There is nothing that separates EO from those languages

Factually wrong, I'm afraid Ceiger.

I insist, it's a category error to treat Conlang projects as languages. And the liklihood of any of them becoming languages is zilch.

As Zamenhof might have said 'Por ke lingvo estu lingvo ne sufiĉas nomi ĝin tia'

sudanglo:

There is nothing that separates EO from those languages

Factually wrong, I'm afraid Ceiger.

I insist, it's a category error to treat Conlang projects as languages. And the liklihood of any of them becoming languages is zilch.

As Zamenhof might have said 'Por ke lingvo estu lingvo ne sufiĉas nomi ĝin tia'

What distinguishes a language from a project is that people actually learn and speak it. People do speak Klingon, Quenya, and Interlingua. Two of the three continue to be spoken after the death of their authors. Those are the facts.

I don't think it's wise to create additional requirements, in order to perpetrate the same "no true language" fallacy that Chomsky perpetrated against Esperanto.

As an aside, about a year ago, I was chatting with a colleague at a deparmental social, and he mentioned that his daughter and a friend had learned Quenya, and were busy exchanging emails with other Quenyists (for want of a better word). He found the whole thing very vexing, and wished that she would turn her efforts to Latin or Greek. Then, remembering that I speak Esperanto, he said, "Well, I guess you're the wrong person to ask about this!"

Not to mention that a language does not need to be continuously spoken or learnt to still be a language, otherwise Latin etc would cease to be languages (after all, that was a communal project by all its speakers to trade information within the mighty roman empire, and it's not living up to its purpose much at all now is it? )

If we're going to talk about conlang projects, EO could be examined as one - it's not complete, as it has not fulfilled its goals as set out by its creator.

Now, I don't think that's very fair to EO, is it? But that's exactly what you're doing when you call things like interlingua projects but NOT languages.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with arbitrary favouritism towards Esperanto, I mean, I don't think it's fair to tell someone that if they support one conlang they must support all simply because they were created in similar ways as opposed to naturally evolving, but facts shouldn't bend to sheer preference of one language over another... Otherwise we end up with the same language imperialism that Latin, French, English, German etc all participated in back in the hayday of that trollop.

Chainy:
I think I'll stop subscribing to the English forum so as to not repeat myself any more. I'm going to stick to the Esperanto-language forums now. Hope to see you there!

Mi tute konsentas kun vi. En kiu fadeno?
I totally agree with you. In which thread will you do that?

Todd I do think that there should be a additional requirement for something to count as a language, in order to distinguish itself from a language project.

That requirement as you rightly suggest is usage - or if you like social consensus.

Appying that requirement distinguishes Esperanto from Kingon, Interlinga, Occidental and all the rest.

Esperanto started its life with a fairly minumum specification and evolved through being used.

When Chomsky dismissed Esperanto as not being a language wasn't it just because he felt it was derivative from the European languages and therefore had nothing new to say about the nature of human language - or did he believe that there wasn't enough usage to make it a test vehicle for his thories of language and mind.

sudanglo:Todd I do think that there should be a additional requirement for something to count as a language, in order to distinguish itself from a language project.

That requirement as you rightly suggest is usage - or if you like social consensus.

Appying that requirement distinguishes Esperanto from Kingon, Interlinga, Occidental and all the rest.

How so? Klingon, Interlingua, Occidental, Ido, and Quenya are all in use. They are not used by as many people as Esperanto is, to be sure, but they are not just descriptions in a book either. People actually speak them. So I fail to see how a meaningful line between them and Esperanto can be drawn. To be sure, there are plenty of projects out there that are just that: projects. I don't think there are any speakers of Sona, for example. But once people actually learn one of these things and start using it, a threshold is crossed.

When Chomsky dismissed Esperanto as not being a language wasn't it just because he felt it was derivative from the European languages and therefore had nothing new to say about the nature of human language - or did he believe that there wasn't enough usage to make it a test vehicle for his thories of language and mind.

No, it had nothing to do with either of those things. His position was that a true language is defined by the actual usage of its L1 speaker base, and that usage is normative. Although Esperanto is indeed partly defined that way, the function of the Fundamento sets it apart. He's of course correct as far as other languages are concerned. There's no Fundamento of English. If you want to know whether something is or is not an English sentence, you must go to the L1 speakers and see if they accept it as English. Grammatical rules etc. don't override the L1 speaker base.

To take a well-known example: "The horse walked past the barn fell" is a grammatically correct English sentence, but the overwhelming majority of native English speakers reject it as being defective. From Chomsky's (and most other linguists') viewpoint, this disqualifies it as an English sentence, no matter what the grammatical rules say.

In Esperanto, the usage of the L1 speaker base is not normative, or in any way privileged, as far as defining Esperanto is concerned. I think we can agree that this makes Esperanto different from the natural languages, but I can't agree that it's a defining condition of languages.

T0dd:"The horse walked past the barn fell" is a grammatically correct English sentence, but the overwhelming majority of native English speakers reject it as being defective.

My interpretation of this is "The horse, which was walked (or was being walked) past the barn, fell."

You're right, it is defective. No commas!

Ah well if you define a language in terms of its L1 speaker base, then by definition Esperanto couldn't be a language even if there were 50 million speakers - because the overwhelming majority of them would have it as an L2 language (or L3),

But in the situation of Esperanto having 50 million speakers it would seem absurd to not then consider Esperanto as a language. So the criterion looks unnecessarily restrictive.

However it is an interesting point about what takes priority in deciding whether something is a well-formed sentence. I think that this already decided in Esperanto by the consensus among the speakers. Rarely would an appeal be made to some parallel sentence in La Fundamento.

And I just don't believe there is enough usage of the various IL projects to instil a lingvosento among the speakers.

Incidentally, the sentence you give about the horse, immediately seems to become well formed in Esperanto, because of Esperanto's explicit marking of functions of a word in a sentence. La ĉevalo promenigata preter la grenejo falis. I am not convinced too that it isn't well formed in English.

Here the appeal would be to sentences of similar stucture, eg., the witness described as Mr. X entered the court, rather than a body of rules.

Doesn't a similar process apply in the case of Esperanto. And wouldn't the Esperantists naturally prefer some rewriting of the sentence if it appeared to be grammatically correct but inelegant, or difficult to understand at first reading?

Am I missing the point here?

I had originally written a reply with links and everything but alas a 1 second power black out made sure that didn't happen!

sudanglo:Todd I do think that there should be a additional requirement for something to count as a language [...]

That requirement as you rightly suggest is usage - or if you like social consensus.

Appying that requirement distinguishes Esperanto from Kingon, Interlinga, Occidental and all the rest.

Esperanto started its life with a fairly minumum specification and evolved through being used.

I think it's better to think of language development as similar to human development. For example:
Conception (Human) - Conception (Linguistic)
Pregnancy - Development of grammar etc
Birth - Publishing or start of usage
Baby years - adoption of language by public
toddler years - prolonged use of language by public
child years - infiltration of language to higher society (or different subcultures)
teenage years - growth of language internationally
adult years - growth of language as a national identity
grumpy old men years - dominance on the international scene
dead/reincarnated - fallen out of use (dead if they're never used again, reincarnated if they are picked up for whatever reason at a later date).

Thus:
- Na'vi ??: Baby years. Thanks to avatar, there is knowledge of it.
- Interlingua, Klingon etc: Baby/Toddler years. Used by certain groups, but not much outside those tightly knit groups.
- Esperanto: Preteen. International by nature, but still not spread out in enough subcultures or levels of society.
- Welsh: Adult. A stereotypical anti-english welshman might speak welsh.
- Japanese: Mid-life crisis. Internationally relevant, but the langauge is mostly confined to Japan, and Japanese is ALWAYS associated with Japan, never with another country.
- English, French: Grumpy old men. Been around for ages, been through various stages, been everywhere.
- Latin: Reincarnated/back to the state of a toddler.

So they're all languages, but in various stages of development. Languages, as long as they are used by living things or things with personality/soul/whatever, are stuck in a never ending development cycle that depends on their speakers, meaning a language can go backwards in development, e.g. go back to being in an infantile state.

When Chomsky dismissed Esperanto as not being a language wasn't it just because he felt it was derivative from the European languages and therefore had nothing new to say about the nature of human language - or did he believe that there wasn't enough usage to make it a test vehicle for his thories of language and mind.

Chimpsky's ideas were that because Esperanto is in no way mysterious and because its speakers could explain it (where as with Spanish it doesn't work that way, laŭ li), that Esperanto was not a language. It's a nice, well thought out theory except that the basis of the entire theory is utter bollocks and makes no sense.

Chomsky also has various related thoughts to do with animal language, which is why I mentioned "Chimpsky" before as a bit of a bite at him. Basically, he's clearly an intelligent man, he just lacks the ability to think out the square.

Well, definitions cannot be proved right or wrong. If that is Chomsky's definition of a language, then Esperanto is not a language according to his definition. But since my definition of a linguist is "someone who knows about languages and appreciates Esperanto", then Chomsky is not a linguist and I don't have to pay attention to his opinion.

For centuries, it was said that bee's bodies contradict aerodinamic laws and therefore bees cannot fly; however, since bees do not know that they cannot fly, they fly anyway.

Not very long ago, scientists finally discovered how it happpens that bees and other insects can fly: http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/6....

It has yet to be discovered how it happens that esperantists so successfully and easily communicate with each other using something that is not a language.

Regards,

Daniel

T0dd:
No, it had nothing to do with either of those things. His position was that a true language is defined by the actual usage of its L1 speaker base, and that usage is normative. Although Esperanto is indeed partly defined that way, the function of the Fundamento sets it apart. He's of course correct as far as other languages are concerned. There's no Fundamento of English. If you want to know whether something is or is not an English sentence, you must go to the L1 speakers and see if they accept it as English. Grammatical rules etc. don't override the L1 speaker base.