sudanglo:Thus Esperanto is an unusual subject for study by linguists who delight in just those features of language that Esperantists strive to avoid.

I sometimes think that the efforts of 'students' of natural languages and their desire to create laws of language are rather comic.

Imagine someone who has spent their life in the analysis of the streets, mews, courts lanes, alleys, avenues, passages and boulevards of cities like London, Paris and Berlin and then tries to produce sweeping generalisations about cities without any knowledge of the regular layout of New York.

Hahaha, I do hope these three aren't all tightly interconnected paragraphs otherwise that'd be the same time of sweeping generalisation! . I'd (rather harshly) put many of those above mentioned fellows as being beginners in those respective fields, and then divide them into by-the-bookers (to whom EO may appear as breaking the rules), true-blue linguists (without fear of insulting others as they question everything to find the root of everything), and then the ignorant fellows that are a bad combination of the two, and the nice fellows who are a good combination of the two.

Nonetheless - analysing Esperanto and discussing it can sometimes be like being a reporter in the Middle East or Africa in some of the regions that have to deal with the rather hectic and often carnivorous face of the west - wear a flack jacket at all times and try to sympathetic and empathetic to those who might be exhausted from being misunderstood or stereotyped

sudanglo:If there are any laws of language to be discovered that arise from our neurons, rather than our human freedom to create any cultural institutions we so desire, then perhaps the place to look is in the psychological and medical laboratories and not in the higgledy-piggledy arrangements of the historically burdened natural languages.

Chomsky has argued (pretty convincingly, in my view) that the set of possible, or learnable, languages is constrained by innate universal grammar. That is, we are hard-wired to accept certain kinds of grammars, and to reject others. His argument isn't based on neuroscience, because neuroscience isn't yet advanced enough to support (or falsify) it. It's based on convergent lines of evidence from language acquisition studies and observational studies of linguistic universals.

If Chomsky is right, then it's possible to design an artificial language that, while seeming perfectly fine on paper, can't be learned, because it violates too many of the rules of universal grammar.

Whether Chomsky's right or not, anybody, if they had the time and energy could devise a language that would be difficult to learn, just as anybody could design a practically unplayable game (because the rules were too complicated).

Would you imagine that the set of possible/learnable games is constrained by a universal grammar of games?

I certainly would grant the point that there are levels of complexity that are brains cannot easily handle, but that doesn't seem to be a major concession.

Nor does it seem to imply a mysterious underlying pattern (Universal grammar) to be found in all languages.

Anyway, if such an unlikely beast exists, it must be present in Esperanto since people can clearly speak Esperanto. So, wasn't Zamenhof lucky!

A simpler and more conceptually economical explanation for Esperanto being learnable is that its structures are simple.

Ceiger, poetically worded, but the real reaon why 'linguists' need to tread carefully (with or without a flak jacket) is that there is no good reason to suppose that their experience with the chaos of specific natural languages gives them any insight or special knowledge when it comes to Esperanto.

They make a conceptual or category error in supposing that Esperanto has to follow their laws, and in any case the idea of universal laws of language is doubtful and unproven.

Why imagine that somebody who is expert in Rugby, Football and Cricket, knows anything about Chess.

sudanglo:
I certainly would grant the point that there are levels of complexity that are brains cannot easily handle, but that doesn't seem to be a major concession.

Nor does it seem to imply a mysterious underlying pattern (Universal grammar) to be found in all languages.

Indeed it doesn't. The fact that there are levels of complexity that brains cannot easily handle is not part of Chomsky's evidence for universal grammar.

To take an example, no language forms the negative by simply reversing the order of all the words in the affirmative sentence. As rules for negation go, this is very very simple. It's simpler than the English rule for negation, which requires correct placement of a conjugated auxiliary verb. It's simpler than the French placement of "ne" and "pas". But no language does it, and in fact it's difficult for us to do. If a sentence is more than a few words long, it's quite difficult to say it backwards. It's not complexity that makes it difficult. It's something else.

Anyway, if such an unlikely beast exists, it must be present in Esperanto since people can clearly speak Esperanto. So, wasn't Zamenhof lucky!

A simpler and more conceptually economical explanation for Esperanto being learnable is that its structures are simple.

A better explanation is that Zamenhof had a good ear for language and avoided inventing structures that weren't present, in one form or another, in any language that he knew about.

In contrast, loglan and lojban are based on predicate logic, in a way that no living language ever was. Even its creators seem to have a hard time achieving fluency in them, despite being highly motivated to do so. Although it's hard to quantify simplicity, predicate logic is structurally simple, being fully axiomatized. Its simplicity, however, doesn't make it easily learnable.

I think the fact that Zamenhof spent a lot of time testing his language, on his own and with others, is what enabled him to avoid doing things that may have seemed clever to him but would have created barriers to learnability.

sudanglo:They make a conceptual or category error in supposing that Esperanto has to follow their laws, and in any case the idea of universal laws of language is doubtful and unproven.

I honestly don't care how linguists treat Esperanto as long as it's impartial and they don't do so as *expletive plural noun*. I think any linguist who thinks they have something special to say about EO that they couldn't say about any other language could likely be full of it.

But this is pretty much the reason why a flakjacket is needed - EO may be unique, but it's not so unique that it's some ascended entity that has status over any other language. There are some unique traits we can analyse quite deeply and come to the conclusion that Esperanto in that regards is incomparable with any existent contemporary, or superior (or inferior). But the overall package of Esperanto is ultimately just a language, and thus it is sensible for it to be treated as such. I honestly wouldn't have believed that any such sensible linguist would try anything else, but Noam Chomsky has attempted to (and thus one may ask if that was really sensible judgement of him).

So, relating that to Esperanto, having some know-it-all jerk come and tell the EO community that our language isn't perfect can seem pretty unfair and stupid, especially when there are some who feel EO is perfect and those people are just fools. Thus, when a well-meaning fellow comes by and tries to treat EO as "just any language", or tries to analyse something about EO that makes it special without being overly positive, the average criticism-wary Esperantist is bound to have warning lights flashing everywhere in their brain.

Thus, it pays for anyone wishing to do such to prepare before hand for any possible negative reactions or fall out or misunderstandings by vary carefully looking over what they're planning to say as if they were the beforementioned criticism-wary Esperantist.

Sudanglo:Ceiger, poetically worded, but the real reaon why 'linguists' need to tread carefully (with or without a flak jacket) is that there is no good reason to suppose that their experience with the chaos of specific natural languages gives them any insight or special knowledge when it comes to Esperanto.

Apart from the fact that they're linguists? Granted, saying every linguist knows what he's talking about (since linguistics can be opinionated if you don't look at various sources) is like saying all policemen live by the law and that all teachers impart knowledge with a 100% percent success rate. At the same time though, it'd be sort of rude to tell a teacher that them being a teacher is no good reason for them being able to teach (technically true, but we assume in good faith the question doesn't need to be asked)

And just because they're used to chaos, doesn't mean they can't comprehend and appreciate regularity - after all, there is no language that has no regular features whatsoever (although I've heard one German linguist apparently say that there is no such thing as a regular verb in Georgian ). EO is a fairly normal language with the irregularities taken out, and it's not 100% original either. Zamenhoff was smart for putting in the features he did, but he didn't make it such that it was immune to being seen as a language and not as some unique other entity.

T0dd:In contrast, loglan and lojban are based on predicate logic, in a way that no living language ever was. Even its creators seem to have a hard time achieving fluency in them, despite being highly motivated to do so. Although it's hard to quantify simplicity, predicate logic is structurally simple, being fully axiomatized. Its simplicity, however, doesn't make it easily learnable.

Not to shoo off the interesting idea of having some form of universal grammar, since it clearly exists to some extent otherwise linguistic universals wouldn't really exist and no language would really be similar to one another today, but I always put that difficulty in Lojban down to bad explanations of the grammar. After looking at some features and thinking about them, they really do seem quite easy to comprehend if put in laymen's speak. Also, the writing system is deceptive since it's based off of the Latin alphabet but uses strange conventions.

I believe if Lojban was aesthetically packaged and instructed in an agreeable manner, it'd be quite easy. But, alas, my difficulty with it was that there was so much damn jargon I couldn't actually learn enough to really start putting it into my own terminology that I could understand

sudanglo:They make a conceptual or category error in supposing that Esperanto has to follow their laws, and in any case the idea of universal laws of language is doubtful and unproven.

No language follows any laws other than its own. Universal laws of language merely change to reflect what is known about languages, with the hope that eventually, what people call "the universal laws of language" and what are indeed the real "universal laws of language" will coincide. Apart from those with strange or unscientific opinions (like the prior mentioned Noam Chomsky in regards to Esperanto), linguistics is like any other science - it is what is known, what is visible/audible/understandable to humans. Thus, whatever is possible in Eo is automatically possible according to linguistics. The only real universal laws of languages that I can think of at the moment are linguistic universals, and even then they are divided into categories depending on whether the are universal in that they apply to many as a general rule, or whether every language must have the feature. Those latter ones aren't even totally agreed on since they have the unfortunate nature of requiring humans to discover every type of language to come up with those rules.

As far as I know, EO without a doubt meets all linguistic requirements for being a language. Those who say otherwise are clearly stupid, ignorant, or playing with words (the latter probably being Noam Chomsky).

ceigered:So, relating that to Esperanto, having some know-it-all jerk come and tell the EO community that our language isn't perfect can seem pretty unfair and stupid, especially when there are some who feel EO is perfect and those people are just fools. Thus, when a well-meaning fellow comes by and tries to treat EO as "just any language", or tries to analyse something about EO that makes it special without being overly positive, the average criticism-wary Esperantist is bound to have warning lights flashing everywhere in their brain.

With all due respect, ceigered, I think you've completely missed the point.

I think that most Esperanto speakers don't have a problem with the idea of analyzing Esperanto, or comparing it with other languages. Many of them spend hours doing so, happily.

The problem is when you get into this positive/negative thing. You bring up that they get offended when someone says Esperanto isn't perfect, or speaks negatively about aspects of Esperanto.

The problem is not comparing aspects of Esperanto to aspects of other languages - the problem is to say that Esperanto does these things in a "better" or "worse" way than other languages.

What *is* a perfect language? What language is perfect? And why would we want to discuss this? And outside of the field of constructed languages, when do you EVER have a discussion on whether a language is perfect, or which language is "better" than another? If you don't do it for other languages, why on earth should you do it for Esperanto?

I think that most Esperanto speakers would be overjoyed to see Esperanto treated as "just any other language".

We could compare German and Swahili in their differing treatment of verb tenses and irregular plurals. We could say that German makes it easier to make certain distinctions than Swahili, or that Swahili makes it easier to express certain ideas than German, or even that German verbs are easier/harder to conjugate than Swahili verbs. But no one is saying that German is "better" than Swahili, or that Swahili is "more perfect" than German. A similar conversation comparing Esperanto with another language wouldn't be a problem to any Esperanto speaker I know.

Do you see what I'm saying? Comparison of languages should be comparisons of traits and not competitions to determine which is 'better'.

Many Esperanto speakers love talking about languages and learning about languages. I've heard Esperanto speakers discussing how aspects of Esperanto are perhaps less logical than advertised, and discussions of how Esperanto expresses something grammatically compared to other languages. But it's comparison for the sake of interest and for the sake of learning, not for the sake of proving that Esperanto's way is better than the other language's way.

Flak jackets?

People who want to discuss Esperanto on an equal basis, a truly equal basis, not on a basis of deciding which language is 'more perfect' than another, don't need flak jackets.

However people who come into Esperanto settings to prove that some other language is "more perfect" than Esperanto need flak jackets because they are being insulting. There are people who are born in Esperanto-speaking families and speak it for their whole lives until death (plus a national language, of course). How dare someone suggest that our language is somehow not "as good" as other languages? It's a living language, not an in-group slang or a fun proposal to toy with and improve upon.

At a maximum you could have a debate about which language would be the most suitable international auxiliary language. But I would hazard to say that more than half of Esperanto speakers love Esperanto for its own sake, not because it is "the best IAL that could ever exist", not even because it's the best IAL that currently exists, but because they love the culture, community, and freedom to express themselves. So it's a bit pointless to go to an Esperanto forum and discuss whether Esperanto is really the best IAL, because most people just don't care, they enjoy the language for what it is today.

Chomsky's claim that Esperanto isn't a language is based on certain properties that all other languages have, which Esperanto lacks. One of these is a community of native speakers whose usage is normative.

When linguists discuss what is and isn't a sentence in English, French, or any other natural language, their most basic test is: Is this string of words accepted as English (or whatever) by native speakers? It doesn't have to be understood; it merely has to be recognized as belonging to the language. A physicist could say something to me about quantum mechanics that I don't understand at all, but I'd still recognize it as English.

In Esperanto, we have a small number of native speakers, but their usage is not normative. For Chomsky to infer from this that Esperanto is not a language is, of course, highly polemical. He knows as well as anybody that Esperanto speakers actually converse in Esperanto. He's merely making a point that Esperanto fails to satisfy a commonly used criterion. We will say that this only demonstrates the inadequacy of that particular criterion, as a defining condition of language. I don't know that Chomsky would disagree with that.

When linguists study Esperanto, the important thing is for them to study it for what it is, rather than for what it isn't. The continued existence of Esperanto depends upon the vigilance of its users in a way that other languages don't. This creates a set of values and priorities that are attached to Esperanto in a way that's different from other languages. English doesn't need a "netuŝebla Fundmento"; Esperanto does. This is something that linguists can't (or shouldn't, anyway) ignore.

Apart from the fact that they're linguists?

But that's my point, Ceiger, I don't think that that they are linguists does put them in a special position - other than that if they know some Esperanto and they know language A or B then they are in a position to make comparisons with A or B and Esperanto.

But then all Esperantists are also speakers of another language so they can make such comparisons anyway.

It's only if you accept that there is some special theoretical knowledge about natural languages that linguists have acquired AND that Esperanto is 'just another language' that the linguist is in a privileged position.

Now, as Todd very usefully pointed out, Esperanto is already distinguished from all other languages by the criterion for deciding whether any sentence is well formed.

And the fact that the culture of the speakers is such that certain 'natural' tendencies to be found in national languages are actively resisted by Esperanto speakers also puts Esperanto in a different class.

Another feature would be that the community of speakers is not a normal group of human beings.

I would be amazed to find that the average IQ among Esperanto speakers is anywhere near 100, that in communities of speakers of other languages bilinguality is universal, or to find another language which is normally only learnt in adulthood.

Whatever the consequences of these differences might be, these differences certainly establish the 'portantoj' of the language as an atypical group.

Todd you make an interesting point about the rule for making a sentence negative. But that a rule may be simple formulate doesn't make it necessarily simple to implement.

And counting backwards from 100 is difficult and that involves no grammar.

However, the real objection to this line of argument is that there must be an unlimited number of rules that one could conjure up that would be not be found in most, if not all languages. But this doesn't establish the positive presence of universal rules.