sudanglo:I make no assertion about the order of acquisition for a natural language. I was thinking about Esperanto.

In that case I would agree with you about the order of acquisition.

I stick with my point that there is something a little odd about all this educational superstructure of formal classes, tests and exams, and grading. The early Esperantists would have found this slightly ridiculous.

Probably so. I think this is a little ridiculous in most languages anyway.

Look, you can do things in Esperanto you simply can't do in the natural languages.

Stuck for a word? Then build one on the fly, or borrow an international one.

You can do this in modern German. There are plenty of compound German words that you won't find in any dictionary but that are immediately understood by almost everyone.

Likewise you can often use a "Fremdwort" (foreign word) instead of a native German word : e.g. Independenz instead of Unabhängigkeit. This tends to work better with more educated speakers who also know Engligh or a Romance language.

But yes, you're absolutely right : the ability to coin words, change part of speech, etc. make it very easy to actively produce Esperanto (written or spoken) compared to other languages.

Amike,

Paul

darkweasel:

sudanglo:
Or, it might be that once the wheel had been invented, so to speak, there was no point in re-inventing it.

Then why was Esperanto more successful than Volapük?

You could argue it was simply the case of one finding popular support and, the other loosing that support; however, that would be oversimplifying the history a bit. Even with the oversimplification, that still is not an unreasonable explanation as to why this is "lernu.net" and not "lärnön.net."

Other important factors:
1) Dr. Z told the community of speakers, "It's yours." Schleyer insisted on retaining rights to his property and the resulting split with the Academy caused many to seek out other language projects.

2) The official clubs were flattened under the Nazi regime in Germany. This isn't to say that E-o hasn't been also repressed, merely that E-o had more speakers when it was repressed and thus had a better chance of survival.

3) Dr. Z was a bit of a rock star for his day. Don't underestimate the power of the personality cult.

ludomastro:1) Dr. Z told the community of speakers, "It's yours." Schleyer insisted on retaining rights to his property and the resulting split with the Academy caused many to seek out other language projects.

2) The official clubs were flattened under the Nazi regime in Germany. This isn't to say that E-o hasn't been also repressed, merely that E-o had more speakers when it was repressed and thus had a better chance of survival.

3) Dr. Z was a bit of a rock star for his day. Don't underestimate the power of the personality cult.

4) Volapuk is not that easy. It looks like the words are made up out of thin air, even though they aren't. The words are based on words from European languages, but not recognizably so; therefore you might as well be memorizing words from scratch, because they seem to lack cognates. Who could guess that Nelij means England (prior to the 1931 reform, which aimed to reduce these problems).

In the analogy of reinventing the wheel, I would say that Esperanto invented the wheel and Volapuk invented the log roller - like a wheel in some ways, but much less flexible and much more difficult to deal with.

Volapuk was in decline long before Nazism got started, so I can't really say that Nazism was a significant factor in its decline, though surely it didn't help. I think that Volapuk's difficulty is what really did it in, more than any other factor.

erinja:

This is a debatable point, and I suppose it depends on what you call "the very beginning". Zamenhof went through more than ten years of testing and revising his language before he finally published it.

You ere correct and I should have been more exact in my statement. However, I think your response supports my assertion that Zamenhof was just as special (and perhaps more so) than the language itself.

I have trouble believing that there would have been an Esperanto without a Zamenhof. That sounds a bit obvious (duh!) but hopefully you get my point.

Of course, this is just my opinion and could change given additional information and experience but, that's my viewpoint currently.

Gxis,
Kelly

It seems that the current conversation here has strayed far from the original topic of the thread, though the discussion is very interesting.
I just wanted to echo some of the opinions I read regarding Volapük a little earlier. From what little I have learned on the internet about the language, it appears to be too complex for use as an international auxiliary language (though if you are really looking for a complex language, I suggest you take a look at John Quijada's «Ithkuil»). I have to say, however, that I have much respect for Volapük as being the first IAL with a dedicated community of speakers. I consider it to be the «praavo» of the modern IAL movement.

vicmg3:It seems that the current conversation here has strayed far from the original topic of the thread, though the discussion is very interesting.

That’s usual on these forums.

The switch from Volapuk to Esperanto was almost certainly down to the superior design features of Esperanto.

What needs to be explained is why none of the pre-Volapuk or post-Esperanto inventions made it significantly past the drawing-board stage.

sudanglo:What needs to be explained is why none of the pre-Volapuk or post-Esperanto inventions made it significantly past the drawing-board stage.

That an easy one to answer. It all comes down to the following

1) Creators not giving up ownership rights, if a community can't take part without creator permission than the language WILL die
2) Languages aren't field tested before being released, and are found to be lacking in a mass of features
3) Either the owner or the community want to keep *improving* the language by changing the core *rules*
4) The language needs a purpose, Esperanto is the top candidate for a constructed international language, so this field has been taken. Klingon filed a need within a the science fiction film genre.
5) Esperanto was created at a time of ideals, people believed that they could change the world... So it's really a fluke of history

sudanglo:What needs to be explained is why none of the pre-Volapuk or post-Esperanto inventions made it significantly past the drawing-board stage.

Well, Interlingua is still alive and well at 60+ years old : there are conferences, books being published, a regular podcast by the UMI, a few magazines, etc. There's even someone who's actively running an Interlingua-English dictionary project

So I would claim that Interlingua made it well past the drawing-board stage. That said, I'll be the first to admit that the ratio of Esperanto to Interlingua speakers is on the order of (tens of) thousands to one. I have my own theories as to why that is, not the least of which has to do with Esperanto also being a "movado."

It appears Ido is also still kicking around, but I'm sure someone here is better qualified than me to talk on that subject. I don't have the bandwidth to follow more than two constructed languages at a time.

Amike,
Paul

pdenisowski:It appears Ido is also still kicking around, but I'm sure someone here is better qualified than me to talk on that subject.

Ido's annual international conventions draw fewer people than Washington DC's annual Zamenhof banquet -- and our area hardly has an active Esperanto movement.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Ido speakers. They are really a very small community but somehow they have hung on (and continue to publish futile articles in Esperanto about how Ido is much better than Esperanto).

In a way, looking at the Ido movement from an Esperantist's eyes presents a view of how the Esperanto movement must look from the outside. Pictures of Idists (mostly middle-aged or old) posing with their Ido flag, going on tourist excursions, discussing how to promote Ido, singing Ido songs together - it looks very familiar to an Esperanto event, only on a smaller scale! And it looks pointless and pathetic.

I think Volapuk has a pretty good deal of respect from Esperanto speakers. It paved the way for Esperanto, in some ways. A couple of years ago, a new dictionary was published, Volapuk Esperanto. That says something to me - that Esperanto speakers are possibly the main people interested in learning about Volapuk nowadays!