I have a question about Esperanto, please bear with me. The text below is quoted from the book What Language Is (And What It Isn't and What It Could Be) by John McWhorter. He's writing about colloquial Indonesian. "...Because Standard Indonesian is already so approachable, when it has undergone yet another streamlining it is one of the smoothest rides on earth." "...Papua, although this is little known worldwide, is part of Indonesia, such that the language all people speak other than one of their native ones is not Portuguese, Dutch, or English, but Indonesian. More properly, they speak a colloquial version of it, of the kind that eschews what is complicated in the standard." "It was the only place I have ever been where I could not take advantage of the fact that, where an American is likely to travel, most people speak English or, if not that, then French or Spanish. What they speak in Papua other than the obscure indigenous languages they learn on Mommy's knee is Indonesian. English is something some learn in college if they are so inclined. Even public servants often know only just enough English to manage elementary exchanges." "So--even for a one-week stay, it became clear to me that if I was going to be able to operate as a human being rather than as a squinting mute, I would have to speak some Indonesian, of which I knew precisely none when I got off the plane. I did have a handy little phrase book with a word list at the end (Lonely Planet's--highly recommended), and because I was at a linguistics conference, I had Anglophones with decades' experience in the region to consult. So I got to work from the second I hit the hotel (where few of the employees could even really be said to speak English). And the glorious thing was that there wasn't much work involved." "Because Indonesian as it is actually spoken is the result of the Persian conversion twice over, learning to communicate was thrillingly close to just, of all things, learning words and stringing them together..." "...All I had to do was memorize some key words. Not the kind of vocabulary that language textbooks routinely present as "basic," mind you. Occasions never arose for me to engage in discussions about mothers, cousins, forks, spoons, yesterday, tomorrow, whether anything was good or bad (even there okay is understood and that will do), whether or not it was raining, or what color anything was ("No, I want that yellow food!")." "I found want, need, buy, not, may, go, I, you, eat, drink, here, there, up, down, thank you, please, what, just a second (so I could look in my phrase book), and the numbers from one to ten, and I don't speak Indonesian most helpful (but if you get too confident in saying that last one, they assume you're lying and keep talking, so say it slowly with a dutiful look of slight alarm)." "With those words plus a few others I no longer recall-well, okay, one of them was the word for water, which is, go figure, air--after just two days I was, as they say, "getting around." "...My final experience was one familiar to many of us--I had a bottle of air (i.e., water) in my bag as I went through security in Jakarta on my way to Hong Kong. The screener stopped the machine and after a few beats I said, What?--a word I knew. He said, Air. I said, Saya minta minum di sini? Those were the words for I, may, drink, and here, and I didn't need a stitch of case marking or conjugation or dishevelment to put them together. Wangling even that simple sentence in French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Navajo, Tukang Besi, Leti, Mandarin Chinese, Akha, or even colloquial Sinhalese would have required extensive tutelage beforehand, far beyond just learning some words (remember, in Chinese and Akha, you have to do the tones). But in colloquial Indonesian the security guy understood me perfectly and said okay. I drank gratefully." "All of this is possible because of the blessings of a thoroughly oral kind of language, never committed to the page, and thought of as "not real Indonesian" by the people who speak it their whole lives long. Yet the ease of learning it made Esperanto, with its European-inspired suffixes for tense that make it hardly a plausible "universal" language for Chinese or even Indonesian speakers, seem like a parochial stunt." "To say May I drink it here? in Esperanto would mean pushing out Ĉu mi povus trinki ĝi ĉi tie? The -us ending is the conditional, as in could I rather than can I. In asking if it's allowed that I drink the water, I indicate that I regard the action as hypothetical. But in colloquial Indonesian people make equivalent requests 24/7 without having to indicate that they know the future hasn't happened yet. Ĉu is the particle that you use when asking a question--but only the kind of question that solicits yes or know, as opposed to What do you want? which solicits the identification of a thing. Esperanto requires that you distinguish the two kinds of question, which only seemed necessary to Esperanto's inventor, Ludwig Zamenhof, because he grew up speaking Russian, whose li works the same way. In colloquial Indonesian you don't have to specify that you want to drink "it". For instance, given the context at security, there was no question as to what "it" I wanted to drink. Drink--minum--alone was fine. What else would I have wanted to drink, my iPod ?" "The Indonesian dismissed as "slang" is actually a human language that does without most of what is decorative but unnecessary in how we express ourselves in "normal" languages. It would be an ideal universal language, which all humans regardless of linguistic background would find relatively easy to learn and use..." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ok, that was longwinded, but it sets up my query. Do Esperantists at their conferences ever discuss streamlining Esperanto ? What kind of reception is there to that kind of thing ? Is preservation of the original treasured above making the language even easier for any given learner irrespective of mother tongue ? I don't study Esperanto, but remain curious about it. It just seems to me that a lot more could be done to pare it down towards the prospect of the original intent.
I don't study Esperanto either, but that's some interesting info about Indonesian. Thanks for posting it.
A very interesting insight on Indonesian. Just a couple of comments on Esperanto, if I may. The sentence you quote - "Ĉu mi povus trinki ĝin ĉi tie?" is not wrong grammatically (except for the missing accusative 'n' which I have added). but you are in danger of reaching false conclusions based on limited evidence. I would not ask the question in the way you have it here. I would probably say: Ĉu mi rajtas trinki ĉi-tie? (with no word for 'it'.Rajti means « to have the right to. The conditional is not necessary either. You can use the ending –as rather than –us. In the context of asking if it's okay to have a drink you could say "Mi esperas ke mi rajtas trinki", allowing for a positive or negative response. I don't see any need to pare Esperanto down. The language can be used in a range of registers, as can Indonesian, I'm sure. Like Indonesian, Esperanto is actually a human language, and not a code or linguistic game. Incidentally, one of the growth areas for Esperanto in recent years is Indonesia. Sere, for example: https://sites.google.com/site/esperantoenindonezio/kongreso
Surely that simply reinforces the point that the string of choices to be made in constructing a sentence in Esperanto is somewhat more complex than necessary...? One of my main objections to Esperanto is that it was designed to be easy to learn based on certain assumptions about language that appear to be wrong -- structuralist grammars of a Latin origin.
Hello, again I read the evidence in a very different way. In both Indonesian (which I don't speak) and Esperanto there will be great number of options for saying anything. If you don't want to talk like a child or someone with learning difficulties, you will opt for the clearest, least ambiguous version. You're wrong to suggest that Esperanto is like Latin. Far from it. "As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any natural language." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto ). Take a look at http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm Esperanto has much in common with Turkish and Chinese.
I didn't say that Esperanto was like Latin -- I said that it was constructed with an understanding of grammar based on the Roman/Latin school of structural grammar, tables etc.
By the look of the websites for Lernu and various Esperanto associations I would guess that everyone gave up learning Esperanto in the late 1990s.
As English has been gaining as the world's common language, what chance does a constructed language have, a lot of whose appeal was having inputs from many major languages? Knowing English can give immediate financial benefits, while knowing Esperanto gains one mainly in learning other languages. As a native English speaker it is depressing that there is little benefit to learning many European languages now unless one plans to stay there for an extended period, and that L2 native speakers don't really see why English speakers would want to learn their languages. And since there is very very little immigration from western Europe to the US here, there are few opportunities to find native speakers of western European languages in the US. Even so, I would have far better chances finding someone to practice German or Dutch or Swedish with in the US than Esperanto if I were interested in learning it. Esperanto is like an object at the back of a shelf in one's curio cabinet, which just gathers dust. While it might be intensely interesting to a few, it never will be to many. While the same can be said for learning multiple languages in general on an absolute scale, the difference on a relative scale between Esperanto and other languages is vast.
Do you mean just the site layout? Is a clear, simple site a bad thing? I'm personally sick of modern sites that take forever to load....
