ceigered:Vi facile povus uzi pli bonajn, pli klarajn vortojn anstataŭe. Kaj, eĉ se vi ne volus fari tion, homoj kiuj ne parolas angle ne povas kompreni "equitable" eĉ en ĝia originala senco

(You could easily use better, clearer words instead. And, even if you didn't want to do that, people who don't speak English can't understand "equitable" even in its original sense )

Dankon por via sugesto, mi deziras ĉiam esti klara.

ceigered:

Mustelvulpo:It seems to me that the idea that turns a lot of people off to Esperanto is that it is so often referred to as an "artificial language,"

That's true. I think also what's important is that "artificial" easily leads to "made up" which leads to "figments of the imagination" which leads to "mental health patients", thus the whole stigma of Esperanto speaking parents and their children's doomed future.

Critics' use of "artificial" suggests an agenda to discredit Esperanto and the concept of creating a language to improve communication. Cars, computers etc. are products of the human mind just as Esperanto is, and no one ever calls them artificial.

Epikuro57:

ceigered:
That's true. I think also what's important is that "artificial" easily leads to "made up" which leads to "figments of the imagination" which leads to "mental health patients", thus the whole stigma of Esperanto speaking parents and their children's doomed future.

Critics' use of "artificial" suggests an agenda to discredit Esperanto and the concept of creating a language to improve communication. Cars, computers etc. are products of the human mind just as Esperanto is, and no one ever calls them artificial.

That too. Pity, it's an easy argument to counter as you did then, but we need a way to be able to prevent such arguments, e.g. send the first volley in the debate rather than having to be on the defensive.

The main advantage of esperanto over a foreign language, is that with esperanto you feel at home: You can joke in esperanto without wondering if people are laughing because of your joke or because of your mistakes in the language.

Maybe a native english speaker can coin a word to express that.

Altebrilas:The main advantage of esperanto over a foreign language, is that with esperanto you feel at home: You can joke in esperanto without wondering if people are laughing because of your joke or because of your mistakes in the language.

Maybe a native english speaker can coin a word to express that.

Amikeca/Friendly? Even in arguments and fights, you feel like a tightly-knit band of soldiers rather than strangers? Maybe?

Perhaps we might drop the idea of even referring to Esperanto as a language, rather presenting it as means to an end.

In which case the slogan might be "Esperanto the Equitable Solution".

One of the cul-de-sacs that discussion of Esperanto is prone to enter is the whole idea of whether it really merits the label 'language' - is it a real language?

Also by presenting Esperanto as a means to an end, its 'artificiality', ceases to be relevant. Solutions to problems are usually planned or designed or thought out.

If one wishes to emphasize the way it can facilitate the learning of natural languages then perhaps we could say 'Esperanto the Gateway to Language Learning.

Whatever approach is taken, one clearly needs to find a way of pre-emptively nipping the standard unthinking criticisms of Esperanto in the bud.

I don't think that the problem with esperanto is its name. It is its image that must be changed. People should start seeing it as an useful tool which is worth learning. Until then the language can be called whatever one likes - it won't change anything.

An interesting example of how Esperanto is different from the national languages presented itself during my recent visit to Lille for La Braderie (Europe's biggest flea-market).

I was in a bar and ordered 'deux petites bières à la pression', which may not have been the best French, but judging by the speed of reaction of the barmaid was idiomatic enough.

It occurred to me that if I had been in an English pub and ordered 'two little beers under pressure', in a foreign accent, I might have been met with a blank stare.

That's not anywhere close to the appropriate formula which is 'two halves of X please' where X is either a beer type (eg bitter) or a brandname (eg Guinness) - this formula is well understood to mean that you are ordering draught beer and not bottled beer.

Now of course for Esperanto there is no well-used formulation for this situation, since there aren't any Esperanto bars and even if there were, any of the reasonably logical phrases for ordering the beer would be acceptable.

This is one small example of how Esperanto is different. It is largely devoid of clichéd phrases or standard formulae appropriate to specific contexts.

When learning a national language one has to learn a whole host of such phrases for ready communication, and one is likely to not be easily understood (or worse laughed at) if the phrase one uses is quite logical, but doesn't meet the expectation of the native speaker in that context.

EDIT: just to spell that out - in Esperanto you might equally have said, without causing puzzlement, 'du malgrandajn bierojn de la krano' or 'du bierojn de la pumpilo, 25 centilitrajn ' or 'tiru por mi du bieretojn, mi petas' or 'du kran-bieretojn' or any other logical formulation.

sudanglo:One of the cul-de-sacs that discussion of Esperanto is prone to enter is the whole idea of whether it really merits the label 'language' - is it a real language?

I don't care what you think about whether it's a real language or not, but to advertise it as not being a language won't work from a marketing perspective. People like to learn langauges because it makes them look cool. But "not-languages", well, that's like saying "I speak with a cowboy accent/pig latin/gibberish", and I think multilingual people are looked upon with more awe than people that speak creatively .

Sudanglo:Now of course for Esperanto there is no well-used formulation for this situation, since there aren't any Esperanto bars and even if there were, any of the reasonably logical phrases for ordering the beer would be acceptable.

This is one small example of how Esperanto is different. It is largely devoid of clichéd phrases or standard formulae appropriate to specific contexts.

That doesn't make it a non-language entity though
I mean, can you blame users of a language for not having a word for something they never talk about in the language? Last time I checked, there's no proper phrase for "transcendential post-human entity that lives in the hypothetical information cloud upon which the physical universe is based on", since we never need to make the distinction (not yet anyway ).

And I dare say there'll never be a truly accepted phrase for this "deux petites bières à la pression" in Esperanto if no one ever orders one in Esperanto.

Heck, I don't even know what this thing you're talking about is in English (beer from the tap/pump?) But it seems to me that French is extremely idiomatic, and in languages there tends to be a gray-scale slider between languages like that and more matter-of-fact stative languages (with French and Tok Pidgin on one side, definitely!).

Anyway, it's something we need to work on if we want Esperanto to be able to function totally well no matter where or how it's spoken

(I can't remember where I heard this, but apparently vocabulary, in particular nouns can never reach a "completed state" in any language, since there's no way to check if everything was indeed included, and even if it had been, you just make up a new concept and you've rendered the lexicon incomplete again!)

sudanglo:Perhaps we might drop the idea of even referring to Esperanto as a language, rather presenting it as means to an end.

In which case the slogan might be "Esperanto the Equitable Solution".

One of the cul-de-sacs that discussion of Esperanto is prone to enter is the whole idea of whether it really merits the label 'language' - is it a real language?

Also by presenting Esperanto as a means to an end, its 'artificiality', ceases to be relevant. Solutions to problems are usually planned or designed or thought out.

If one wishes to emphasize the way it can facilitate the learning of natural languages then perhaps we could say 'Esperanto the Gateway to Language Learning.

Whatever approach is taken, one clearly needs to find a way of pre-emptively nipping the standard unthinking criticisms of Esperanto in the bud.

For reasons given earlier (i.e. its' negative connotations with many people) equitable is a bad choice. Even neutral is problematic since some people equate neutral to pacifist or cowardly. We need something that has only positive connotations, so I'd suggest the impartial language, the unbiased language, the evenhanded language or the like.

We can't accept for a minute this notion that because Esperanto was created that it's not a real or natural language. I'd be tempted to call it the natural language since one learns it more naturally than other national languages. Perhaps the intuitive impartial language or instinctive unbiased language, something on those lines.

Epikuro57:We can't accept for a minute this notion that because Esperanto was created that it's not a real or natural language. I'd be tempted to call it the natural language since one learns it more naturally than other national languages. Perhaps the intuitive impartial language or instinctive unbiased language, something on those lines.

It's not so much what it is or isn't, but how people perceive things to be true or not true. People will get perceptions in their heads and accept them as stone cold fact, e.g. 'it's artificial and that's a negative to everyone', or 'it'll never catch on'. Those kinds of people are cynical & negative and will only be swayed by hard evidence, if at all, and are not going to go out looking for it themselves. They are exactly the same sort of people Zamenhof ignored, thankfully!

The propaedeutic thing needs another test, or if it had one already, we need to know about it! The one that was done seems to exist almost as a part of folklore. I'd love to see a proper record of that famous French/Esperanto test, i.e. not wikipedia. (if anyone knows, please post the link!) There was a school in Melbourne that was going to do that same test with Asian languages, does anyone know how it went?