Miland:Piron's argument is not that Chinese and Esperanto are related. It is that Esperanto has a feature (isolation) which means that it cannot simply be classified with European languages.

It can't be classified with them because it's constructed, not because it isolates.

Miland:But there is another reason why Esperanto is suitable as an international language. Such a language ideally builds on preparation in people's minds; Zamenhof rejected a language based on random simple syllables, for this reason. Now speakers of Romance or Germanic languages as first languages do have an advantage in learning Esperanto.

Preparation only for European languages. I said before, it's coincidence that EO and Chinese have isolating features, and Z's quote solidifies Esperanto's foundation in European languages.

Miland:But the majority of people in the world have had exposure to English, French or Spanish as a second language. In Eastern Europe, the structure of those languages is also a preparation for Esperanto.

What an elitist excuse, to expect people to have been exposed to a European language.

Miland:The isolating characteristic of Esperanto gives an advantage to speakers of those languages that have the facility.

Every language has this facility to some degree, therefore no one has an advantage.

I think you might find the Piron comments in this pdf interesting: Lernfacileco (download from my site). The comments start on page 2.

PS: "Es gan ma-sam pi lenfacil lau gepat ling" = Estas granda diferenco pri lernfacileco laŭ la gepatra lingvo (at least, so it seems!)

Chainy:I think you might find the Piron comments in this pdf interesting: Lernfacileco (download from my site). The comments start on page 2.

PS: "Es gan ma-sam pi lenfacil lau gepat ling" = Estas granda diferenco pri lernfacileco laŭ la gepatra lingvo (at least, so it seems!)

Dankon

Told you Miland, the extrinsic is the one that gives learners the most problems (as shown by Piron).

razlem:

Miland:But the majority of people in the world have had exposure to English, French or Spanish as a second language. In Eastern Europe, the structure of those languages is also a preparation for Esperanto.

What an elitist excuse, to expect people to have been exposed to a European language.

Actually, I must take Miland's side here for a second, since he does raise a good point.

While it might seem elitist, it is fairly true that the European languages are by far the most prevalent family of languages on the planet, when you combine the amount of speakers with the amount of "global penetration" (e.g. just as we don't speak Latin but we use many latin words or at the very least recognise them, same deal for european languages and the rest of the world).

Using such vocabulary and grammar (but simplified or at least used in a useful format, be it Esperanto, Interlingua or Lingua Franca Nova) thus is very pragmatic, and also somewhat egalitarian, except for those who can remember times when their people weren't so exposed to European languages, or for those who have noticed the shift towards a more European world viewpoint.

On the flipside though, European languages, due to colonisation and other demographically related factors, have also been somewhat internationalised over history, thus it's not so much a one-way culture colonisation as it is a give and take scenario.

One might for example like to compare "post modern" western culture and language, with the more traditional analysation of European langauges and culture (e.g. gothic architecture, folklore, etc), and instantly it's clear that modern "western" languages and culture have become very internationalised, with american movies, chinese consumer goods, increasingly internationalised architecture, japanese video games, an influx of eastern (or indian) religious concepts and values (buddhism, etc), and slowly we are even getting more cosy with middle eastern culture (although that's more because we're causing people to have to move here due to conflict etc).

Not to mention Europeans are the product of intermingling between greeks, romans, egyptians, celts, germanic peoples, slavs, asiatic nomads, moors and other african groups, semitic peoples, mongols, and various natives of other regions brought in through colonialism let alone other groups. Similarly diverse places include Africa and Asia, but they can be extremely divided places.

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TL;DR: It's not quite so elitist - sure, European languages are not totally neutral at all, but, when compared to languages across the world, there are very few that compare to the neutrality of european languages (e.g. Chinese is distinctly Chinese, Arabic is distinctly Middle Eastern or Islamic, Hindi is distinctly associated with only one group in India, yet what are Spanish, English or Russian associated with, apart from just "Spain, England, Russia"?).

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Of course there's multiple viewpoints in this debate and this is just one of them, but I think it's an important thing to consider since the amount of flack western style languages get for being "elitist" or "completely-un-neutral" drives me a tad mad haha.

You make a good point, Razlem, about the classification of Esperanto.

Because it has features which are there just from its raison d'être, rather than from any imitation of other languages, or from historical inheritance, the classification of Esperanto in traditional terms as belonging to this or that family of languages is likely to be a moot point.

However I think you are overly dismissive in neglecting the reality that non-Europeans who potentially might find Esperanto useful, have already probably been exposed to European languages.

Any judgement as to how difficult it is for them to learn must be tempered with a recognition of that.

The dominant position of English in today's world works in Esperanto's favour when it comes to assessing, for example, how difficult Esperanto is for the Chinese.

sudanglo:

The language has the potential to evolve higgledy-piggledy

Think about that Ceiger - by what mechanism could this occur?

How could you get irregular plurals, irregular verbs, grammatical gender, divergence of spelling and pronunciation, and all the other chaos of natural languages, in Esperanto.

The argument that Esperanto is a language and therefore must develop along the same chaotic lines as national languages is totally specious.

The laws of linguistics are not like the laws of Physics.

Specious? Mate, I admire your impressively vast vocabulary, but this word is what I should be saying about what you are saying!

Wiktionary:Seemingly well-reasoned or factual, but actually fallacious or insincere; strongly held but false.

It's easy to occur - don't maintain it. Have the community forget the spirit of Esperanto. Have a large amount of native speakers who learn completely passively like a baby and honestly don't care about getting things correct.*

Give it 1000 years and you've got irregularities happening for sure. The chance of it not happening is extremely slim.

On the flipside, any language could theoretically over a long period of time lose all inflectional endings, thus bringing an end to irregularity (for the most part), but then the structure of the language would change too to make up for lost inflectional endings.

*And before people say "Esperanto is a second language not a native language", that's an ideal, not a realistic reality (if we assume Esperanto "succeeds"). If Esperanto is to become "the international language", it will develop native speakers in much larger quantities, some countries will probably end up having Esperanto as their official language (despite the whole idea of having it as only a bridge language - think of a hypothetical nation like Switzerland or Singapore), and if the spirit of Esperanto's internationalism prevails, you'll likely have more international couples who only can communicate with Esperanto between each other, leading to native speakers who take Esperanto for granted as their native language, not caring about such trifling topics such as grammar and speaking "correct" (which they'd see as being merely the previous generation's idea of "correct").

Of course, if Esperanto barely grows, and stays manageable in size, then I have no doubt we can keep any extra irregularities out. But I doubt you'd like that scenario Sudanglo, since if I understand your viewpoint correctly you'd like EO to be such a successful global language.

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Also, about linguistics, why do you doubt scientific method? I presume perhaps you've come in contact with maybe some questionable or misunderstood propositions put forth by linguists in the past that didn't follow scientific method or were misunderstood as not following it. I'd hope not though since that's a sad reason to lose all trust in science.

sudanglo:The dominant position of English in today's world works in Esperanto's favour when it comes to assessing, for example, how difficult Esperanto is for the Chinese.

I definitely agree. If Chinese is to replace English, imagine what modifications would occur to it over time just as English has been modified over time? But if Esperanto for whatever reason took off, then both Chinese and English speakers get things a bit easier, although as EO grew the amount of various pronunciations of it from less dedicated learners would get a bit messy .

All us non-tonal speakers would certainly screw Mandarin over, or would have extremely mind-opening experiences, unless they split it into internal and external dialects to prevent internationalisation from affecting the language as spoken within China between chinese citizens (which I'd find rather cool, but only realistic if "bad Chinese" (Jungwen instead of Zhōngwén, kiel "Engrish" ?) really took off and there was enough variations in it and pan-asia support for it).

darkweasel:Just that the strange "i" suffix makes the language extremely difficult. I actually find it unfortunate that the Akademio no longer disapproves of it, but has even put it into the Listo de Rekomendataj Landnomoj as equal to -uj.

The system of countries based on nationalities and their locations has not ceased to exist by introduction of "i". No, this pseudo-suffix has only made it impossible to know which category a word is in. It is otherwise equivalent to -uj and does not change anything about the two-category system.

Extremely difficult??? More than it was already? Anyway, who said -i- was a suffix? What country names ending -io does is allow the geographical entity to be the root, from which the inhabitant is derived, thus:

Rusianoj loĝas en Rusio

This is how things should be. This allows us to get away from the old-fashioned idea that ethnicity is what countries are based on. Immigration is normal and has been happening since before our species existed. There is nothing fixed or eternal about ethnicity. That was just what a lot of people believed at the time when Zamenhof was designing the basics of Esperanto. A bit like Zamenhof's hilelismo project which implied the old idea that religion is something people are born into. It isn't. It's something optional that people can choose and people can change or drop. Just like people can move from one country to another and have children with somebody from another country. Especially now. If the spirit of Esperanto implies anything, it implies moving away from -ujo and the concept of country names based on ethnicities.

Use -ujo if you like. But it will die out. Already 95% of the time people are using -io.

As I said, there's already a HUGE thread on this very dull topic here at Lernu. If anyone wishes to continue banging on about this utterly pointless topic, then I think they'd be better off going to the old thread.

Just read through the comments there, it's all been said before...

EdRobertson:

darkweasel:Just that the strange "i" suffix makes the language extremely difficult. I actually find it unfortunate that the Akademio no longer disapproves of it, but has even put it into the Listo de Rekomendataj Landnomoj as equal to -uj.

The system of countries based on nationalities and their locations has not ceased to exist by introduction of "i". No, this pseudo-suffix has only made it impossible to know which category a word is in. It is otherwise equivalent to -uj and does not change anything about the two-category system.

Extremely difficult??? More than it was already? Anyway, who said -i- was a suffix? What country names ending -io does is allow the geographical entity to be the root, from which the inhabitant is derived, thus:

Rusianoj loĝas en Rusio

This is how things should be. This allows us to get away from the old-fashioned idea that ethnicity is what countries are based on. Immigration is normal and has been happening since before our species existed. There is nothing fixed or eternal about ethnicity. That was just what a lot of people believed at the time when Zamenhof was designing the basics of Esperanto. A bit like Zamenhof's hilelismo project which implied the old idea that religion is something people are born into. It isn't. It's something optional that people can choose and people can change or drop. Just like people can move from one country to another and have children with somebody from another country. Especially now. If the spirit of Esperanto implies anything, it implies moving away from -ujo and the concept of country names based on ethnicities.

Use -ujo if you like. But it will die out. Already 95% of the time people are using -io.

EdRobertson:Rusianoj loĝas en Rusio

This is how things should be. This allows us to get away from the old-fashioned idea that ethnicity is what countries are based on. Immigration is normal and has been happening since before our species existed.

[....]

Use -ujo if you like. But it will die out. Already 95% of the time people are using -io.

1+ (yeah sorry I'm posting more than I usually do, which is pretty bad in itself)

Completely agree, but I was under the impression -ujo was more popular and still has a chance at "winning" (at least here), not that I'm particularly fond of that happening though.

Even then though, "ujano" is still an option, but "iano" is probably easier to pronounce, and if you always have "io" and only use things like "rusoj" to refer to ethnic groups, then you solve the irregularity problems with things like "aŭstralio" (there is no "Australian" ethnic group, so it makes no sense for the main system to be based off of using ethnic groups + ujo, if we still have irregularities).

Chainy: on this very dull topic here at Lernu.

I did not know that this topic was codified as fact (by an internationally respected panel using scientific method) as being universally boring! Clearly the fact it's still active says otherwise?