Evildela:I am tired of seeing all forums being filled with novices that are continually suggesting improvements. I myself am guilty of this, two weeks after I started learning I made the mistake of thinking something was better, just to find out I was wrong about a year later. Is it possible just to close these threads with a link to a single forum thread or FAQ where all these things can be discussed instead of several threads gong at once. This is a Esperanto LEARNING website, not a REFORMIST website.

Though you've got to admit, these threads really bring the forum to life.

I agree that the torrent of reform-proposal-threads is kind of annoying, but what really bothers me is this attitude "it works, so why change it?" or "other languages do it the same way". I thought the aim was to make things better and not to just settle with what we have. I mean: If something has a downside, then why not trying to eliminate it? Why even constructing an artificial language, if there exist hundreds of natural ones already, that work sufficiently well?

The question, I'm asking myself, is: How to measure the ratio between the advantages and disadvantages, that a certain reform would yield? To what degree is stability more important then regularity, symmetry, ...? What kind of reforms would be accepted by the majority of the (advanced) Esperanto-speakers?

Fenris_kcf:I agree that the torrent of reform-proposal-threads is kind of annoying, but what really bothers me is this attitude

But your missing the point, Esperanto attacked these at it's core, but now it's a living language. If you want to make further improvements than you need to start again. That's the ONLY way to make your changes. But remember also, what YOU see as an improvement is another man's difficulty. This is Esperanto, learn it, love, or leave it. Yes Esperanto was designed to tackle these things, but there's a point where you have to say. That's it, enough! I want to just learn the language now without having to relearn it every time a new beginner comes along. And I'm sorry to say but that point was reached over 100 years ago...

I thought the aim was to make things better and not to just settle with what we have.

The aim is NOT to make things better. The language was already tested out and improved in its development period, which lasted some number of years. But at some point you have to say, "This is going to be my stopping point, this works well, and if we keep working on it, then the perfect becomes the enemy of the good". That point was reached more than a hundred years ago. The aim is to use Esperanto for international communication. It currently works wonderfully well for international communication. So what do we gain by changing it, aside from inconveniencing every person who has learnt Esperanto so far?

Are you constantly ripping up your house and inconveniencing your family to make your house that teeny incremental bit nicer or more suitable? Or have you done some amount of work, whatever that was, and said "This house is good enough for me, I like it, it works great for my needs, and now I'm going to just enjoy my house rather than inconveniencing everyone to improve it constantly?"

What kind of reforms would be accepted by the majority of the (advanced) Esperanto-speakers?

Nothing referred to as a "reform" would be accepted by the majority of advanced Esperanto speakers.

Certainly nothing against the Fundamento would be accepted by that group. Even relatively minor innovations that work within the guidelines of the Fundamento - new suffixes, new prepositions, whatever - would not be accepted by the majority of advanced speakers.

The consensus among advanced speakers is that while new vocabulary needs to be developed to keep Esperanto moving with the times, the grammar itself is fine for our needs.

Reform proposals are seen extremely negatively within the Esperanto community; it's really hard to convey to a person new to Esperanto exactly how negatively these reform proposals are seen. When a newbie comes in with a reform idea, first you see it as someone who is simply ignorant of the fact that Esperanto isn't open to reforms. But when the newbie starts to insist, it becomes an insult. What new French student would come to a community of French speakers willing to help newbies and insist that they know better than the experienced speakers, and that French should be reformed in accordance with this newbie's ideas? When Esperanto is treated with less respect than other languages, by ostensible supporters, it comes across as an insult.

The newbie offering the proposal thinks, "Why are these people being so rude about my great ideas for improving their language, and why are they dismissing me and my ideas without even hearing me out fully?"

The Esperanto speakers think, "Oh no, not another one! Doesn't this person know that Esperanto is a living language with its own culture and literature, and you don't just go and make massive changes to the entire basis of functionality of a living language? Would this person really suggest a huge package of reforms to a 'national' language that they have just begun to learn? Does this person want to do away with our entire literary heritage and cause a schism in the community, fracturing our small community into even smaller groups? Doesn't this person know that we have heard his or her ideas hundreds of times before, and we are sick of discussing these reforms that will never be implemented? And why doesn't this person bother even learning the language properly before trying to change it? *I wish this person would just go and bother the Idists, because we all know how much THEY love language reforms!"

*That last one would be an unfair statement; Ido was born in a schism with Esperanto, a reform project that never took hold, and caused a small number of Esperantists to splinter off; Ido has a reputation for being the "reformists' language" but in fact, today, it is likely as stable as Esperanto. I have sometimes wondered whether Ido speakers get newbies coming in and wanting to "fix" the language, and how they deal with that.

erinja:What new French student would come to a community of French speakers willing to help newbies and insist that they know better than the experienced speakers, and that French should be reformed in accordance with this newbie's ideas? When Esperanto is treated with less respect than other languages, by ostensible supporters, it comes across as an insult ...
Doesn't this person know that Esperanto is a living language with its own culture and literature, and you don't just go and make massive changes to the entire basis of functionality of a living...

You cannot be serious comparing French and Esperanto.
French is a natural language of a single country.
Esperanto is a constructed language for international communication.

The language with few hundreds of native speakers has no right to dictate anything appealing to example of natural languages with millions of native speakers. Everyone has Esperanto as second language, and had absolutely equal rights to propose modifications and suit it to its needs.

It's impossible to say without pretention that Esperanto can fulfil its intended feature of international communication in its present state. Therefore voices of billions of people not speaking Esperanto means more than mere thousands of its present speakers.

The behavoiur of persons posting the Piron's reasoning about Esperanto giving total freedom of expression, and at the same time calling people 'beginners', imposing on them arbitrary rules of (mostly English) syntax, are, in my opinion, ridiculous and borderly schizophrenic.

Evildela:...what YOU see as an improvement is another man's difficulty. ...

Exactly! For example, the accusative ending and the adjective-noun agreement are natural for me to uze and their absence would be a remarkable discomfort. I still feel this while using English...

erinja:When a newbie comes in with a reform idea, first you see it as someone who is simply ignorant of the fact that Esperanto isn't open to reforms. But when the newbie starts to insist, it becomes an insult.

Though being a beginner myself, I do understand that this attitude is boring or sometimes irritating. But insulting? I think I wouldn't take for an insult even a malicious trolling - I'd most likely just ignore that kind of posts.

razlem:Though you've got to admit, these threads really bring the forum to life.

Yes, but in a bad way. It just ends up being an utterly pointless discussion about various hypothetical 'improvements'.

There needs to be an explanation somewhere that this site is for learning Esperanto as it is, in the form that fluent speakers of Esperanto currently use it.

Check out the articles at Libera Folio, read the literature created by fluent Esperantists - learners of Esperanto can't just ignore the reality of the Esperanto that is currently being used!

erinja:...constantly ripping up your house and inconveniencing your family to make your house that teeny incremental bit nicer or more suitable?

erinja:Ido has a reputation for being the "reformists' language" but in fact, today, it is likely as stable as Esperanto

These ideas conflict. The first supposes that any reform will lead to an endless chain of reforms until no one will bother to learn it. But the second shows that a major reform project (in this case an entire separate language), can be just as stable as the original.

The point of Ido is that it IS another language. It isn't reformed Esperanto; it is a new language that uses Esperanto as its base.

There are so many "reformed Esperanto" proposals from the past and present. Anyone who wants to reform Esperanto should go ahead and do so. But it won't be Esperanto, it will be their new language based on Esperanto, an "Esperantido". And it won't have a chance of acceptance within the mainstream Esperanto community. So supporters of these numerous reform projects should make their own website and talk to others enthusiastic about reform, rather than cluttering websites for people who want to learn or speak Esperanto as it's been spoken for more than 100 years.

It would be so rude for me to show up Slovake.eu and start going on about how Slovak has so many problems, and why don't we reform Slovak to make it more like Czech, which is so much better in the following ways (......).

On a smaller scale, if I'm a person interested on implementing spelling reforms for English, a website for English learners is not the place to go and promote my ideas. These poor students are trying to learn the language as it is, and spelling reform proposals don't really concern them.