efilzeo:Aren't you exaggerating a little?

Do we really need to repost all the vitriol you hurled at that guy? Because the character limit for posts would make that a little tedious.

leporinjo: [...]

Thank you for this list.

On a side note:
About my simplistic view of the Foundation. At least since my post about

mi mem:AllenHartwell et alii, you have convinced me, and I want to beg your pardon for not seeing the underlying truth earlier and for not recognising your posts for what they are: the zealous expression of unshaking faith.

I wasn't being serious, it was intended as irony, or even (shame on me) sarcasm. I would never call for holy war and smiting heathens. I just got carried away a bit because of other users here who actually bash and flame users, because they bring up topics about eventual changes to Esperanto. Even calling others "bastard" (sic!), just because they are not Foundation-conform.
I personally am not religious about the Foundation. I am quite convinced that a language is a living thing, and that if it cannot (or must not) change with the times, it will die. Hence, I don't see change as a danger for a language, but as a means of survival. I am sorry if I have given you the wrong picture.

leporinjo:L. L. Zamenhof (created a lot of neologisms, some of which became official later; proposed reforms to Esperanto that never caught on. Was one of the most flagrant breakers of Rule 14)...

An excellent reality check, Leporinjo.

By rights, it should be a closer to this whole silly debate. Alas, I suspect people here are too vested in their positions — too content with the idea that by bullying the noobs they’re protecting Esperanto’s virtue — to let a thing like reality get in the way of that.

morfran:By rights, it should be a closer to this whole silly debate. Alas, I suspect people here are too vested in their positions — too content with the idea that by bullying the noobs they’re protecting Esperanto’s virtue — to let a thing like reality get in the way of that.

Good resume.

nornen:
I personally am not religious about the Foundation. I am quite convinced that a language is a living thing, and that if it cannot (or must not) change with the times, it will die. Hence, I don't see change as a danger for a language, but as a means of survival. I am sorry if I have given you the wrong picture.

Evolution is constant in any living language, but hardly any of these changes (probably none of them in fact) are brought about by non-native speakers (if talking about natural languages) or beginners (if talking about non-native unifying languages like Indonesian). Also, more often than not they come into being in the spur of the moment, not after careful consideration of what, in some speaker's opinion, the language is missing.

There is a reason for this. An experienced speaker usually develops a good sense of what works in the language and what doesn't, a sense of its somewhat unconscious underlying tendencies and possibilites, and as a result is more likely to come up with innovations that will gain acceptance.

In natural languages, innovations by non-native inexperienced speakers usually gain acceptance only in a group of fellow non-native speakers, often oblivious to the fact that they are indeed innovations. Eventually you get a separate language. Singlish is a good example of what you get when a bunch of Asian merchants, speaking unrelated languages and whose initial priority wasn't to learn proper English, tailor the English language to their conceptual, linguistic and even articulatory needs to communicate between themselves. The innovations were spontaneously selected for based on a compromise on how a language should work and what features it should have according to the various cultural and linguistic backgrounds of its speakers. So even in Singlish this isn't "anything goes". Over time, solid underlying rules on what innovations are acceptable have emerged. Any language should have this kind of filters to preserve its internal consistency.

Esperanto has criteria of inclusion as well, which seem to be a compromise between the fundamento and some less explcit rules that naturally formed over time. Bottom line, when Esperantists resist innovations, they are usually not being blindly conservative.

nornen:I am quite convinced that a language is a living thing, and that if it cannot (or must not) change with the times, it will die.

Before I make my primary comment let me clarify: When we speak of "change" in a language, there are actually two things being talked about: 1. Addition of new vocabulary (and with the evidence of Latin and its introducing "modern" vocabulary for such things as "motorcycle" et al, we can see that even dead languages "change.") and
2. Actual transformation of grammar rules.
Every language changes in sense #1; without this kind of change it will die, but as I said above, even 'dead' languages undergo this type of change.
NO language (including Esperanto) can willy nilly change in sense #2 without an uproar and without the tacit approval of the body of fluent users. To see an example of this in English, one only has to look at the reactions I get when I use "thee" as a (GASP!!!) SUBJECT pronoun (oh, the horror!!!!) and its use with (what is now, only) the 3rd person form of the verb.

Yyann, thank you very much for your informative and detailed comment.

yyaann:Esperanto has criteria of inclusion as well, which seem to be a compromise between the fundamento and some less explcit rules that naturally formed over time. Bottom line, when Esperantists resist innovations, they are usually not being blindly conservative.

In my opinion it is fine for conservatives to be conservative (be it blindly or with the eyes wide open), but this shouldn't be a reason to disregard some very basic concepts of human communication and society: namely, respect. I think when we start insulting one another we are overstepping some invisible, but nevertheless important, line.

yyaann:In natural languages, innovations by non-native inexperienced speakers usually gain acceptance only in a group of fellow non-native speakers, often oblivious to the fact that they are indeed innovations. Eventually you get a separate language. Singlish is a good example of what you get when a bunch of Asian merchants, speaking unrelated languages and whose initial priority wasn't to learn proper English, tailor the English language to their conceptual, linguistic and even articulatory needs to communicate between themselves. The innovations were spontaneously selected for based on a compromise on how a language should work and what features it should have according to the different cultural and linguistic background of its speakers. So even in Singlish this isn't "anything goes". Over time, solid underlying rules on what innovations are acceptable have emerged. Any language should have this kind of filters to preserve its internal consistency.

I agree with you completely on this and am aware of the items you mentioned and what they imply.

yyaann:There is a reason for this. An experienced speaker usually develops a good sense of what works in the language and what doesn't, a sense of its somewhat unconscious underlying tendencies and possibilites, and as a result is more likely to come up with innovations that will gain acceptance.

Here apparently our opinions diverge a bit. I wouldn't draw the line between experienced and unexperienced speakers, but solely between native speakers and non-native speakers, no matter how long they have spoken the language and how long they have lived immersed in it. The topic of language acquisition is a very interesting and controversial one, and there are tomes over tomes about it in the libraries. In my humble opinion, the basic question is the following: Have you acquired the language ungrammatically as an infant, or have you studied it later in your life. I, for instance, have learned Spanish as a boy and have now lived 20 years speaking Spanish daily, immersed in a Spanish speaking society and my children are Spanish native speakers. I might be a bit more proficient [...next post]

[...ctnd] I might be a bit more proficient than someone who has taken a Spanish course, and I can understand without problems everything that is spoken around me and I can express without much thought everything I wish to communicate, but still: I speak Spanish analytically (I am not sure if this is the right word). To some limited degree I can say "This Spanish phrase doesn't ring right", but I also err on those assumptions, something which will never happen to a native speaker (limited to the narrower circle of his variation of the language, e.g. American vs European Spanish).
I believe the same holds for Esperanto: no matter how proficient you are, if you have not learned it as a baby, you are just an L2-speaker like the rest.
I have read on this forum several times sentences like "my lingvosento tells me" uttered by -no doubt experienced- non-native EO speakers. I am quite positive that this is an illusion and that no L2-speaker can actually have a "feeling for the language" as a native speaker has.
This is why I think that the debate "spertuloj" vs "noobs" which now has taken 2 threads on some 20 pages, is moot. We are all noobs, excluding the native speakers. And proposing rules like "you need to attain a certain level before you may talk about reforms" is senseless and above all arbitrary: Where do you place the threshold?
I hope this comment will not cause too strong a negative reaction.

Bottom lines:
1) Language changes aren't agreed upon, they just happen.
2) One non-native speaker telling another non-native speaker to get more proficient before they talk about reforming a language, is like two blind people discussing colours (no disrespect against blind people intended.)
3) Citing "lingvosento" as a non-native speaker is debatable.

morfran:

efilzeo:Aren't you exaggerating a little?

Do we really need to repost all the vitriol you hurled at that guy? Because the character limit for posts would make that a little tedious.

Do you have a link? I wanna see if I've been that bad.

yyaan:An experienced speaker usually develops a good sense of what works in the language and what doesn't, a sense of its somewhat unconscious underlying tendencies and possibilites, and as a result is more likely to come up with innovations that will gain acceptance .... Bottom line, when Esperantists resist innovations, they are usually not being blindly conservative.

A reasonable argument. But in this case, I would point out that:

1) ASCarroll was not proposing reforms for everyone else; he was declaring reforms to his own usage, and wanted to know if everyone else would be able to understand him, even if they disapproved.

On another thread, Kaŝperanto makes the case that by reforming his own usage, ASCarroll forces everyone else to learn the reforms with him just to understand him. But really, no one is obliged to read, understand, or even acknowledge ASCarroll’s posts, whether he writes in the Queen’s Esperanto or Singlish.

(By the way, interesting story about the Singlish.)

2) While some of ASCarroll’s personal reforms certainly seemed like the knee-jerk contrivances of noobs trying to negotiate a foreign grammar, some were neologisms proposed by other, more experienced speakers, and are mentioned in Wikipedia and the PMEG. It’s one thing when a beginner proposes changes before he’s learned the language, but if he’s echoing a forgotten neologism first introduced by, say, Kalocsay, doesn’t that oblige one to consider the neologism on its own merits and not the messenger?

3) Even if ASCarroll had indeed been proposing neologisms and reforms for the entire Esperanto community to embrace — and all those neologisms and reforms were patently terrible — the Lernu forum could have simply said “No, thanks”. Instead, it turned into an orgy of angry, misogynistic insults based on things ASCarroll never said, self-congratulations when he left the forum, and, in a related thread, Nuremberg rally-like rhetoric and an actual call for a watch list to guard against enemies of the Esperanto state. (Fittingly, the guy behind most of that has the initials A.H.)

Some of the most vitriolic posts — as well as misogynistic and homophobic — came from people who later admitted to having experimented with some of the very same neologisms ASCarroll was floating here.

Bottom line: A lot of Esperantists are not only blindly conservative, but also 20-20 vision hypocrites and assholes.