Just mention Kabe, and someone leaves the forum... what an ironic sadness.

Is the fact that Qwertz deleted his account (if that is so) the reason why the thread seems somewhat disconnected? Posts from him in the thread are missing, at least as I am seeing it right now.

Regarding the thread itself, I have always agreed that a conIAL ought to be able to stand on its own two feet. There have been those advocates, whether for Esperanto or some other auxiliary languages which have a somewhat European derived vocabulary, who claim that because a lot of educated people around the world already know this or that west European language(s), E-o or whatever would be easy for them. (I have especially read this claim for Interlingua, but it also applies in part to the vocabulary of E-o.)

I agree with sudanglo that such an attitude largely defeats the whole idea of having an auxiliary language which can be (at least more or less) autonomous, not requiring prior knowledge.

bartlett22183:Is the fact that Qwertz deleted his account (if that is so) the reason why the thread seems somewhat disconnected? Posts from him in the thread are missing, at least as I am seeing it right now.

He did delete his own account; only three people on this site have the permissions to delete someone's account, and none of us did it.

However the thread is somewhat disconnected because I deleted about two and a half pages worth of off-topic messages regarding qwertz's opinions on why people think and react in different ways.

As you can see from my previous message that I left intact, I said that the discussion was off-topic and I suggested he start a new thread if he wanted to discuss his topic. I deleted the off-topic messages in this thread (both those of qwertz and those of other users) and qwertz responded by deleting his account.

bartlett22183:I have always agreed that a conIAL ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.

I certainly agree, and I definitely think that someone can speak Esperanto very well, knowing only Esperanto and presumably their native language.

I understood Kabe's quote to be referring to the writing of great literature; I think he felt that the more languages you speak, the better your understanding of different ways to say things, and the better you write, in general.

I wouldn't limit it to Esperanto. I think that if someone speaks a couple of languages in addition to whatever they speak natively, it may influence their writing style in their native language, in a positive way. Certainly someone may be monolingual and a great writer in their native language, but I think it's helpful to have an awareness of how language works, and foreign language study is a great way to gain that awareness.