From: 72627.2647@compuserve.com (Don HARLOW)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: English is easy to learn ?????
Date: 14 Aug 92 07:04:15 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet

To: Janis Maria Cortese >INTERNET:cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu;
Esperanto >INTERNET:esperanto@rand.org

Dato: 920813

>All natural languages have irregularities; English isn't so bad on this.
>It's worst characteristic is monumentally stupid spelling.

Not so bad? Ah, Janis. English, a language with some 300 strong and 
irregular verbs, two standard plural endings (in the spoken language) 
and a host of non-standard ones derived from a variety of sources, a 
syntactic structure that looks like a ball of yarn that the cat got into, 
so many idiomatic forms that whole dictionaries have been written 
around them (and, at least in California back in the sixties, a whole 
political war was fought around one of those dictionaries), and many, 
many pairs of words whose meanings are identical but whose usage 
you must know or be labelled an alien (when to use "sick" and when 
"ill", when "deep" and when "profound", or -- yech! -- when to use 
"shall" and when to use "will"?)? A language which confuses its native 
speakers about when to put apostrophes into contractions and genitive 
forms, and when not to (hint)? A language whose prepositions are so 
ill-defined that it is difficult to figure out which one to use, particularly 
in an idiomatic expression (hint)? English isn't so bad???

And ... a word in defense (or is it "defence"?) of English spelling. It 
was indeed monumentally stupid when it was frozen in concrete a 
couple of centuries ago, but today, like the glyphs of China, it is 
the tie that binds the written languages of several diverging variants 
of English around the world. Which makes it not too surprising that 
the average American student will spend almost as many hours 
studying spelling as his Chinese counterpart will spend learning 
ideograms.

(Question arose at work today: how to spell descendant/ent? I opted 
for the first form; Microsoft Word's Spell Checker insisted on the 
second. Which is right? Check your dictionaries and get a big surprise, 
ladies and gents, or, if you prefer, gesinjoroj.)

>And I'd rather not speak a language that classifies my mom as a female
>father, thank you.

That's not really the way an Esperanto speaker looks at it -- a "patrino" 
remains a mother. But if you insist on looking at it that way, consider it 
a tradeoff -- Esperanto also has "konkubo", a word lacking in English, 
where only women can hold down that august and traditional household 
position.

(By the way, Esperanto makes fairly heavy use of something called 
back-formation. I can't claim that "mother" doesn't derive from 
"father" in Esperanto; but, like "konkubo" from "konkubino", the 
much more common word "edzo" = husband _does_ derive from 
"edzino" = wife. If "mother" is a "female father" in Esperanto, is 
"husband" then a "desexed wife"?)

While I'm on this kick, let me also reply to Sven Hauptfeld:

>Anyway, Esperanto is not meant to be the language in which one would express
>love to one's mother, but a language of communication between people of
>different nationalities - who are usually unattached enough that there's no
>need to worry about such lack of emotions.

Sorry, Sven. They get attacked awfully fast -- in Esperanto (Japanese 
Esperantists sometimes refer to the language as "edz-peranto" -- husband-
agent -- because of the number of Esperanto-speaking Japanese women 
who have married Esperanto-speaking European men). And there have 
been at least hundreds of kids raised in such marriages speaking Esperanto 
as their first (and, for at least a couple of years, only) language; we may 
suppose that they, like their fathers, can tell their mothers "mi amas vin" 
in Esperanto...

(It is very easy to discuss emotions in Esperanto. Even the less laudable ones.)

And Jon Liechty:

>        There is another use of the "-in" suffix that I find very strange
>and would like to see explained: the word "amikino" used to mean "girlfriend"
>in the same sense as in English.  This isn't just a "female friend", but a 
>"female friend with whom one is having a very close (possibly sexual)
>relationship".

This usage is strange to me, too. My friend Ming-chi doesn't object to my 
referring to her publicly as "mia plej kara amikino", and neither does my 
wife -- and if the word had the meaning you suggest, and I were to use it, 
I suspect they'd both beat me over the head with matched blunt instruments.

And Steve Brewer to Janis M. C.:

>I think you're being intentionally obtuse about the issue.  I've seen
>other postings that you've written where you didn't find a need to distort
>issues to such an extent.

An interesting remark, Steve. Are you familiar with Claude Piron's 
"Psikologiaj reagoj kontraux Esperanto" article? Whatever the 
distortions to which you refer may be (I didn't receive her second 
posting), they may not be intentional, or even conscious, at all. To 
any Esperantist who runs into this sort of thing at all often, I 
recommend Piron's article. To understand all may not be to forgive 
all, but it certainly helps take a load off the old ulcer.

=============================================
Don HARLOW                                Redaktoro Esperanto U.S.A.
tel. (1 510) 222 0187
CompuServe [72627,2647]
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"To discipline Esperantists is to eat soup with chopsticks."
                                                          Confucius
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