educated",
change "West European" to "South-East Asian" *or* change "read" to
"speak", the statement is definitely untrue.

You're right in noticing that some of Esperanto's biggest supporters
don't speak Esperanto very well. Some people have the time, inclination
and ability to support Esperanto in some way but don't have the time,
inclination or ability to learn to speak it competently. Most
Esperantists are grateful for the help such people give; some however
regard such people as comtemptible idiots.

>   My
> first suggestion would be to use Esperanto to discuss things other than
> Esperanto itself or the "movado"   While it is true that there are many
> other subjects discussed in Esperanto, it sometimes seems that the
> entire raison d'etre for Esperanto is so that people can use Esperanto
> to talk about Esperanto.

Well said! A lot of Esperantists would agree with you on this one. I am
sure Stefan MAUL would agree, for example. He set up and edited for 12
years the only independent magazine in Esperanto that isn't largely
about Esperanto. If your time of being a "serious Esperanto student"
was before 1980 it is possible that you don't know about it. It's
called MONATO. It appears every month (as the name implies) and
contains 32 A4-pages in each issue. It *never* writes about Esperanto.
It contains only articles written originally in Esperanto (with the
exception of occasional interviews with politicians, etc).  And
articles about a country are almost always written by someone from the
country in question.

It is partly this last rule that makes MONATO different from other news
magazines. MONATO frequently provides information which is unavailable
elsewhere...

However I don't want to give the impression that MONATO is unique in
its "per-Esperanta" as opposed to "pri-Esperanta" activity. If you look
through the hundred novels which have been written in Esperanto (of
which some have been translated into and have been sold successfully in
other languages), you will find that only one or two of them are about
the Esperanto Movement. Similarly, if you look through an anthology of
Esperanto poetry you will find very few poems about Esperanto.

Maybe you're not interested in literature (in the narrow sense). Well
magazines such as LITOVA STELO or EL POPOLA ^CINIO often contain
interested articles about the countries in question and rarely contain
articles about the Esperanto Movement.

Maybe you're not interested in that either. Well there are some good
popular scientific books in Esperanto. (The record for the number of
translations of a book originally written in Esperanto is held by a
book in this category. It was translated into and sold in something
like 40 languages, I think...)

The phrase which you used "esp in the sciences" makes me think that you
are possibly really only interested in real scientific literature. In
that case you have struck on the weakest part of Esperanto literature,
alas. There is scientific literature in Esperanto but it is fairly
miserable compared with the poetry in Esperanto, for example. One of
the reasons for this is that people don't want to write literature in
Esperanto that is likely to be obsolete within a few years. Another
reason is that scientific literature is the least popular variety of
literature that there is: it's true that not all that many people like
reading poetry, but there are far more people around you enjoy poetry
than are interested in techniques for optimising Semantic Head Driven
Generatrion of Natural Language, if I may mention what I'm doing at the
moment...

However if I get a lot of requests for an article on "semantiko-kape
stirata sintezo de homa lingvo" I might try to write one!

Edmund

(PS: After you've been a serious Interlingua student for a few years
you will probably notice that Interlingua isn't catching on either,
indeed rather the reverse, and you will probably move on to some other
project...)

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Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS                              dfkihueg@rz.uni-sb.de
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