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Philosophical debate

kelle poolt Islander, 7. veebruar 2007

Postitused: 69

Keel: English

Islander (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 0:19.54

It was mentioned that Esperanto did not become what it was supposed to (not yet, anyway). It wasn't clearly stated why.

In my opinion, one of the reason is the influence the US and UK/Commonwealth had over the world in the last century (military, economically, culturally...) and how the english language is a simpler language to learn than most other western languages and probably even simpler than Esperanto itself through immersion by all accessible media (TV, Internet, ...).

What do you think?

erinja (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 0:50.54

Islander:It was mentioned that Esperanto did not become what it was supposed to (not yet, anyway). It wasn't clearly stated why.

In my opinion, one of the reason is the influence the US and UK/Commonwealth had over the world in the last century (military, economically, culturally...) and how the english language is a simpler language to learn than most other western languages and probably even simpler than Esperanto itself through immersion by all accessible media (TV, Internet, ...).

What do you think?
I think that the US and the Commonwealth don't really matter that much. If it's in someone's economic best interest to learn a language, they will. In Zamenhof's time, it would have been French that was the "international language". In the future, perhaps Chinese. I think perhaps that it doesn't take a lot of effort to learn to speak English badly, but it takes a lot to learn to speak it well. Other languages have the work distributed more; there is perhaps more work up-front, then it becomes easier later. I don't know that I would say English is easier than other western languages, though.

pastorant (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 1:47.30

Chinese, in my opinion, is very easy. Grammatically speaking. It has also been said that Indonesian is the easiest natural language. I don't think so as too many words are foreign to a westerner.
But still, Esperanto is easier than any language I know of. It has more structure than a Creole, but yet it's a full language.

dwarf (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 15:44.29

A couple of reasons why Esperanto failed/would fail:
1) It has plenty of left-outs, errors, mistakes and so on. These also include the parts of the language which result in difficulties in learning the language.
2) It's too romanian.
3) Noone needs to learn it. It's not of their economical interest to do so.
4) The pronunciation is not so easy for speakers of some languages.
5) It is not advertised, there are not enough good learning resources and so on.

There might be more to it, though...

erinja (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 19:23.41

dwarf:
2) It's too romanian.
Wow, I thought I had heard all possible arguments against Esperanto, but this is a new one to me. I doubt that most English speakers even have enough knowledge of Romanian to say "Oh, I just can't learn Esperanto, it's too Romanian"

Islander (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 20:19.43

I don't think Esperanto as any asian-like structure (none voluntary anyway). From what I understand, Esperanto as a Romance (latin) based ethinology (word pool), thus resemblance to any other romance laguage such as French, Italian or spanish (and even Romanian, which is also Romance based), a germanic structure (grammar and word construction basis), which the English language also is, and a slavic phonectic (how things sound).

I must agree, however, the "too-Romanian" even if refers to Romance based latin, would not be it. It can never be "too easy", basically.

erinja (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 21:07.52

My understanding is that Esperanto's structure isn't really that Germanic either. Its agglutinative structure (think: taking a root and adding tons of suffixes) is actually more similar to languages like Turkish, from what I understand.

Islander (Näita profiili) 7. veebruar 2007 21:35.21

The extent in which Esperanto uses affixes is pretty unique to it (it even is a critic from Esperanto detractors), but prefixes and sufixes exist in all western languages, including all Romance based ones. I was more refering to the ability to merge two or more words to form a different one, where Romance languages are limited to hyphen.

Overall phrase construction, subject oriented gender (as opposed to object oriented of Romance languages), lack of a 2nd person singular pronoun... these are all examples of a Germanic based grammar.

My original Question, however, was not to list reasons why Espenrato did not become official (the fina venko as some may call it), but more to comment on how the English speaking culture, how predominent it became as the US and UK became economically superior and how their movies, music and other cultural artefacts had anything to do with it.

dwarf (Näita profiili) 8. veebruar 2007 14:23.55

Err, yeah, I meant Romance rather than Romanian.
Or at least I didn't mean the modern Romanian. Although it might be that even that 'Romanian' argument would be valid. But sadly I don't know any Romanian to tell. okulumo.gif

Islander (Näita profiili) 9. veebruar 2007 0:25.15

I'd like some further explanation here: I personally don't understand why Esperanto's syntaxis marks it as Germanic.
How the systax is defined overall is what makes it Germanic in origin and the few examples I've listed do confirm that.
Are you talking about possessive pronouns here?
Yes, in part. For exmaple, in a Romance language such as French, most objects have a gender (e.g. a table is a female noum, thus in French one would say sa table to says His or Hers with no distinction to the subject's gender. This is one of the most difficult distinction for Germanic based speakers when learning a Romance based language, and vice versa (a native French speaker would be tempted to say "the table, she is heavy").
As far as I know, English is the only Germanic language that does not have the distinction, and it did have it in the past.
I'm aware of the "Thou" of the english language. This is, however, more presented as an impersonal pronoum than one defining quantity (of subject).

These may not have been the best examples, but the definitions of Esperanto you may find over the Internet do outline this and I do personally find easier to corrolate what I learn in Espenrato with English as fr as syntax is concern just as I find it easier to corrolate the ethimology to French.

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