Encyclopedia > Talk:Esperanto
Talk:Esperanto
> It seems, that http://unumondo.com doesn't exist anymore.
Esperanto's potential as a meta-language for machine translation is being explored by the traduki. Other useful links include http://www.esperanto.org and, for US-ians, http://www.esperanto-usa.org. The last can be contacted at ELNA, PO Box 1129, El Cerrito CA 94530; 1-510-653-0998 (real person), 1-800-ESPERANTO (automated info and information requests).
Esperanto isn't an agglutinative language since it inflects: it has different cases as numbers distinguished by different suffices. Agglutinative languages can have inflections too; these aren't absolute categories...
Esperanto is fully agglutinative. Two or more grammar suffixes for the same word don't modify each other, and that's usual agglutinativity test. For example: -o + -j + -n is -ojn, it wouldn't have to be in inflective language. --Taw
It certainly looks agglutinative to me. Moreover, John Wells says, on page 27 of his book Lingvistikaj Aspektoj de Esperanto, "Ekzemploj de aglutina lingvo estas la turka, la japana, la zulua, kaj - kiel konate - la Internacia Lingvo Esperanto." ("Examples of agglutinative languages are Turkish, Japanese, Zulu, and - as is well-known - the International Language Esperanto.") There are not many people better placed to judge this than John Wells, so I've changed the article accordingly. --Zundark
I don't know about the spirit being Hebrew; my impression has always been that the spirit has been that of the prestige language of the area Esperanto was first extensively used; namely, Poland -- and German. It should be also noted that canonical modern Esperanto style is not primarily Zamenhof's, but Kazimierz Bein's ("Kabe", who to my knowledge was Gentile).
- I took out the phrase about the spirit of the language being Hebrew because Enrique Ellemberg (a fluent Esperantist from Argentina) and I also agree. I also removed the part about the ease of use being luck because Zamenhof spent many years testing the language to see which parts worked and which didn't. Also, that would be more appropriate on the L. L. Zamenhof page. Enrique's comments are as follows: --ChuckSmith
- "its heart and spirit (its logic) is Hebrew."
- Cxu tio certas? En la pagxo la vorto "Hebrew" estas ligo, kaj pro tio havas enfazon. Mi pensas ke la ideo de "Hebrew"-a lingvo povas malallogi interesitojn. Ankaux mi scias ke iu foje Zamenhof pensis pri lingvo por judoj, sed finfine li faris lingvon por la mondo, ne nur por la judoj. La judoj ne akceptis liajn ideojn.
- "Zamenhof was not a professional linguist, but rather an ophthalmologist"
- Zamenhof studadis lingvistikon kaj lingvojn, de sia volo, dum multaj jaroj. Zamenhof studis medicinon nur cxar la patro trudis gxin. La lingvon Esperanton Zamenhof pretigis multaj jaroj antaux ol esti oftalmologo. La oftalmologo ne kreis Esperanton. La studento de lingvoj kreis Esperanton.
- "extremely regular and easy to learn (due in large part to luck..."
- LUCK ???!!! Zamenhof laboris multege da jaroj en sia lingvo, provante cxion per tradukoj, kaj refarante cxion kio ne funkciis. Nenio estis "luck", bonsxanco, en la vivo de Zamenhof.
The note on the Utah convict sounds like mere advocacy (learn Esperanto and get letters). What is the status of the 30,000 titles that the British Esperantists 'have' (yes, I know the verb is hopelessly vague in English, and that the Esperanto must be MUCH more exact)? 30,000 EVER published, or 30,000 currently in print? A side issue is that I'd like to know what Foreign Service level 1 is if level 3 is communication is that above the level of grunted greetings (which must be level 2?). Is level 1 WISHING you could grunt greetings, much like my ability at spoken German? --MichaelTinkler
Points well taken. My comment about the Utah inmate was indeed advocacy and has been deleted (personally I could care less about having Esperanto pen pals, but some like them). There are 30,000 books in the library in the British Esperanto Association alone. For the record, havi is the word for "to have" in Esperanto and it actually has the same vagueness as English. :) The foreign service levels are somewhat defined in the government document at http://oig.state.gov/pdf/7sp005.pdf. It appears that level 0 is wishing you could grunt greetings, and level 1 is actually being able to grunt greetings (as is also my ability at spoken German). Thank you for your comments. --ChuckSmith
Could somebody please give a reference for the study mentioned in the entry that it pays off (or at least is no hinderance) to learn Esperanto as the first language. -- HJH
See Chuck Smith/Pedagogical evidence for Esperanto.
Because Esperanto is so well known
Is Esperanto really so well known? I only heard about it a year ago when I was 21 researching a paper on Machine Language Acquisition[?]. I would say only about a quarter of the people in the United States have even heard of it. --Chuck Smith
- Good point. Perhaps a better way of putting it is to say that Esperanto is by far the most well known of the artificial (auxiliary) languages. -- Egern
What does everyone think about breaking this article into Esperanto language and Esperanto culture like the other languages are set up? I think this article is large enough to warrant this split. --Chuck Smith
Can't the other Esperanto pages go as sub-pages of this one? - Mark Ryan
I think they would go better as seperate pages because LMS wants to get rid of subpages altogether soon. --Chuck Smith
- Yes, they shouldn't be subpages. But they shouldn't be uppercase either, so I've renamed them. --Zundark 2002 Jan 12
To 12.234.138.157: removing references to the Esperanto version of the wikipedia and moving the links to criticism pages to be before the supportive pages is pretty childish. If you really want to show how poor Esperanto is, may I suggest you start up a Wikipedia project in your favored language and try to surpass it in honest usage? There are stub sites ready to go for Interlingua (http://ia.wikipedia.com/) and Volapük (http://vo.wikipedia.com/) at the least, and I'm sure Jimbo would be happy to set up wikis for any languages that don't have 2-letter codes. Brion VIBBER, Monday, April 29, 2002
I'm removing the "some claim" from (some claim that its syntax is more like Asian languages) unless I can see any evidence against this. See Esperanto: A Western Language? (http://www.geocities.com/c_piron/westernlanguage) by former UN translator, Claude Piron.
- Yes, Chuck, I've read that article. (I love Piron's articles -- I started on an English translation of his Confession d'un fou européen (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/enotero/fou_europ.htm) some time ago which I'll have to finish one of these days!) BUT... he doesn't say anything there about syntax! He does show similarities in word formation (part of morphology) -- usually building from invariable parts rather than the variable inflections and oddly or unrelated word families we see in Indo-European. However, there are quite a few decidedly un-Asian but IE-like things in Esperanto's syntax: required plural markers, required noun-adjective agreement in number and case, required tense markers (on verbs) and aspect markers (on participles), prepositions, relative clauses... I'm willing to believe that someone claims there are greater similarities to Asian languages in syntax, but I'm not aware of such claims and I wouldn't believe them without seeing any evidence. Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, April 30, 2002
I'd like to see more references to Esperanto's supposed similarity to Asian languages. The analysis in the Claude Piron article mentioned above is deeply flawed, linguistically. Piron likens Esperanto to Chinese! The problems with that are:
- Chinese is not at all polysynthetic; it is the canonical example of an isolating language
- Piron's real basis for comparison is their regularity. But Chinese is regular because of its lack of inflection; Esperanto is regular because the inflection system has no exceptions.
- I'm not fully qualified to judge on this point, but he seems to be using the word word a bit loosely. The strings of Chinese morphemes he cites are AFAICT phrases, not words.
- The similarity of ordering among the morphemes doesn't rise much beyond the threshold of coincidence.
Overall, Esperanto is closer to a fusional language than to an agglutinative language. The test for agglutination, as mentioned above, includes that morphemes are concatenated without change. But this can be explained in the case of Esperanto by the intentional effort to keep the language fully regular; there are other tests which suggest properties of a synthetic language.
The main argument is another test for agglutination: that each element of meaning be expressed in a separate morpheme. Esperanto follows the model of other European languages, with a small number of morphemes coding a large number of meanings: -as conveys verbal function, present tense, declarative mood; -o encodes status as a noun, subjective mood, singular number; etc. Another argument is the general similarity to Latin or German, which are considered canonical fusional languages.
- The verb endings can be analyzed further: -s indicates verbishness, -t- indicates participleness [cannot stand on its own, must be followed by additional endings to make adjective, noun, or yes even verb forms], -n- is a passive->active converter for participles; -a- is present, -i- past, -o- future, -u- potential. -u- participles are not "official", but do appear in usage. The -i infinitive and the -u volative mood act a little differently from everything else; infinitive is noun-like but not exactly, and volative has a default subject [second person] and can't be used in participles. --Brion
I note some confusion on this point, for example in the Esperanto FAQ, part 9, which sets up a dichotomy between "'Western' root-based thinking and 'Eastern' agglutinative thinking", and claims that Esperanto is a "good compromise" between the two. It's not clear what's meant here; for example, some of the most highly agglutinating languages out there are Mohawk, Innuit and Basque.
The distinctions "agglutinative" and "synthetic" lie along a continuum, so this is not a cut-and-dried issue, but I'd like to capture the most accurate characterization here, especially with regard to relation or non-relation to Asian languages. The comment in the article is, even if correct, much too vague: the Asian language with the most speakers by far is in fact not agglutinative at all (and yet is the only Asian language mentioned in Piron's article). Can we have some pointers into the literature comparing Esperanto to Japanese? --Len
- How about this:
- As far as [modifiers coming before the modified word], European languages behave in different ways. For an adjectival modifier, the basic principle in French is [noun + epithet], while in English it's [epithet + noun], unless it's a subclause, including relative clauses; then the order is always [noun + epithet]. Japanese and Chinese stand out for their regularity. "The fact that he's a liar" is "[he's a liar]-ish fact". To formulate; in the European languages: SN -> NP, in Japanese and Chinese: SN -> P N, where SN = naming sintagm [??"sintagmo noma"??], P = clause, N = name or noun.
- Esperantologists' hobby horse about the agglutinative nature of Asian languages and Esperanto means absolutely nothing here. There is absolutely no such fact that Esperanto is more easily learnable for Asians because of it's agglutinative nature. Esperanto is durch und durch a European language.
- YAMASAKI Seikô, Enkonduko en la Japanan; Chapecó-SC, Brazil: Fonto, 2000. pp 22-23; my translation. --Brion 21:06 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)
Claude Piron doesn't have time to respond to the comments made in this thread on his comparison of Esperanto with Chinese, but he told me that his comparison is with actual Chinese (i.e. the language used by Han people both in China and in the Chinese diaspora), not with the image of Chinese found in many linguistics textbooks and encyclopedias. He sent me an article he wrote in French on the remarkable difference between the real language and the features constantly ascribed to it in books on general or comparative linguistics.
I have posted this article and you can read it at http://www.esperanto.net/info/CHINOIS.rtf.
In this article, he demonstrates by linguistic analysis of Chinese material, comparison with other languages and the use of various tests where you are mistaken if you adhere to the conventional opinion according to which
- there is no distinction between word and morpheme in Chinese,
- Chinese words don't belong to a grammatical category and can readily switch from one to the other,
- the substantive, adjective, verbal or adverbial function of a Chinese word depends on its place in the sentence,
- Chinese morphemes are autonomous units not susceptible to agglutination, and
- Chinese is a language without affixes and endings.
He also presents a few hypotheses on the psychological causes of this distortion of reality which are traditionally repeated among linguists, and of which even people who have studied some Chinese appear not to be aware. People often stick to a preconceived opinion that has been transmitted to them by authorites rather than to reality, to such an extent that they don't see the facts that contradict that opinion.
I removed the phrase "Esperanto advocates" because even some linguists who don't speak Esperanto show that morphemes make languages easier to learn, plus that phrase is very biased. --Chuck SMITH
Fair enough. I just hate seeing the phrase 'Some say'. It's better (I believe) to attribute beliefs. Would it be fair to say "Esperanto advocates and many linguists say..." ? cprompt
Well, if you have to put something there then use "Esperanto speakers" and not "Esperanto advocates". :-) --Chuck SMITH
In one study, a group of high school students studied Esperanto for one year...
- A pet peeve of mine in popular writing is the tendency to use phrases such as "studies show" without citing the studies that show this. In this case, the reference is to one particular study, with some details mentioned. What is the study? -- Stephen Gilbert 01:45 Apr 13, 2003 (UTC)
The recent Wikification of the alphabet breaks down on letters not present in English. Please remedy. --cprompt
In view of above comments re the rather limited success in establishing similarities between Esperanto and non-European languages, the comment that "Esperanto has proven to be a good deal easier to learn as a second language than any national language" seems far too sweeping. Unless evidence can be provided that it is generally applicable outside the context of European languages, the assumption must surely be that there are many pairs of non-European languages X,Y for which Y is easier for speakers of X than Esperanto is. I am about to edit that comment to limit its scope to speakers of European languages. --Trainspotter 20:50 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Likewise, removing reference to agglutination / Asian languages. Again, the above discussion seems not to support this assertion but somehow it has remained in the text. (To support assertion, would need to show not only that Asian languages have some agglutination, but that E-o agglutination is *more* similar to that in Asian langs than to that in say German.) --Trainspotter 21:01 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I have strengthened the statement "Esperanto vocabulary is based mainly on European source languages" to "Esperanto vocabulary is based almost exclusively on European source languages". Take for example the Esperanto text of La Espero. I could not find a single word which did not seem to be from a European root. There may be a few words in the language from non-European languages, but if so, then they are so rare as to be curiosities. --Trainspotter 16:52 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The recent changes to the Criticism section make the Responses to Criticism require updating. Could someone please do this? I am not yet fluent in Esperanto, and I am no expert linguist. :-) --cprompt 13:26 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
- Why do they need updating? --Chuck SMITH 16:08 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
How can there even be criticisms of a language? Can we also put up criticisms of English, Spanish, Catalan, Frisian... ? Isn't this a bit offensive to speakers of that language? Especially to those of us who speak it as our primary language? --Chuck SMITH 11:37 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I agree that it seems a bit petty. Especially now that we have "criticisms" and "responses to criticisms." Is this a encyclopedia or a debate forum? user:J.J.
Well, the fact that Esperanto is "new" to most people means that they need a reason to accept it. Besides that, Esperanto's goal is to be an international language. The criticisms are whether it is ideal for that purpose. English and Spain strive to be nothing more than the languages spoken in England and Spain. Perhaps these criticisms should be moved to a new article. It could be referenced by Esperanto as "Esperanto is sometimes Criticisms of Esperanto|criticized as not being an ideal international language." In any case, the criticisms kind of made it look like Esperanto was too flawed to be taken seriously. It's a bit more neutral with both sides presented, I think. As Chuck and I were talking about another time, maybe the English article should have criticisms. --cprompt 19:02 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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