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Linguists and esperanto

von Altebrilas, 24. Mai 2011

Beiträge: 216

Sprache: English

Altebrilas (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 09:34:39

I have already asked it in esperanto forum, but got no answer.

Does anybody know if somewhere is a compilation of opinions of linguists about esperanto?

Thanks a lot if you can help me.

Miland (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 10:22:41

I know of only one book about E-o from a linguist's point of view, namely by Gledhill.

At World Congresses, there is an Internacia Kongresa Universitato where many of the lectures are about linguistic issues, so you might find something there.

ceigered (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 11:57:22

I don't know of any, and even then I doubt you'd find one that's unbiased. Then again, depending on your motives, you might want a biased one okulumo.gif

omid17 (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 12:33:05

Some linguists vehemently dismiss EO. Most notable remark is made by Chomsky who has gone so far as saying that Esperanto is not a language

ceigered (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 12:56:14

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 language
Unfortunately, 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 malgajo.gif

Kirilo81 (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 14:02:35

The bad thing is that most linguists don't know anything about planned languages, so their opinions don't give more insight than anyone's else ones (else's??), but of course one tends to believe them, as they should know better.
I'm saying this as a linguist, by the way.

ceigered (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 14:14:54

Go Kirilo! Usurp Chomsky and his reign of terror upon we Esperantujanoj! ridulo.gif

Kirilo81:so their opinions don't give more insight than anyone's else ones (else's??)
"So their opinions don't give (any)more insight than anyone else's", I believe. Else apparently seems to act as an adjectival modifier to "anyone", so the 's just comes at the end of the whole lot, or so I just read 1 second ago.

Altebrilas (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 14:47:03

The book of Gledhill seems interesting. I'd read the bibliography but most references are about esperantists.

Concerning Chomsky, does he have his own definition of "language" and claims that esperanto don't fall in its scope, or is it just a subjective opinion?

It is known that Chomsky has redefined some linguistic terms like grammar, anaphor, etc. and it may be the case for language.

razlem (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 14:59:59

Kirilo81:most linguists don't know anything about planned languages
How so?

(anyone else's)

omid17 (Profil anzeigen) 24. Mai 2011 15:22:35

First i have to say that my knowledge of linguistics is very limited, so if there is any experts out there please correct my possible misunderstandings...

He is looking at the matter through his own theory (That grammatical rules are hardwired to the brain and that's why all the natural languages share a single universal grammar.) He says that we are yet to understand human mind and how it functions and therefore we don't fully "know" any languages. So the claim that the language X is preplanned and fully known is meaningless. Building a language from scratch without knowing what one is talking about is absurd. He goes on to claim that esperanto is simply a codification on national languages and doesn't separately exist as a language. Here's his own words (as found in the net):

The interest of linguists, as linguists, in universal language was based on an illusion, which linguists had but no longer have. That was the illusion that Esperanto is a language, and it isn’t. Yeah, Esperanto has a couple of hints that people who know language can use based on their own linguistic knowledge to make a language out of it, but nobody can tell you what the rules of Esperanto are. If they could tell you that, they could tell you what the rules of Spanish are, and that turns out to be an extremely hard problem, a hard problem of the sciences, to find out what’s really in the head of a Spanish speaker that enables them
to speak and understand and think the way they do.

That’s a problem at the edge of science. I mean, a Spanish speaker knows it intuitively, but that doesn’t help. I mean, a desert ant knows how to navigate, but that doesn’t help the insect scientist. [...] To be puzzled by simple questions is a very hard step, and it’s the first step in science, really. And the same is true about the nature of Esperanto, or Spanish, on which it’s based, and so on. We don’t know the answers to the questions of what the principles of Esperanto do because if we did, we would know the answer to how language works, and that’s much harder than knowing how a desert ant navigates, which is hard enough. So, now it is understood that Esperanto is not a language. It’s just parasitic on other languages. Then comes a question, which is not a linguistic question, but a question of practical utility. Is it more efficient to teach people a system which is parasitic on actual languages, and somewhat simplifies, eliminating some of the details of actual historical languages; or is just more efficient to have then a whole lot of languages. And I think it’s now pretty widely accepted that the latter is better and not hard.

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