T0dd: I think that by far the most plausible explanation for Esperanto's very limited success is that the world doesn't want constructed languages..

Dictators certainly haven't liked it. But it did make progress up to the 1920s, after which nationalist hindrance by France in the League of Nations, persecution in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union all began to take their toll. Since the Cold War we have the ascendancy of English as an international professional language.

Zamenhof did not want the language separated from the interna ideo. The leaders of the early movement prevailed on him not to make too much of the latter, and maybe that was a mistake. But we are free to turn to the view that Z was right. This may be one way to restore the vitality of Esperanto in the long term.

Ceiger to call something which is no more than a language design or project and hasn't yet been put to the acid test, is to put an unacceptable spin on it.

It is by no means evident that any such design could become a spoken language. That has to me demonstrated empirically, as there is no science of language or theoretical framework, from which you can make a prediction that the language design will work in practice,

Todd to talk of Esperanto's very limited success is not fair.

Given the history of so much usage, the wealth of literature, the constant influx of new speakers and its ubiquitous presence on the net, I think it might be more objective to refer to Esperanto's success as outstanding. No other constructed 'language' has come even close.

By the way, the issue for the Esperantists is not whether the world wants constructed languages, but whether Esperanto can provide a means for speakers of different L1 languages to communicate without the costs associated with national language acquisition in adulthood.

Anybody who isn't a native speaker of English knows full well the price that has to be paid in accepting English as the world's lingua franca.

Zamenhof lived in a very different world than we do today. It was a time of great optimism. Technology was progressing rapidly, and people felt that they could solve any problem using the latest new inventions. I think that constructed languages were one of these 'inventions'; they were a fad at the time. Most of the constructed languages invented at the time have now died, and of some of them, we have no trace.

If Zamenhof had released Esperanto today, I think it would not have survived. The only reason, in my opinion, that it lived until today is that it had an active speaker community at the time that the constructed language fad had died out. And the active speaker community believed in the interna ideo. I think that if Esperanto were to start up today, it would be hard to build a core base of speakers, and it would be hard to get them to agree on the interna ideo.

As Todd has pointed out many times, and I have as well, most people decide not to learn Esperanto without a single look at its grammar and vocabulary, without a single look at how easy it is or isn't to learn. So I think that the linguistic aspects of Esperanto are definitely NOT the reason why it isn't more widespread.

However it's a lot of fun to be involved in and it has a great community, and it has lived this long, and it has speakers all over the world, so I think in this regard, all of us in this forum would regard Esperanto as a great success, in spite of the fact that it hasn't really lived up to Zamenhof's hopes.

Today's world is incredibly inhospitable to the idea of an international language. Governments are dismissive of the idea (unlike the governments in Zamenhof's time), people don't care and don't want to know. If Zamenhof were to come back today and see all of the world events that Esperanto has survived, if he were to see Esperanto's relative success in an incredibly inhospitable climate, I think he would be astonished that it has endured through so much strife. I think he would be ever so pleased that Esperanto has had even the level of success that it enjoys today.

Esperanto was designed for a situation of linguistic diversity. In the Americas, North and South of the US-Mexican border, English and Spanish are respectively more or less a lingua franca. But in Africa we have a division between the anglophone and francophone parts, and in the far East I understand that the languages are very different. Not to mention the potential enthusiasm in Brazil, Russia, China and Viet Nam, where the ease of Esperanto in comparison with English may be appreciated. For these reasons, I think Esperanto's potential has yet to be realised.

sudanglo:Todd to talk of Esperanto's very limited success is not fair.

Given the history of so much usage, the wealth of literature, the constant influx of new speakers and its ubiquitous presence on the net, I think it might be more objective to refer to Esperanto's success as outstanding. No other constructed 'language' has come even close.

Oh I agree that Esperanto is far more successful than the other auxlangs that managed to get off the drawing board and actually be learned and spoken. But in terms of its own original ambitions, if I may anthropomorphize it a bit, it's more than fair to say that it has met with very limited success--limited enough to be called failure. Esperanto is not the language that people learn in order to communicate in the world beyond their native language. But that is what it was meant to be.

Despite that, it has come very far indeed. That's a point to be emphasized.

By the way, the issue for the Esperantists is not whether the world wants constructed languages, but whether Esperanto can provide a means for speakers of different L1 languages to communicate without the costs associated with national language acquisition in adulthood.

Of course it can, and anybody who thinks about it for five minutes can see that much. That is, in fact, the proof of the claim that the world doesn't want constructed languages. Esperanto has been around 120+ years, and Esperantists have made heroic efforts to demonstrate its effectiveness to the world. Yet idiotic misperceptions persist, not because people are idiots but because they really just don't want to know about it.

The same moronic criticisms have been made since before any of us were born: Esperanto can't express emotions; you can't tell jokes in Esperanto; Esperanto is no good for literature; etc etc etc. These criticisms are easily refuted by anyone willing to spend even a little time looking into the matter. But they never go away. It's not just ignorance; it's willful ignorance. That's why I say the world doesn't want Esperanto, and that is the issue.

Of course, they don't want Ido or Interlingua either. But maybe razlem will get lucky with Angos!

T0dd: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.

(There have been a number of posts since T0dd made this one, but I have just now seen it, so maybe I will be excused for coming in so late to the discussion.)

I am somewhat familiar with Ido's Principle of Reversibility, but I am not sure what you mean by Esperanto's system of necessity and sufficiency which does not require as complex a system of affixes. I for one would be grateful if you could elaborate some. Thanks.

Paŭlo

T0dd:Of course, they don't want Ido or Interlingua either. But maybe razlem will get lucky with Angos!

I can only dream

Certainly, but to be fair, the price to pay in accepting Spanish would not be smaller. And I would bet that any other national language would also demand similar costs.

It is really incomprehensible how planned languages face such opposition on the part of people who have no personal interest in mantaining the present statu quo (i.e. they are not native English speakers, nor translators, nor sell English courses, etc.).

I once read an article by Claude Piron, in which he speculated about psichological reasons for this rejection (but I don't remember the details).

Regards,

Daniel

sudanglo:
Anybody who isn't a native speaker of English knows full well the price that has to be paid in accepting English as the world's lingua franca.

bartlett22183:
I am somewhat familiar with Ido's Principle of Reversibility, but I am not sure what you mean by Esperanto's system of necessity and sufficiency which does not require as complex a system of affixes. I for one would be grateful if you could elaborate some. Thanks.

Paŭlo

I am at your service. First, lazy beast that I am, I shall quote Wikipedia:

Ido introduced a number of suffixes in an attempt to clarify the morphology of a given word, so that the part of speech of the root would not need to be memorized. In the case of the word krono "a crown", the suffix -izar "to cover with" is added to create the verb kronizar "to crown". From this verb it is possible to remove the verbal -ar and replace it with a nominal -o, creating the word kronizo "a coronation". By not allowing a noun to be used directly as a verb, as in Esperanto, Ido verbal roots can be recognized without the need to memorize them.

So, that's one sort of case. In Esperanto, you have to remember which form of a word is basic. In Ido, you don't, at least most of the time. The trade-off is that you must always remember to use the right affix. For example, MARTELO is a noun, "hammer", in both languages. The verb MARTELI in Esperanto is simply "to hammer". In Ido, you can't use that (I think), and the -IZAR affix doesn't fit, so you use MARTELAGI, which indicates acting with or using a hammer.

Another interesting case is adjectives. Esperanto has the ending -A to make adjectives. The ending indicates either pertaining to or characteristic of whatever the root concept is. So, ARBA could mean either pertaining to trees, or treelike. Usually context clarifies which is meant. In Ido, you have those to functions split between two endings: -A and -ALA. The -A ending indicates characteristic; -ALA indicates pertaining to. So ARBA means treelike, and ARBALA means pertaining to trees.

It's true that occasionally we want to specify in Esperanto whether we mean characteristic of or pertaining to, rather than letting context sort it out. In such cases, we can resort to ARBECA, for example, to emphasize that we are speaking of a tree-like thing. And we could, if necessary, emphasize that something pertains to trees but is not actually treelike, by using, say, PRIARBA. In the majority of cases, however, we needn't bother with such locutions. Esperanto allows us to use the minimum set of affixes that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient to convey the meaning, in context.

In contrast, Ido requires the speaker always to decide which ending to use.