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de Bassace101, 2008-novembro-05

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Bassace101 (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-05 16:49:07

I was reading up on Esperanto in wikipedia. And i read that Esperanto plays a role in the Baha'i religion. I continued to read up on the religion and the use of Esperanto. I came across a page discussing how Esperanto needs to be perfected. Don't get me wrong, i LOVE Esperanto. But, and i brought this up on a previous post once before, we need to make Esperanto 100% genderless and universal. Or, have a congress of someone from every country. Esperantos vocabulary only covers so much. We pretty much skipped any Asian and African language. Anywho, just a thought.

trojo (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-05 17:34:28

Nah, Epseranto fine as is. So-called "perfection" is in the eye of the beholder.

trojo (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-05 20:43:20

If, though, you do want to speak a perfect language, you should learn Ido
Ido and Lojban are not perfect. At best they just have different imperfections.

One of the issues Bassace has with Esperanto is that its vocabulary is a mix from European languages (including Romance, Germanic, and Slavic) with not much in the way of Asian or African languages. One of Ido's "improvements" over Esperanto was to cut out as much of the Slavic and Germanic influence and vocabulary from the language as possible, due to these being perceived by the early Idists as "unnatural" and "foreign".

I don't know Bassace, but I doubt that's the kind of "improvement" he's looking for. In fact, Ido basing the overwhelming bulk of its vocabulary on French sounds like the opposite of what he was suggesting above.

Also, Esperanto's nearly perfect phonetic system (i.e. having only one letter for each sound and only one sound for each letter) was dispensed with in Ido in favor of the supposed "beauty" and "naturality" of digraphs, the letter Q, and other irregular spelling rules. Here again, the Idists' complaint was that Esperanto wasn't French enough, and that had to be changed.

Esperanto not being French enough, to my mind, is not a legitimate complaint.

Ironchef (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-05 21:05:09

One of the issues Bassace has with Esperanto is that its vocabulary is a mix from European languages (including Romance, Germanic, and Slavic) with not much in the way of Asian or African languages.
Do you think maybe this is because in the 1880's, Dr.Zamenhof did not really think that there would be much call for an Auxiliary language outside of the Eurosphere? I don't think much trade or diplomacy was being done directly between Poland and Japan in 1887 and his initial inspiration was to avoid the multiplex of languages he heard in and around Bialystok.

I think expecting one language to contain elements of Eurolangs, Chinese/Japanese, Native American (Nth/Sth), African, Polynesian and Austronesian would be impossible.

Given that I've become proficient in Esperanto in one year, without any formal training, says much for this language and its efficiency as it stands.

People don't argue about whether a word is the wrong gender in French/Italian/Greek (do they?) or why one word is preferred over another in Swahili... I think the feeling is that because Esperanto was created as a deliberate act, and not developed naturally over generations, there's the assumption it's "open source" and available for tweaking as people see fit.....Ĉu ne?

Oŝo-Jabe (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-05 23:05:12

I don't think Esperanto needs to be anymore genderless than it already is, as the only words that have an inherent gender are arguably family words, and a few others. As for making Esperanto more universal, it's impossible to make a language entirely universal. There are at least 5000 languages in the world so even if you took the most spoken language from every continent, you'd never be able to cater to everyone. I've also seen it argued that while Esperanto has Western roots, it's grammar is similar in spirit to Easter languages.

Here's an article by Claude Piron, which examines Esperanto's Westerness:
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/weste...

trojo (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-05 23:10:06

Ironchef:I think the feeling is that because Esperanto was created as a deliberate act, and not developed naturally over generations, there's the assumption it's "open source" and available for tweaking as people see fit.....Ĉu ne?
Yes, this seems to be the perception. I myself felt a need to suggest changes (which I saw at the time as "improvements") when I was new. What needs to be made clearer, somehow, is that there really is no authority to appeal to that governs the use of Esperanto that can dictate changes. This is in contrast to Loglan, Volapuk, etc, whose owners maintained copyrights or whatever over their languages and got into fights with reformers over who controlled it and had the right to make changes. These fights (aka reform efforts) contributed to the failure of those projects.

In contrast, *no one* controls Esperanto. No one has the right to enforce proposed changes. Esperanto was Dr. Zamenhof's free gift to mankind, and no person or group of people "own" it or can change it, not the Akademio, and not even Dr. Z himself when he was alive. I personally feel that this has been a big part of Esperanto's success, but regardless of how *I* feel, that's nevertheless the way it is.

If you think you can make a more perfect IAL, you'll just have to start over, because the fundamental principles of Esperanto are set. I know it's blunt and I don't mean it to be a flame, but I don't know how else to say it: no one can enforce changes or reforms in Esperanto.

On the other hand, changes do occur in Esperanto in much the same way that they do in natural languages -- through gradual, widespread changes in general use -- but the body of experienced Esperanto speakers tend to be rather conservative when it comes to the beloved language.

Bassace101 (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-07 04:44:15

I've taken all of your points and revised my point of view. I don't think perfecting Esperanto would be a good idea. In face, when things are perfect (whenever possible), they get boring. This isn't what we want. All i wish for now, is that Esperanto represented a wider spectrum of vocabulary. Obviously, it would be too hard to try to make everyone re-learn the revisions. So, whether this is even a fathomable goal is completely in the dark for me. I am just tired of hearing arguments against Esperanto just cause it has -in and is too hard for some people to pronounce. I think that all base nouns (anything without affixes, just to be clear)should not automatically mean the masculine form. But, assuming we do change this, the prefix Ge- would become extinct. I don't know... it just bothers me.

webgovernor (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-07 05:25:16

I generally agree with you, but I'm still going to learn the language to the fullest before I pass a final judgment.

Maybe I too will enjoy the imperfections... we shall see.

RiotNrrd (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-07 05:31:32

Bassace101:I think that all base nouns (anything without affixes, just to be clear)should not automatically mean the masculine form.
Except for familial roots, which are gendered with a masculine default, this is already the case. It is unfortunate that the familial roots have a masculine default, but... it's a bit late in the game to change that now. But there aren't very many of them.

"Kato" does not mean "tomcat". It just means cat, and it is perfectly acceptable to call a female cat a "kato". If you want to specify a "tomcat", that is "virkato". If you want to specify a female cat, that is "katino". This is true of essentially all non-familial roots.

Some people do interpret all roots as having a masculine default. However, that is simply their interpretation, and not an underlying rule of the language itself. Zamenhof did not claim a masculine default for all roots, and I believe that is sufficient to support my position that they do not have such a default. Just because some people use the roots as if they were masculine only means that they are imparting a meaning to the words that is, in fact, not there, and are therefore incorrect.

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2008-novembro-07 09:01:51

Bassace101: All i wish for now, is that Esperanto represented a wider spectrum of vocabulary.
When I was at the World Congress in Rotterdam, and two older Japanese told me that they found English and Esperanto equally difficult, this did occur to me too - could the vocabulary of E-o be made more international, so that the 'distance' from Esperanto to the minds of all communities be more comparable, and thus the 'linguistic handshake' be more of a reality? Assimilating words from other languages by way of usage i.e. natural evolution, is fair enough, but deliberately adding a larger international vocabulary would effectively make a new language, and be a lot trickier.

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