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Is Esperanto a big part of your life?

de Alkanadi, 2015-novembro-04

Mesaĝoj: 57

Lingvo: English

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-17 07:23:14

uosuaq:...conflating "elite" with "elitism"...
One final note about this: I hate to admit it, but you are right. I looked it up.

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I thought elitism or being an elitist meant that you are at the top (without the connotation of dominance).
I honestly don't think there are enough Esperantists yet for there to *be* a stereotype, or a status.
I think Esperantists have the stereotype of being:
-left wing
-vegan
-LGBT
-IT professionals
-Quakers

Matthieu (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-17 09:15:36

Why the hell would Esperantists have the stereotype of being Quakers? I've never met a single Quaker in my life, Esperantist or not.

Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-17 11:31:39

Alkanadi:
uosuaq:...conflating "elite" with "elitism"...
One final note about this: I hate to admit it, but you are right. I looked it up.

externalImage.png

I thought elitism or being an elitist meant that you are at the top (without the connotation of dominance).
Actually I am right. I made the distinction between elite/elitism.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-17 16:15:51

Alkanadi:
I think Esperantists have the stereotype of being:
-left wing
-vegan
-LGBT
-IT professionals
-Quakers
Among who?

Quakers - that's simply wrong, I have maybe met an Esperantist Quaker or two but the number of Esperantist Bahais I'm aware of certainly exceeds the Quakers. If I had to pick a stereotypical religion it would probably be Unitarian. But most Esperanto speakers are not Unitarians, vegans, IT professionals, or LGBT. Those are all sizeable minorities but it doesn't represent the community as a whole. Left wing? I have no idea. that might be more than half of the community, but only if each person is assigned as being one of two categories, left wing or right wing, with no room for a "center".

At any rate, people outside the Esperanto community really have no stereotypes about Esperanto speakers, because they don't know enough about the language or about the community even to make a guess. It reminds me slightly of people who claim "Way more people would learn Esperanto if only xyz grammatical element would be changed to abc". Most people decide not to learn Esperanto without ever knowing that xyz element even exists! And similarly, most people decide not to learn Esperanto without knowing a shred of information, true or false, about the community who speaks it.

Tempodivalse (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-17 18:56:44

For a stereotype of something to exist, it must be at least somewhat well-known already, which Esperanto isn't (at least among the under-50 crowd). So I think we flatter ourselves when we say people don't take Esperanto seriously for X reason. They don't take it at all.

(I've had Esperanto on my resume's language list for some time and nobody has commented about it. I think they assume it is some minority European language like Catalan.)

RiotNrrd (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-17 23:36:43

Tempodivalse:...I think they assume it is some minority European language like Catalan.)
Or they think that you're saying you speak Spanish, in Spanish. And they don't speak Spanish.

uosuaq (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-20 02:04:01

Alkanadi:
uosuaq:...conflating "elite" with "elitism"...
One final note about this: I hate to admit it, but you are right. I looked it up.

externalImage.png

I thought elitism or being an elitist meant that you are at the top (without the connotation of dominance).
I honestly don't think there are enough Esperantists yet for there to *be* a stereotype, or a status.
I think Esperantists have the stereotype of being:
-left wing
-vegan
-LGBT
-IT professionals
-Quakers
Alkanadi, it's good of you to admit making a mistake -- which was really a fairly small mistake, but I think it created some misunderstanding in this discussion.

As for stereotypes, I think *people who know a little about Esperanto* might have stereotypes about Esperantists, but I think most people don't know about it and therefore don't have stereotypes about it, which is all I meant to say.

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