Aportes: 216
Idioma: English
razlem (Mostrar perfil) 2 de junio de 2011 22:57:25
Maybe you're asking the wrong people. The 'phenomenon' of Esperanto is more a sociological one, not a linguistic one.
Noktomezo (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 03:22:54
ceigered:Well, The way he keeps saying crazy, unpopular things, he might not be for long.omid17:Some linguists vehemently dismiss EO. Most notable remark is made by Chomsky who has gone so far as saying that Esperanto is not a languageUnfortunately, he's very respected in the field of linguistics, so we just have to put up with such silliness until he's no longer as influential
ceigered (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 03:37:32
Noktomezo:Well, The way he keeps saying crazy, unpopular things, he might not be for long.Well, it depends on who finds him unpopular. To cold, hard scientists he might be liked for being so disregarding of the bias of us speakers wanting our languages to be recognised as something special and beyond his hard analyses.
A drop in influence will occur only after a newer, stronger, better perspective is presented, or someone builds upon Chomsky's stuff in a very empowering manner. It would of course be nice for Chomsky to play his own critique in some manners though.
sudanglo (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 08:34:50
Perhaps it was a defining characteristic of birds in the past that they could fly. Then someone discovered flightless birds.
By confining their studies to 'natural languages' (those whose origin can not be pinpointed to a particular year) linguists may not have correctly perceived which properties of languages are accidental and which defining.
Any theories put forward by linguists of what constitutes a human language may suffer from this bias.
So if some linguist wants to declare Esperanto as not being a language, it could just be that he is making the 'black swan' error, and his theoretical position is dubious.
I suspect that there are some correct generalisations that you can make about language without knowing the the world's 6000 languages. But they may be quite trivial.
For example, a language will not include all sounds that you can make with the human vocal apparatus, or there will be some combinations of words that the speakers would consider ungrammatical.
Basically, it is up to the linguists to prove that Esperanto is not a language, not up to the Esperantists to prove the linguists are wrong.
And Razlem, Esperanto is a sociological phenomenon only in the sense that any other language is a sociological or cultural phenomenon.
The importance of Esperanto for Linguistics is that it is a test case for their theories.
It is a language with unusual traditions shared among the speakers and that govern its usage, and as such can hardly be legitimately ignored, any more than the existence of certain particles can be ignore by Physicists, or the existence of certain types of stars can be ignored by Astronomers.
EdRobertson (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 09:12:57
tommjames (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 09:43:36
sudanglo (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 11:08:39
Languages are not simply formal systems. The communication furnished by any sentence (its meaning) depends also on the nature of the world.
Also, Esperanto is still evolving, still a work in progress.
That there may be disputes about the meaning of certain sentences in Esperanto among experienced Esperantists means little. It would, of course, be a practical problem, if there were no way of rephrasing such problematic sentences for greater clarity.
Any schoolmaster who teaches English in Britain will have seen examples of poor use of English where the meaning is inadequately conveyed.
To take a poem to illustrate difficulty in interpretation is surely scraping the bottom of the barrel. Poems are notoriously vague and capable of different interpretations.
If Linguists have limited themselves to the task of extracting rules without reference to what goes on in the world, what is probable in the world, then their view of language is removed from that of the man in the street who happily gets on with the job of communicating with his fellow men.
erinja (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 11:11:35
Funding is also an issue. Research is governed not only by the interests of the researcher, but also by the interests of whoever is providing the funding. I can imagine that it would be difficult to get funded for study of constructed languages.
sudanglo (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 11:38:18
I think here we can usefully conduct a thought experiment about the early days of evolution of the indigenous languages.
Why should we imagine that way back in the mists of time the grammactical structure of these languages and the agreement on meaning within the community had developed to the point of making all (or the majority of) sentences clear out of context.
With a limited vocabulary and crude grammar, it is highly likely that such 'pralingvoj' were heavily interpreted according to the situation.
Miland (Mostrar perfil) 3 de junio de 2011 12:50:07
1. His central thesis appears to be that there is no community of "native speakers" in Esperanto which his essay suggests is the only adequate criterion of correct usage. I am not sure that the lack of consensus among experienced speakers is so great as he suggests. The use of des pli may be a case in point.
2. Miner asks how Esperanto comprehension can be tested. There are international examinations entirely in Esperanto that concern themselves with this skill (among other things).