kaŝperanto:if I didn't already know that Esperanto wasn't based on Spanish I would be inclined to believe the statement when it comes from someone in his position.

Noam Chomsky is something of an ass. Even so-called "experts" or "authorities" can have amazing blind spots. Just because someone has credentials and a name in one particular instance (and Chomsky seems these days to be more interested in far left wing politics) does not mean that she/he is an authority forever. Copernicus was a trailblazer in his day in overturning the time-honored geocentric belief, but it took Kepler to realize that planetary orbits are elliptical, not just circular as Copernicus thought. The famous anecdote goes -- I have not verified it -- that Umberto Eco asserted that Esperanto cannot be a "real" language because "you can't make love in it," whereupon a woman in the audience stood up and said that yes, you can, because she had done it. Sometimes even "experts" can and have to be challenged.

RiotNrrd:

Tempodivalse:And then we have Chomsky, who betrays a total ignorance of Esperanto when he claims it is based on Spanish (a language Zamenhof didn't even know!). I'm sure he would never be careless enough to make a fundamental factual error about any other language, e.g. calling Hungarian Indo-European.

He would not make that error about Hungarian, because in his world Hungarian is a language. Esperanto is not.

Although I think Chomsky ought to at least learn a little about a subject before spouting off about it, his refusal to recognize Esperanto as a real language does make some sense from where he is sitting, in the same sense that an archaeologist might not consider the versions of Ancient Egyptian statues manufactured today for sale to be anything worth studying (I even have one myself; a statue of Bast). My statue of Bast is definitely a statue, but in no way is it "real" in the sense that an archaeologist would care about. No ones archaeology PhD dissertation is going to ever make any conclusions based on the kind of statue I own, which is probably no more than ten years old. I think Esperanto is essentially the same way for Chomsky.

Chomsky is interested in languages that came about "naturally", as they may (or do, as far as he is concerned) tell us something very fundamental about how humans minds work. Esperanto came about through an entirely different path that doesn't remotely fit what he cares about; as far as he is concerned, Esperanto is at best a parody of a language. But that's because he's looking at language differently than most of us do.

Sure, but, to go with the statue analogy, even an archeologist who isn't interested in RiotNrrd's Bast statue should still actually look at it before asserting that it is based on a Hawaiian Tiki. Otherwise, he should just not bother mentioning it all!

Christa627:Sure, but, to go with the statue analogy, even an archeologist who isn't interested in RiotNrrd's Bast statue should still actually look at it before asserting that it is based on a Hawaiian Tiki. Otherwise, he should just not bother mentioning it all!

You get no argument from me. In fact, a number of years ago, I myself posted a rather sharp message about Chomsky asserting Esperanto was based on Spanish.

Nevertheless, after thinking about it quite a bit, I am willing to cut him a little slack. From his point of view, all he really needs to know about Esperanto is that it's artificial; that by itself is enough to tell him that he doesn't need to waste any more of his time bothering with it, because he doesn't study artificial languages.

And from the point of view of someone who knows next to nothing about Esperanto (which could certainly be true of someone who rejects it outright simply for being artificial), a cursory glance at it can give the impression it is based on Spanish. I certainly thought it was before I learned it. And since he really just doesn't care about Esperanto, I can sort of see why he doesn't bother even fixing any misconceptions he might have: he doesn't care.

*I* don't tend to devote a lot of time or energy to things I don't care about, either, and if I happen to say something about one of them that's wrong, well, whatever. Remember: not caring means... not caring.

It is intellectually lazy, though.

Tempodivalse:.. Modern Hebrew..being revived by essentially one person after being dormant or dead for many centuries.

One person? I would have thought that many emigrants to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century were responsible.

Miland:

Tempodivalse:.. Modern Hebrew..being revived by essentially one person after being dormant or dead for many centuries.

One person? I would have thought that many emigrants to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century were responsible.

Well yes, but the beginning of the revival, as I understand it, was spear-headed primarily thanks to one person, though of course other people were involved to varying degrees as well. It's not a great analogy with Esperanto, but it does seem pertinent, since there was a decidedly "artificial" element. My point was that this doesn't introduce doubts about Hebrew's linguistic merits.

Chomsky was attached to the the view that language is essentially a biological phenomenon. All languages had behind them some genetically determined grammar engine (common to all homo sapiens).

Esperanto, looks like a cultural phenomenon. More like a legal system than a biologically determined adaptive feature. Hence, he would naturally be dismissive of it.

I believe that the current academic view is of grammar as usage rather than the result of some in-built Universal Grammar. Ref. The Language Myth- why language is not an instinct

Tempodivalse:
And then there's the theme of highly intelligent people not even caring to check basic facts before spouting off about Esperanto, in a way they'd never do with other subjects - a simply immature reaction.

Well, believe it or not, people do that with Modern Hebrew far more often than you seem to think. Your argument about it is actually quite common. People don't understand that it never fell entirely out of use- it was used for daily prayer and as a written interlanguage between Jews living in Europe and Jews living in the Middle East. People, even respected linguists, have made all sorts of absurd claims about Modern Hebrew that are contrary to verifiable reality, like for example that its grammar is based on Yiddish (most of the grammatical changes between Biblical and Modern Hebrew are much less modern than people think, predating Yiddish).

As someone who isn't wont to throw these accusations around lightly (I'm extremely anti-Zionist and atheist), I think deep-seeded cultural (as opposed to personal) anti-Jewish sentiment contributes to this in no small part, as well as to the hatred of Esperanto. The history of academia is rife with antisemitism (though I loathe that word), especially in the humanities and social sciences. Today this is mostly manifested passively and subconsciously, but there have certainly been times when I have brought up Esperanto to people who didn't know I was Jewish (as most people wouldn't from just talking to me) and they responded, "It's a constructed language invented by a Jew; what else do you need to know about it?"

Interestingly enough, Yiddish used to be dismissed as an inferior non-language back when millions of Jews spoke it; nowadays it's lauded and almost dead.

leporinjo:there have certainly been times when I have brought up Esperanto to people who didn't know I was Jewish... and they responded, "It's a constructed language invented by a Jew; what else do you need to know about it?"

So in their retarded outlook on life, a Jew can't create anything useful?

Wasn't Jesus Jewish? So I guess, by using their logic, nobody should look into Christianity right.

These people weren't Christian either, I don't think. Antisemitism has little to do with religion; I think it largely boils down to a clash of culture. We're different, we act differently... we're holding onto antiquated customs... we interrupt people while they're talking... etc. etc.