sudanglo:And, I expect, Ceiger, you could find U-tube Videos of Trekkies having a go at Klingon - So what.

So this automatically devalues everything I just said? Perhaps it means that Klingon counts as a language too? Of course, that's youtube, and there's heaps of crap on youtube. But to see a documentary style video about an entire interlingua conference, to me, shows evidence of using the language properly, like with Esperanto.

Of course, if you'd like to call bollocks on that, then I can easily change my mind and go "oh well, EO's not a language". After all, all I've ever seen are youtube videos of conferences and seemingly insignificant (laŭ via opinio) things like that.

The so called vital distinction is purely SCALE. EO's community is BIGGER. That's all that needs to be argued. You don't need to look for some other magical reason, coz there AIN'T any. We can't put all of our effort into going "wow Esperanto's so unique", it won't work that way. There are languages with bigger communites, and liked by far more people. This does not devalue Esperanto, and thus Esperanto should not devalue languages "below" it (on the linguistic food chain). We have to sell the language for what it is, otherwise if we try to say Esperanto is seperate or better etc to other languages, what are we doing? We're both giving free advertisement to those other languages, and we're coming off as if we're got a superiority complex. WE DON'T WANT THAT!.

Cheers.

Sudanglo:How can the general public be expected to see the distinction, if we (I mean Esperantists) don't forcibly assert it ourseves.

Well they ain't a bunch of idiots. If they don't like EO when they here it's a language or some special language, which it is often termed as, they ain't gonna learn it. You can't force people to learn it if they don't like it and that doesn't make them stupid (It makes them narrow minded - just joking! ).

In all seriousness, the public are likely to only KNOW about Esperanto. There's no point differentiating between EO and other conlangs because the general public don't know they even exist. The only way you could sell Esperanto any differently or make it sound special is to outright lie about it and brainwash people who still don't want to learn it then.

So, there is no reason to advertise EO as being "better" than other conlangs, because EO's size is a passive advertisement as-is, and no one cares about conlangs or knows there's even such a category (people tend to call them made-up languages). The only exceptions are Klingon and Na'vi, and if people don't think those are langauges, they're not gonna call EO a language if they've never heard of it before since they'll put 1 and 1 together and go "so, if the made up languages Klingon and Na'vi aren't languages, how is the made up language Esperanto". And that is a VERY hard argument to win, since anything that isn't a proper argument with decent evidence just results in the other party looking at you like you're some fanatical evangelist for a cult.

Thus, building up Esperanto to be something it isn't necessarily, or demoting other conlangs to non-language status to make Esperanto look better, is shooting ourselves in the foot.

About the more original topic, another thing to consider - whether you are going to use Interlingua to consume or produce.

A consumer only needs to be able to read it and listen to it. As an English speaker, or better yet an English speaker with sufficient knowledge of romance languages (e.g. if you learn Spanish/Italian etc, even say Esperanto), reading interlingua is very easy and doesn't require much effort, except a grammar reference and dictionary loaded on another tab in your browser.

A producer needs to understand the grammar, have a lexicon in their head and needs to be intimately experienced with the language so they can write and speak in a way that similarly experienced individuals can understand.

This doesn't really work with EO, unless we talk about Ido, since EO is different enough from other languages that the similarities aren't so common you can passively read texts with little effort needed to comprehend them. Interlingua though is like a dialect of every single romance language, and since English is practically half anglo norman french, an English speaker doesn't need to be able to understand the language to understand it if you get my drift

The original question of this thread is interesting, since one of the arguments sometimes given in support of Esperanto is that it facilitates learning other languages. One needs to be careful with that argument, however, since it's possible that a more naturalistic language such as Interlingua or Occidental would actually do this better, at least as far as Romance languages are concerned. This is strictly an empirical question, though. There's no way to know without doing actual studies. I don't see those happening anytime soon.

ceigered:So this automatically devalues everything I just said? Perhaps it means that Klingon counts as a language too?

Seriously, you guys, if you want to keep discussing this, please take it to the private messages. There are only a few people active on this vehement debate and I doubt that anyone will convince anyone, but if you want to continue duking it out, I suggest taking it private.

erinja:

ceigered:So this automatically devalues everything I just said? Perhaps it means that Klingon counts as a language too?

Seriously, you guys, if you want to keep discussing this, please take it to the private messages. There are only a few people active on this vehement debate and I doubt that anyone will convince anyone, but if you want to continue duking it out, I suggest taking it private.

I apologize, and I've edited my last salvo post so that only the content relevant to the original topic remains. As I think about it, I'm not certain that this topic belongs here at all either, but until you say otherwise I'll assume it's okay.

I think this is a semi important question to a learner of Esperanto acquainted with Interlingua. After all, some might feel as if they have to reshuffle their priorities around this new discovery (I think that the discovery is exciting, but no need to make it change what you were doing originally).

RE T0dd's previous addition to the volley discussion, I do miss that post since even though we should end this sooner or later (preferably sooner). But I think it's important that this actually does end *here* where it was originally brought up, since in the public domain, this is where people not too knowledgeable on the subject will find this controversy, and I personally don't want people getting the wrong ideas (I guess I should hope that everyone who reads it from now on is pretty relaxed and not in the habit of looking into things too much ).

I think everyone here agrees that Esperanto is a language. Since this is a website for learning Esperanto, and since Esperanto's language-ness isn't in question, I think it's not really the right place for passing judgement on other constructed languages. A little digression is ok, but this whole thread has been diverted to an off-topic discussion. The original poster asked a fairly straightforward question about whether learning Interlingua would help with learning other Romance languages. She got some useful answers on that topic. She didn't really need to know everyone's opinion on whether Interlingua is a language, and quite frankly whether you consider Interlingua to be a language or not is not even relevant to the original question. An audio recording is not a language but it is a tool can help you to learn a language, so even if you were to agree that Interlingua isn't a language, that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't useful for helping you learn a language.

Furthermore, most posts have come from the same few people. So it's hardly the entire forum that has been participating. I've personally been ignoring most of the off-topic debate here.

Resolving topics is all well and good that presupposes that they can be resolved. If I were one to wager, I would put a lot of money on the fact that sudanglo isn't going to come to agree with Todd and ceigered anytime soon, and Todd and ceigered won't be agreeing with sudanglo anytime soon. So there will be no resolution; the maximum that we can achieve is to agree to disagree. Future readers getting the 'wrong ideas'? That presupposes that sudanglo will change his mind and say "By George, you're both right, Interlingua IS a language after all!" That will never happen.

So let's let the thread drop and back away slowly, and get back to our regularly scheduled Esperanto programming.

If you guys want to continue discussing this, please take it to the Esperanto forums.

Yes, I know, ceigered, you aren't focussing on Esperanto right not, because of your studies of other languages. I mean this in a nice way but the fact that you don't want to do too much with Esperanto, so not to interfere with your other languages, it isn't an excuse for keeping off-topic threads in the English forum. Move it to an Esperanto forum, or take it to private messages.

I checked out a book yesterday by an F.P. Gopsilli, "International Languages: a matter for interlingua" and thought I'd post an update. There is a segment citing research regarding constructed languages' use in more quickly acquiring a national language (a concept I think almost all Esperantists are familiar with), and several of the studies were indeed about Esperanto's success in this area. Interlingua had similar results. Interlingua could, hypothetically, be more useful than Esperanto if the only goal was to acquire a Latindia. The author speculated that Interlingua allowed students to study lesser-used vocabulary earlier because they can spend less time on grammar. This makes sense. But Esperanto is far more viable in its own right than Interlingua (or so I believe most people on this forum would agree). As for me, I don't think Interlingua would help Western Esperanto-speakers too much.

I tend to agree.

To take it a step further, if someone was studying Latin for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of English vocabulary, I would say that Interlingua would be a better choice, since you would be focussing mainly on vocabulary, and not on grammar (which is very complex in Interlingua)

If you wanted to learn grammar, I think Esperanto is the better choice, since its grammar is easier (I have heard) than Interlingua's.

Whole package, I think Esperanto is better bang for your buck because you can not only use it to "learn how to learn" languages, but you can also use it as a language in its own right, which is hard to do with Interlingua, since Interlingua is so small.

I understood it as that you learn interlingua an learn the general gist of the grammar of latinids through that, then apply that grammatical lnowledge to say spanish, learn the grammar faster and thus focus on more unique vocabulary in Spanish more than youd be normslly able, with interlingua working in tandem with english to fill up the remainder of your vocabulary by presenting balanced cognate forms which can more easily be converted into spanish than if you only knew English.

Ultimately though if you know Esperanto well enough, learning interlingua would be taking up more time, but otherwise learning interlingua as your first foreign language then the latinids after would be quite faster. Only no one has heard of interlingua if they havent heard of esperanto

Internationally though, which is more efficient is beyond me. Both are easy but have strange quirks by natlang standards (although i guess all natlangs have strange quirks by eo standards!)