Where is Esperanto headed ?

Discussion in 'Specific Languages' started by biTsar, May 12, 2014.

  1. biTsar

    biTsar Active Member VIP member

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    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.
    Big_Dog likes this.
  2. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I don't study Esperanto either, but that's some interesting info about Indonesian. Thanks for posting it.
  3. BillChapman

    BillChapman New Member

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    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

    luke likes this.
  4. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    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.
  5. BillChapman

    BillChapman New Member

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    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.
  6. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    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.
  7. embici

    embici New Member

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    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.
  8. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    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.
  9. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    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....

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