T0dd:Well that sounds about right.

Of course, anything can be compared with anything. Comparing Esperanto with other constructed languages, or projects for that matter, is interesting but...what's the point of doing so? Is there a point to be made?

My point is: natural languages weren't designed to facilitate communication between speakers of other languages. Even pidgins or languages like Indonesian drew from other languages for regional- not international- use. So to say Esperanto is easy compared to English wouldn't be a legitimate comparison, as the latter was not designed to be spoken internationally. You would have to compare the simplicity of Esperanto to another language which shares this function, like Interlingua.

razlem:My point is: natural languages weren't designed to facilitate communication between speakers of other languages.

You may be interested in this debate, which treats the question of whether it should be the case that one language has a certain "field of use" and another language has another, with input from some eminent Esperantists of the past.

The topic of the debate is whether Interlingua is better than Esperanto for scientific discourse. The whole text is in English so anyone reading this forum should be able to read it.

[in fact the debate never took place; the letters in the link are discussions preceding a debate, to establish whether there is even a point to having such a debate]

I see. Well, it's probably impossible to give each language an overall simplicity score, due to the difficulty of ranking the factors that contribute to simplicity. And "easiness" isn't fully assimilated to simplicity, since it's a 3-term relation. Language A is easier than language B for population C.

Ido is more naturalistic than Esperanto, and Interlingua is more naturalistic than both. Does that make Interlingua the simplest? Not necessarily. Esperanto's schematism arguably counts in favor of simplicity. Ido's greater naturalism arguably makes it easier than Esperanto for those familiar with the source languages. On the other hand, Ido's Principle of Reversibility, while logically tidier than Esperanto's system of necessity and sufficiency, requires a more complex system of affixes to make it work.

And even so, if we decide in the end that Ido or Interlingua is easier or simpler than Esperanto, which I doubt, what then? As I wrote earlier in this thread, Ido has had more than a century to make its case to the world. Some of the leading lights in the Esperanto community joined the Ido movement. But Ido has failed to thrive. interlingua, despite decades of painstaking work and actual use, has done no better. If we determine that it's easier than Esperanto, apart from satisfying curiosity what have we accomplished?

Both Ido and Interlingua tried to mimic natural languages to a greater extent than Esperanto. I hypothesize that the closer to natural languages you get, the less logical it is to learn; more people speak the actual language. So what is it about Esperanto that made it so successful (or, in some other views, a failure)? That's what I hope to find out. I think it is successful because it is relatively neutral linguistically (with vowel classifiers and affixes), but I think it has not done as well as hoped because it tried to mimic such a small group of languages. Had Esperanto a more general, artificial system (direct alignment, general phonotactics, etc.) I think it would have spread faster. I'm not saying it should have been a priori, but it could have been more generalized.

I have yet to see an IAL that looks at communication from a different angle (if anyone knows of one, please send me a link to it). In this sense I mean that the language would use parts of speech and semantics that are not found in natural languages yet easily comprehensible by any speaker of any language (and not just the 'civilized' languages, as claimed by La Unua Libro). My IAL experiment with Angos has attempted this, but I have yet to complete it, let alone start teaching it.

So back to the main topic, I think the concerns raised in the initial post are legitimate because the person cites linguistic phenomena when talking, for example, about people's capacity to recognize patterns without markers (in the case of 'mal' and the direct object marker).

What we're trying to accomplish is a better understanding of why Esperanto is the way it is, and to note its strengths and flaws so that we understand how people can communicate without sharing a first language. By comparing it to Ido and Interlingua (rather than English or French), we can better determine how and why an IAL is propagated. This may not interest the general forum crowd, but as you can probably tell, I'm quite excited about it.

erinja:
You may be interested in this debate, which treats the question of whether it should be the case that one language has a certain "field of use" and another language has another, with input from some eminent Esperantists of the past.

I've only started reading it, but it seems like an interesting topic. I don't think it's very practical (from a scientific standpoint) to use either, but an interesting thought nonetheless.

Just out of curiosity, how do you find all of these links? It seems that in every thread you manage to procure some obscure Esperanto resource XD

razlem:So what is it about Esperanto that made it so successful ..?

In my view, the answer may be that Zamenhof was a man with a destiny. I suggest that you read Marjorie Boulton's biography of him.

razlem:how do you find all of these links?

The author of that webpage (the late Don Harlow) was a very well known American Esperantist, whose writings (many available online) are well worth reading. The webpage has been referred to in past threads more than once.

Very interesting link Erinja. So Gode himself didn't see Interlingua as a language.

Razlem, even as an Esperantist of many years, I am surprised every so often in browsing the net to find how much has been done and is being done by the Esperantists for the cause.

A case in point would be Gazetejo.org giving archive access to so many magazines, the existence of which I must confess with some shame as to not being previously aware of.

The question of why Esperanto has succeeded to the extent that it has (when all other projects have failed) seems to me to be a suitable academic topic.

It might be due to linguistic features of Esperanto but it could well lie in the commitment of the Esperantists to a worthy goal and the readiness to contribute to the development of Esperanto to the point where its purpose can be achieved.

Interesting debate about whether to have a debate

sudanglo:Very interesting link Erinja. So Gode himself didn't see Interlingua as a language.

That doesn't sound right at all, otherwise "interlingua" would be a pretty damn stupid name for it.

FLOYD HARDIN to PROFESORO D-RO IVO LAPENNA, Jan. 24, 1963:This confusion, which I myself shared, to a degree, was brought about by Dr. Gode's statement that Interlingua is not an international language and has no ambitions to function as an interlanguage in future.

It's all ultimately a play on words though. He probably saw it as a language when finished, or envisioned a language as the outcome, but chooses not to view it as a language despite knowing in the back of his mind that it is because he wanted to view it more as a scientific literary project made from the western languages.

Anyway, to be frank I'm getting pretty damn tired of this. A language is a language, pure and simple, just as people are people. If we want we can say "but wait, THESE languages are PROJECTS", and at the same time we can say "but wait, people are APES". Both can be true, but it doesn't just suddenly negate that a language is a language and a person is a person. If we continue to insist that a language isn't a language despite the fact we could use it as our primary language if we wanted to (and had the time to), then it's just overthinking.

If we're just gonna classify things in a semantically abusive way I'm just gonna reclassify myself as a "transhuman entity". After all what's the point of calling myself by the same standard naming system that everyone else does? Why must I be human if I feel I'm different to what is culturally perceived to be the "standard" human? Because it just makes everything a hell of a lot easier.

FLOYD HARDIN to PROFESORO D-RO IVO LAPENNA, Jan. 24, 1963:This confusion, which I myself shared, to a degree, was brought about by Dr. Gode's statement that Interlingua is not an international language and has no ambitions to function as an interlanguage in future.

I think you guys are missing the qualifier here. I believe that Gode saw Interlingua as a language, but not as an international language. He saw it as being a language for scientific use.

He did NOT see it as an international auxiliary language, to be used in all fields of life.

Therefore Gode and supporters of Esperanto were at cross purposes. Gode argued that Interlingua was better than Esperanto for scientific debate. Esperantists said that Esperanto is for every communication where speakers have different native language, including communications regarding science. Esperantists asserted that there was no point in having a separate language for science only. Therefore the debate never took place, since the Esperantist 'eminentuloj' who were asked to participate rejected the very premise of the debate.

razlem:
I have yet to see an IAL that looks at communication from a different angle (if anyone knows of one, please send me a link to it). In this sense I mean that the language would use parts of speech and semantics that are not found in natural languages yet easily comprehensible by any speaker of any language (and not just the 'civilized' languages, as claimed by La Unua Libro). My IAL experiment with Angos has attempted this, but I have yet to complete it, let alone start teaching it.

As I've said before, I see no evidence that Esperanto's linguistic properties had much or anything to do with its limited success. But your Angos experiment sounds interesting, and I hope you get to the point of actually getting someone to learn it, to see whether your way of doing things is in fact "easily comprehensible by any speaker of any language." Have you looked at Sambahsa, by the way?

I think that by far the most plausible explanation for Esperanto's very limited success is that the world doesn't want constructed languages. It's tempting to say that they don't want them because they don't really understand them, but I'm afraid that's backwards. They don't understand them because they don't want them, and therefore will settle for a very distorted kind of (mis)understanding.

The tiny minority of people who are, in fact, "conlang-receptive" have already learned Esperanto or Ido or whatever. There's very little reason to suppose that a new project will increase the number of conlang-receptive people. But I suppose a truly scientific approach would be to study the psychology of such people and try to understand what makes them (us) different.