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Do you agree with this?
ca, kivuye
Ubutumwa 28
ururimi: English
Frano (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 6 Nzero 2017 14:54:00
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 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 6 Nzero 2017 20:07:59
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 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 7 Nzero 2017 02:36:10
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 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 7 Nzero 2017 02:51:08
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 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 10 Nzero 2017 13:10:42
mkj1887 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 10 Nzero 2017 17:39:43
Серёга (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 10 Nzero 2017 18:02:17
Altebrilas (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 10 Nzero 2017 21:53:48
Vestitor (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 12 Nzero 2017 17:35:46
T0dd (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 12 Nzero 2017 17:41:43
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.