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Do you agree with this?

fra Frano,2017 1 6

Meldinger: 28

Språk: English

Frano (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 6 14:54:00

Pini Dunner in his article The Rebirth of Hebrew, among other things, makes the following statement:
Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, a Jewish Polish-born physician and inventor, who became obsessed with the idea of creating an “international auxiliary language” that could be used by all nations, eliminating divisions caused by an inability to communicate efficiently. The language he came up with was Esperanto.
Despite great effort and widespread support, the Esperanto enterprise failed miserably, and Esperanto exists today only as a linguistic curiosity, spoken as a second language by scattered groups of aficionados around the western world.
Do you agree with Pini Dunner?

bartlett22183 (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 6 20:07:59

In my own opinion, it is a mixed matter. I definitely would not say that "the Esperanto enterprise failed miserably, and Esperanto exists today only as a linguistic curiosity," but I would tend to agree, at least somewhat, that E-o may not have come up to Z's expectations. So I think that Pini Dunner is overstating the case. E-o may not have overtaken the world by storm, but it is definitely (I would say) far more than just a linguistic curiosity.

One issue is that no matter how great the chaotic language situation is in the world, many / most "elites" (for lack of a better term), i.e., professional linguists and government officials around the world, somehow, simply, do not take the matter of constructed international auxiliary languages seriously. Why this is, I myself have never completely understood. Advocates of Esperanto (or any other reasonably contending conIAL, such as Interlingua) have to struggle against this inertia (or even hostility). So I can understand the idea of Raŭmismo as a sort of a community withdrawing into itself in a hostile world, even if I do not agree.

noelekim (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 7 02:36:10

Take a look at the website for the 102nd World Esperanto Congress en Seoul this year: http://www.2017uk.net/

If a volunteer-based cultural movement with no political backing or government funds can organise an international event on this scale - the 102nd in the series -, can it reasonably be called a "failure"?

Vestitor (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 7 02:51:08

Is it not a fact (as Noelkim alludes to above) that Hebrew was only successfully made concrete as a resurrected language by the creation of Israel as a state? So a great deal of 'heimat' enthusiasm for a lost history, perhaps even some zealotry and bottomless pockets only stopped that from becoming a miserable failure.

Esperanto doesn't have the luxury of either and still it isn't a failure. It's almost a hobby now among pop-linguists to declare the failure of Esperanto. It's beyond boring.

NikolaoKoja (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 10 13:10:42

How can a 120+ year-old artificial language with 2,000,000 speakers be considered a "failure"? The author of that article is incredibly biased.

mkj1887 (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 10 17:39:43

Ho, hum. Esperanto keeps outliving its obituary-writers.

Серёга (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 10 18:02:17

There is Incredibly a fear that esperanto will be allowed to be new Babylon language, but I expect that it can be the language of saving the multiculturalism world.

Altebrilas (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 10 21:53:48

A linguistic curiosity? I wish linguists were more curious, and began to study the topic seriously.

Vestitor (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 12 17:35:46

Some so-called language experts seem to hate Esperanto for all kinds of crackpot reasons. They (erroneously) believe it is intended to homogenise the language world. You can tell most of their 'research' is culled from similar-minded articles. They make no effort and can thus be summarily dismissed as charlatans.

T0dd (Å vise profilen) 2017 1 12 17:41:43

"Esperanto had its heyday and is now dead," is one of the "myths" of Esperanto discussed by Esther Schor near the end of her book, Bridge of Words. As she documents in that book, Esperanto hasn't died because it keeps reinventing itself, by reconceiving its "interna ideo." As Paul Bartlett said above, Esperanto in 2017 is not what Zamenhof and probably most other Esperantists hoped in 1917. But as long as there are people still learning and using it, it's not dead and not entirely a failure.

Personally, I lean toward the Raumismo end of the spectrum, so I tend to see Esperanto less as the solution to a problem and more as a unique (in the history of the world) cultural experiment. And if we think of the question asked by that experiment to be "Can a constructed language acquire a speech community and continue on beyond the death of its creator and without the force and authority of any single personality?" then it must be regarded as a success. Esperanto survives because of what it is. People are attracted to it for various reasons. Many find that they enjoy the language in itself, apart from whatever attracted them in the first place. Claude Piron described this well in La Bona Lingvo, my favorite book about Esperanto. That enjoyment, that strange satisfaction we get from speaking Esperanto, keeps it going.

So, not really a failure, in my opinion.

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