Esperanto

Discussion: Critiques

Esperanto favors Central European learners

A.Z. Foreman:

it didn't take much time looking at it before realized that Esperanto is, in virtually every way that matters, chock-full of features that, thought not all drawn from European languages per se as people claim, nonetheless clearly favor European learners.

Then came the conversations in Esperanto. It became apparent to me that, though many can craft written sentences in Esperanto, a far smaller number were actually able to communicate with any fluency- whereas the number of people who try to learn the language and then give up is quite high.

Still, I thought for some time that it might make a passable Lingua Franca for Europe, even if such a thing was functionally impossible. Several years and one linguistics degree later, I realized that, of European learners, it favors most especially central and east Europeans. (And for some time I didn't realize just how profoundly the latter was the case.) Moreover, the schematic derivational morphology coupled with the propensity of European speakers to import European borrowings has had the unintended effect of giving the learner an even greater burden than most regional languages would or could. At the same time, it contains features that absolutely no language on earth uses and which speakers themselves seem to find weird enough to avoid in many cases, leading to the features being applied inconsistently and contributing to the lexical burden. On the other hand, it's still definitely worth learning for other reasons.

The only person on the internet with a good knowledge of linguistics who gives Esperanto a thorough structural autopsy is Justin B. Rye whose page can be found here. Indeed, it was through long email-debates with him that I came to some of my conclusions. He makes a number of good points (and a couple which seem suspect to me, which I myself endlessly debated with him in a couple long email threads over the past three years or so.) His basic point is that Esperanto is in nearly every way more central European than anything else. I differ in that I think the features aren't central European themselves, but certainly do favor European learners. (But that's academic at best.) Anyway, I will try not to repeat what Rye has said since I don't like typing for no reason. Moreover Rye's observations -which do have a good deal of merit to them- seem to be based not on Esperanto as it is actually used but as it was designed, or else just taking the rules and just running with them. My concern is more with the practices of the Esperanto community. I'll try and make points that he doesn't, mainly having to do with the language's ostensible learnability as actually spoken, its morphological quirks, how in some ways Esperanto actually violates linguistic universals, as well as the outright false, and sometimes downright bigoted, claims made by its more zealous proponents.

... What it shows, both intentionally and unintentionally, is that Esperanto, with all its typological quirks, lexical chaos and strangeness, is like any other language on earth: its origin, features, and behavior are limited and determined by time and space. In its phonology, morphology and syntax, it bears the stamp of its origin as a 19th century conIAL: extreme freedom in what is grammatically acceptable, a clockwork morphological system, inherent sexism and a mal- prefix which doesn't seem to do any good a lot of the time. But as a living language, it has speakers changing it (usually unconsciously) through constant usage. This usage, like any usage, is not schematic or systematic. Morphological anomalies (such as agent-nouns without -isto) crop up, a plethora of synonyms are introduced alongside the regular derivations, syntactic norms become a bit more fixed, and even the evolution of new conjugational patterns (like amantas for estas amanta) becomes possible- these signs of usage are a testament to Esperanto's success as a language people want to be using. Even features that are unheard of in other languages, such as the typological oddity of the mal- words, isn't stopping people from being perfectly at home with common words like bona and malbona, and competitors such as as liva "left" for maldekstra haven't gotten much traction in common speech- precisely because, like any language, core vocabulary doesn't change quickly for any reason: it is mainly the more abstract mal- words (where the problems are not just typological but also functional) which seem to be losing ground in favor of near-synonyms (such as mallibereco). And mal- even finds new uses, such as in youth-slang where trinki "to drink" yields the hip formation maltrinki "to take a piss." As Esperanto continues to live, it is showing itself more and more to be a regular human language, with unique features stemming from its artificial heritage. Despite being not as simple, regular or innately accessible as advertised, it is nonetheless a easier to gain at least a working knowledge of than many other languages (though certainly not all.) To learn it and take part in its culture of 1.5 million speakers, and read its uniquely rewarding literature is an experience worth having. As such, it is worth learning: if only to become part of the community of its speakers, many of whom are among the coolest people I've ever met."(http://blogicarian.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/esperanto-international-auxiliary.html)

More Information

• there are about 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto worldwide,