sudanglo:Anyway back on topic, my beef about linguists is the specious argument that linguists know about languages, Esperanto claims to be a language, therefore linguists have worthwhile opinions about Esperanto.

I'm a bit confused by this statement. Are you saying that linguists do have worthwhile opinions or pretend they do?

The point is that if linguists claim that esperanto is NOT a language,

- either they use it as a counterexemple to show what element (of linguistic nature) is missing to esperanto to properly communicate between people of different mother-tongues,

- or declare that esperanto is out of the field of their studies and therefore that they are incompetent to have an opinion about its efficiency.

I am sure that you are right, Altebrilas.

It would not occur to the Esperanto speaking community to consider that our denaskuloj (people exposed to Esperanto as a child) would have any greater authority over questions of grammar.

It rather depends on what happened to them later in life. Did they then take only a desultory interest in Esperanto, have they read widely in Esperanto, do they actively use their Esperanto and so on.

Anyway the riposte to Chomsky, it seems, is simply that he has defined 'language' restrictively in a way that by definition excludes Esperanto.

It could be because the phenomenon of Esperanto is uncomfortable for his theoretical position, but who knows.

Such a view of 'language' doesn't seem to me to be likely to lead to a greater understanding of the defining characteristics of human language and seems vaguely academically disreputable.

Incidentally on the subject of 'puzzle' sentences like 'fish fish etc' and 'the horse walked etc', you would not turn to a English child to establish whether these sentences are well-formed.

That such sentences can be invented in English stems from the extent that English doesn't explicitly mark which grammatical class a word belongs, and confounds in the same word different meanings.

Therefore context and our knowledge of the liklihood of certain things are more important in understanding a sentence in English.

'Food children like' can be more readily understood than 'fish fish fish' and it is more likely that you would comment on a horse walking past something than on a horse being walked past something.

'Well-formed' seems a bit of a weasel word.

I wonder how exactly the question was worded when native speakers were asked to judge if a sentence was good Engish.

An English sentence which was rejected by native speakers might be accepted by the very same speakers in its Esperanto translation.

I might say 'fish fish fish' is poor English, but at the same time accept 'Fiŝoj kiujn fiŝkaptas fiŝoj' even though the idea of fish with fishing rods is improbable.

robbkvasnak:If adults reject "planned languages" why did Martin Luther's peers accept his new version of German, Hochdeutsch? Or why did the Indonesians and the Israelites accept their new languages? Furthermore, there are a few L1 speakers of Esperanto - even in the third generation. Some of them are active in Esperanto life, even in la movado. The founder of Esperanto.org is an example.
The fact that one can acquire Esperanto and express all daily events and everyday thoughts in it without having studied a book, i.e. as L1, shows that Esperanto is a language (unlike Klingon, at least up to now).

But we all know that "planned languages" that were originally natural languages and "planned languages" that are meticulously planned or just plain created are two different things, no amount of pretty words will tell the public any different.

The difference between something like Indonesian and Esperanto is that Indonesian is really Riau Malay but taught and used in a standardised way (hehe, standardised probably isn't the best word for it though). But anyway, its development is mostly identical to English.
We could call these "naturally arising but somewhat cultivated languages".

Esperanto on the other hand is like "well, it's cultivated, but we also made it from scratch", which is nothing like Hochdeutsch, Indonesian, French, although Modern Hebrew is of course a bit more planned than the rest, but still pretty much just a modernised biblical hebrew, at least as far as detractors would be concerned.

So, essentially, there's no point saying Esperanto is the same as other languages. They KNOW there's a difference. What we have to focus on is pushing for them to realise that the difference doesn't make Esperanto inferior, or that the difference doesn't matter, isn't a problem, won't make children into psychopathic killers etc.

As a result, while true, the overuse of referring to Espernato as a "planned language" i can imagine can sort of be seen by detractors as us trying to cover up what we feel uncomfortable about Esperanto's origins by trying to shove it in close with other "planned languages" that might not be the same (in fact, I think "planned languages" isn't suitable for things like Hochdeutsch, Indonesian etc. They're certainly not according to plan now at least).

sudanglo:
If linguists had produced results of any consequence, being more than just descriptions, and having some benefits in practical fields like the learning of languages or machine translations, I would be more inclined to take them seriously.

Linguistics is a science, not a branch of engineering. The purpose of science is to expand understanding, not to generate practical results. The results of scientific inquiry are often put to practical use, but not always, and it's generally not possible to know which results will have practical payoff and which will not. Linguistics is a relatively young science, still grappling with the general principles of language.

I am not aware that generative grammar has any physical reality - relates to how the brain works.

Language is a formal system, and formal systems have formal properties. It is the job of linguistics to study them. Whether those formal properties are constrained by the way the brain works is an interesting hypothesis, which in the end will require convergent research by linguists and neuroscientists. Neither can hope to accomplish it alone.

You would not expect to be able to decide whether white has a forced win in chess by studying the brains of chess players. Nevertheless, it's an open question whether white does have a forced win. If that question is ever answered, it'll be answered by studying the formal properties of the game.

Isn't there a contradiction in saying that GG is not about usage, but at the same time requiring an established usage to test the validity of a GG.

No. I was referring to "usage" as in word choice.

Todd, as regards 'The horse walked past the barn fell', could you give a sentence of the structure Noun verb in the past preposition noun verb in past (no commas) which most native speakers of English would think well-formed.

"The wall painted red collapsed."

"The clothes hung on the line fell."

"The milk left on the table curdled."

Of course if this sentence is supposed to mean 'La ĉevalo promenigita preter la garbejon falis' then the sentence is well formed.

Of course.

Again, I think the proper response to Chomsky is not puerile dismissal of generative grammar or linguistics as a science. The existence of generative grammar is an important discovery about language, even though still very much a work in progress (like most scientific theories). But it's simply not obvious that Chomsky is correct in asserting that Esperanto lacks a GG, or the right kind of speech community to norm it. It's pretty clear that he hasn't done the actual research that would be needed to warrant such a claim. Maybe somebody else has, or will? My guess is that Esperanto does have a proper GG, and I think it would be more than interesting to see it described.

The judgment of what is "well-formed" in a language may be different between Esperanto and other languages, because they are not as regulated as Esperanto. But it seems to me that a living consensus and feeling for correct usage may result in the capacity to make judgments about it. Some may try to systematise these judgments as a group into a "generative grammar", if I understand this term correctly. This consensus in my view arises out of the "life" of a language in a community, which in turns arises out of our innate capacity to make languages, which is subconscious to some extent.

This being the case, other languages can be just as "artificial" as Esperanto, insofar as erudite people may decide on rules as to what correct usage should be, and such usage may become prevalent. But Esperanto can be as "natural" as other languages, insofar as the community of its speakers has a living consensus and feel for correct usage.

This living consensus about certain usages being more in harmony with the community's usage than others, seems to me not purely logical (i.e. a "grammar"), but also aesthetic (recall Keats' Truth is beauty).

What a mysterious thing, this innate capacity for language!

Miland:
This being the case, other languages can be just as "artificial" as Esperanto, insofar as erudite people may decide on rules as to what correct usage should be, and such usage may become prevalent. But Esperanto can be as "natural" as other languages, insofar as the community of its speakers has a living consensus and feel for correct usage.

I agree with this theory that other languages can be just as artificial as Esperanto (even without quotation marks) because grammarians have influenced those languages to give them the formal properties they wanted (some languages, especially written languages being more influenced than others by grammarians).

I agree too with "naturality" of esperanto, because there is a lot of irregularities (Z., pardonu al mi!) in it that originate from natural languages.

sudanglo:

I might say 'fish fish fish' is poor English, but at the same time accept 'Fiŝoj kiujn fiŝkaptas fiŝoj' even though the idea of fish with fishing rods is improbable.

It remins me another debate. Is a fishing rod mandatory to "fisxkapti" fisxojn? Can't it be done with the mouth? (in french "pêcher" works also with a net or even with... dynamite!).

If pragmatics depends of the contry, it is better that "fisxkapti" means only "kapti fisxojn" aux "kapti ion kiel fisxon".

T0dd:

Language is a formal system, and formal systems have formal properties. It is the job of linguistics to study them. Whether those formal properties are constrained by the way the brain works is an interesting hypothesis, which in the end will require convergent research by linguists and neuroscientists. Neither can hope to accomplish it alone.

You would not expect to be able to decide whether white has a forced win in chess by studying the brains of chess players. Nevertheless, it's an open question whether white does have a forced win. If that question is ever answered, it'll be answered by studying the formal properties of the game.

Linguisics are somewhere between logic and psychology, but the limits are not clear. They seem to have been set in an "ad hoc" manner, avoiding (inconsciously) the facts that contradict their theories.

Constructed languages, and especially esperanto are a thorn in their foot: they should either study them (as a formal system) or highlight the properties in what they differ from "natural" languages.

Altebrilas:It remins me another debate. Is a fishing rod mandatory to "fisxkapti" fisxojn? Can't it be done with the mouth? (in french "pêcher" works also with a net or even with... dynamite!).

If pragmatics depends of the contry, it is better that "fisxkapti" means only "kapti fisxojn" aux "kapti ion kiel fisxon".

Interesting comment, in Spanish it's the same... "pescar" doesn't involve a fish rod (some people uses only a fishing hook and rope), you can fish with a net, in old times, people effectively used dynamite. You can fish with a spear...

And you can use the verb "pescar" for uses that don't even involve fish. "Pescar un resfriado" = "to catch a cold", for instance. Pescar can mean to catch, to grab, to fish...

It's also curious how in Spanish "pescado" is a fish that was already fished, while it is alive it is a "pez".

Back on topic... Besides the (annoying) opinion of Mr. Chomsky, what about other linguists? Any esperantist linguist? (I think I saw that one was giving his opinion in this thread).

Amike,

Daniel.

(BTW, I hate how this spell checker gives "obscurantist" and "desperation" as alternatives when it doesn't recognize "esperantist")