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Esperanto in the news: Eurocentric

de Alkanadi, 2016-majo-19

Mesaĝoj: 19

Lingvo: English

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 08:44:23

"'Esperanto'... based on the roots of the chief European languages."
Link

Is this an accurate way to frame Esperanto? It makes it seem a bit Eurocentric. Isn't Esperanto also heavily influenced by Yiddish, as well as Germanic and Slavic languages?

Fenris_kcf (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 09:00:30

Yiddish is a Germanic language and the Germanic and the Slavic languages are Indo-European languages.

eriksangel15 (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 11:54:29

Yiddish is a mash-up (to use contemporary popular phrasing) of German and Hebrew.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 12:06:53

Yiddish is fundamentally a Germanic language. It has a lot of slavic and Hebrew vocabulary, more or less of each depending on which dialect we're talking about, but the base and structure are Germanic. At any rate it's surely not enough Hebrew influence to push it out of the realm of Indo European languages.

Someone wrote a paper on the influence of Yiddish on Esperanto and I have it somewhere but this influence is not really that significant in the grand scheme of things. French had a far heavier influence.

Esperanto is Eurocentric, that's absolutely true.

ludomastro (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 12:53:17

Alkanadi: It makes [Esperanto] seem a bit Eurocentric.
Why would that matter? I'm all for an even playing field in communications; however, I don't think you can have one that is perfectly level unless you go the route of an a priori language with (theoretically) neutral grammar. And how does one decide if grammar is neutral? Is the Japanese "desu" copula more or less neutral that the English verb "to be?"

Not to mention, if we go that route we wouldn't be speaking Esperanto. The language is not perfect but it's perfectly suitable and relatively easy to learn. Perhaps a touch easier for those of us with a European language background but not difficult compared to natural languages. It also fully fulfills Z's hope of being a neutral second language for all. (Or, for the pedantic, it CAN fully fulfill that role.)

Alkanadi (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 13:45:10

ludomastro:
Alkanadi: It makes [Esperanto] seem a bit Eurocentric.
Why would that matter?
I don't know. I didn't think that far ahead yet. I was waiting to find out if the statement is true or not.

lagtendisto (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 17:59:26

Esperanto language has been proven to work 'in the wild'. Thats it.

nornen (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 19:24:07

Esperanto's design is not international. Its purpose is international.

Kirilo81 (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 20:48:08

The problem of eurocentrism is real (because of this I support the extensive use of word formation instead of borrowing lexemes), but one should bear in mind two aspects of this:

1. This reproach mostly comes from scholars propagating English, which is much more European

2. "European" means the origin, not the actual dissemination of the languages. Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages dominate in Europe, the Americas, and Australia; they are spoken by 2-3 billion people all over the world.

Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2016-majo-19 20:56:26

Kirilo81:2. "European" means the origin, not the actual dissemination of the languages. Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages dominate in Europe, the Americas, and Australia; they are spoken by 2-3 billion people all over the world.
That is an excellent point which ought to put the charge of Eurocentrism to bed once and for all.

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