antoniomoya:Sudanglo said: But in relation to Esperanto we are all 'foreigners'.

Solulo said: Nobody has any advantage over me in the sense of being a native speaker.
EGALECO! And this is what I like about the language.

I like these sentences, and I completely agree with the two authors.

Me too. English is like walking in a jungle, dark and wild.
Esperanto estas kiel simpla kaj hela vojo, sur kiu ni promenadas kun plezuro.

barat:Me too. English is like walking in a jungle, dark and wild.
Esperanto estas kiel simpla kaj hela vojo, sur kiu ni promenadas kun plezuro.

Mmmm... I also like what you say, Barat.
Vi tre trafe parolis kaj pri la angla, kaj pri E-o. Gratulon.

Amike.

If we write in google:

"English misunderstandings"

we get about 39 milion hits.

If we write:

"Esperanto misunderstandings"

we get only 246.000 hits.

Of course this doesn't proof anything since English is being used hundred thousand times more often than Esperanto, so the number of misunderstandings is correspondingly higher, but it is still harder to make an error in Esperanto. And no one is really native - that is great. Personally I don't like to talk with the English - they treat me as a stupid child because my English is much inferior to theirs. That is not fair.

Real languages do not have grammars. A language is an enormously large set of "they speak it this way" rules. Esperanto is an exception, it seems to have grammar, while remaining (almost) a natural language.

A very interesting point of view, Alex.

Obviously this can't be entirely true - you can produce novel sentences in a natural language by some 'grammatical' mechanism, and many patterns are generalised throughout the language, and are not sui generis.

But imitation, rather than generation, may well have a much more important role in natural languages than the linguistic accounts of language have ascribed to it.

I have for some time thought that Esperanto is an exception - not just another language - and that fashionable attempts to treat it this way are not well founded.

It is pointless to deny its 'designed' characteristics (or its artificiality, if you will) since this is a major advantage.

But can we find, in Esperanto, convincing examples of 'we say this, we don't say that' that are in some way arbitrary and comparable to the idiomatic expression in natural languages.

And even more interestingly, can we find examples where it is difficult to say WHY Esperantists say this and not that, in the same way that native speakers of natural languages may be stumped in providing explanations.

In presenting Esperanto to the general public we are at some disadvantage, since we don't have a suitable alternative word to 'language' - which we can use to get across the difference between Esperanto and the natural languages.

Esperanto is clearly language-like enough for it not to be a misnomer to refer to Esperanto as a language.

But at the same time it is a language that has deliberately dropped many of the features of natural languages, and no amount of evolution of the language would result in a re-incorporation into the language of those undesirable features of natural languages which were deliberately excluded.

sudanglo:
Obviously this can't be entirely true - you can produce novel sentences in a natural language by some 'grammatical' mechanism, and many patterns are generalised throughout the language, and are not sui generis.

What I mean saying "languages do not have grammars" is that grammar is not an underlying "mechanism" for forming a language. We can describe some part of a language using grammar, but this does not mean that language works this way.
An analogy: we can describe planet movement assuming that planets are attached to gears and wheels. And this could be a good approximation. But we now know that it is not true.

sudanglo:
But can we find, in Esperanto, convincing examples of 'we say this, we don't say that' that are in some way arbitrary and comparable to the idiomatic expression in natural languages.

I admit, it could be used as a proof for two opposite positions. One could say that the language that once has been designed
with grammar now shows features of a natural language, ergo any natural language has grammar at the beginning.
Otherwise, it could be mentioned that if people are actually using an artificial language in a 'natural' way, all languages are the same and grammar is auxiliary.
I prefer the second point of view.

I think that an experienced Esperanto speaker will sometimes be able to tell you that something is wrong, but they won't be able to tell you the exact reason.

Sometimes it will be that it "sounds wrong" to them but it is not wrong, it's just unusual. Sometimes it will actually be wrong, but the speaker won't know precisely why. One of the most difficult parts of teaching a languages is to learn to draw the line between wrong and unusual. You have to explain to the student whether it's unusual (but ok) or wrong (and in that case, explain why it's wrong).

The teacher learns a lot in the process. It has happened more than once that a student did something and I thought "that's wrong" but didn't know how to explain to the student why it was wrong. In those cases I looked up the grammar in PMEG to discover the reason why it was wrong; then I could tell the student (and I knew it myself for the next time). On a few occasions, I looked at something and thought "that's wrong" but when I looked it up, I found out that it wasn't wrong, just unusual. You have to be careful with your corrections, and make sure you are only correcting things that are truly wrong!

As a minor example, many Esperanto speakers may say (correctly) "iom da mono" but "ioma mono". Many of them will probably not know the reason why they don't say "iom mono".

The reason is that "iom" acts grammatically as a noun or an adverb, and nouns can't describe other nouns, and adverbs also can't describe nouns. Therefore the two choices to correct the situation are to use a linking preposition (like "da") or to turn the noun/adverb into an adjective, which *does* naturally describe nouns.

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On equality among Esperanto speakers, native speakers of Esperanto usually do not speak better than someone who has studied the language well. In that sense we are all equal. But the rules are the rules, and if someone knows the rules well, certainly they are able to recognize situations where someone is not speaking Esperanto according to Zamenhof's grammar. You don't have to be Zamenhof to know that "Mi amas vi" is incorrect Esperanto.

It is rude to correct people, even if you know that their grammar is wrong. Some people speak very fluidly and confidently (but with persistent errors). Sometimes I wonder whether they realize how many language mistakes they are making. I always shiver a little when I find out that one of these people is teaching an Esperanto course!

A friendly acquaintance who makes a lot of grammatical errors once told me that he is aware that he makes mistakes, but he just doesn't care. He feels that as long as he is understood, it doesn't matter if he makes language mistakes, so he doesn't bother to speak correctly.

I disagree with his point of view and I hope that he tries to clean up his grammar if he ever teaches an Esperanto course. But it would be rude to correct him, so I try to ignore the errors.

barat:
Personally I don't like to talk with the English - they treat me as a stupid child because my English is much inferior to theirs. That is not fair.

Could you specify that in detail? So, apart that kind of your "all English natives" generalisation matter: What let you make think that English natives treat you like a child? You yourself most best know that you're not a kid, isn't it? If some English natives tourists freak out the superior way you could give them a shot across the bows that way "Hey, it took me lots of efforts to learn your language, so please don't treat me like a kid." That will show that there are some culture differences. Btw, I'm in doubt, that this feeling treated like a kid is caused of an language proficiency issue. Its more the way that someones doesn't receive the response of an non-native s/he expect by an native. That even can happen if that both have and speak the same native language.

barat:
Personally I don't like to talk with the English - they treat me as a stupid child because my English is much inferior to theirs. That is not fair.

I doubt they're really treating you like a stupid child, unless you're talking to a very small section of society who act that way.

Self consciousness + different cultural norms = these sorts of uncomfortable situations where you feel patronised.

That simply doesn't exist in Esperanto to the same extent because in Esperanto, the English speakers are learning EO, the (Polish?) speakers are learning Esperanto, so neither the English nor Polish speakers can feel patronised by either's experience with the language.

It's just cultural differences and the misunderstandings they create (e.g. what might seem to you to be patronising treatment might be completely different in the minds of an English speaker). Esperanto isn't really doing anything special here, just making it so two groups of people are forced to speak a language that doesn't belong to either of them.

qwertz:

barat:
Personally I don't like to talk with the English - they treat me as a stupid child because my English is much inferior to theirs. That is not fair.

Could you specify ...

Claude Piron says in his survey:

"...when speakers or writers do not have complete command over the language, they may have a very clear idea of what they want to convey without being able to transmit the idea with the clarity and convincing power they aim at, because they do not find the correct words right away, they use less appropriate ones that make them feel grammatically more secure, they express themselves in a less refined language than if they could use their own, they give up rendering delicate nuances which may be quite important, and their speeches or texts have much less force than they would have were they allowed to use their mother tongue. Further, mispronunciation can cause confusion or make the speaker sound ridiculous (for instance, saying "My Government sinks" instead of "My Government thinks") with all the negative ensuing consequences. Such a flaw is a result of a language handicap which, by its very nature, is spared to those who can use their mother tongue."