Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!hellgate.utah.edu!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!chou From: chou@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Pai Chou) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Global Cultural Prototype Message-ID: <18357@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 13 Oct 89 23:04:16 GMT References: <3366@ccnysci.UUCP> <2145@avsd.UUCP> <18291@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <1989Oct13.142526.13122@uncecs.edu> <1489@intercon.com> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: chou@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Pai Chou) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 92 Some one asked me information about Esperanto. Here is some intro from the book "An Introduction to Language", 4th edition, by Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, Chapter 7, pp 287-288; copied without permission from the publisher La inteligenta persono lernas la interlingvon Esperanton rapide kaj facile. ("The intelligent person learns the international language Esperanto rapidly and easily) Since the scattering at Babel, many people have hoped for a return to the blissful state when everyone spoke a universal language. Lingua francas are a step in that direction, but none has gone far enough. Since the seventeenth century, scholars have been inventing artificial languages with the hope that they would achieve universal acceptance and that universal language would bring universal peace. With stubborn regularity the world has rejected every attempt. Perhaps the world has seen too many civil wars to accept this idea. The obituary column of artifical languages indicates the constant attempt and regular failures: Bopal, Kosmos, Novial, Parla, Spokil, Universala, and Volapuk are but a few of the deceased hundreds. Most artificial languages never get beyond their inventors, because they are abstruse and difficult and uninteresting to learn. One artificial language has enjoyed some success. Esperanto was invented by the Polish scholar Zamenhof, who wrote under the pseudonym of Dr. Esperanto ("one who hopes"). He gave his "language" the advantages of extreme grammatical regularity, ease of pronounciation, and a vocabulary based mainly on European languages. Esperanto is spoken by several million speakers throughout the world, including some who learned it as one of their native languages. There is a literature written in it, a number of institutions teach in it, and it is officially recognized by some international organizations. Esperantists claim that their language can be learned easily by any intelligent person; but despite the claims of its proponents, it is not maximally simple. There is an obligatory accusative case (Ni lernas Esparanto_n_ "We're learning Esperanto"), and adjectives and nouns must agree in number (inteligent_a_ person_o_ "intelligent person", but inteligent_aj_ person_oj_ "intelligent persons"). Speakers of Chinese or Malaysian (and even English) find these rules different from those of their own grammars. Esperanto is regular insofar as all nouns end in -o, with plural -oj; all adjectives end in -a, with plural -aj; the present tense of all verbs end in -as, the future in -os, and the past in -is; and the definite article is always la. However, to speakers of Thai, a language that does not have a definite article at all, Esperanto is far from "simple," and speeakers of the many languages that indicate tenses without verb endings (as English indicates the future tense with _shall_ or _will_) may find that aspect of Esperanto difficult to learn. A modification of Esperanto, called _Ido_ ("offspring in Esperanto), has further simplified the language by eliminating the accusative case and abolishing adjective and noun agreement, but the basic problem remains. Esperanto is essentially a Romance-based pidgin with Greek and Germanic influence, albeit a highly developed one with an immerse vocabulary. It therefore remains "foreign" to most people; speakers of Russian, Hungarian, Hausa, or Hindi would find Esperanto as unfamiliar as French or Spanish. The problems besetting the world community are basically nonlinguistic, despite the linguistic problems that do exist. Language problems may intensify social and economic problems, but they do not generally cause wars, unemployment, poverty, pollution, and disease. ------------------------------------------------ End of chapter Here is my view: these are attempts to establish a SPOKEN artificial language such that the written form and the spoken form are a one-to-one mapping. However, for languages like Chinese and especially Japanese there are a lot of characters which get mapped to the same sound and tone; while Chinese uses compounds (i.e. group two or more characters together to make a new compound word) to resolve the ambiguity, names are impossible to map back to their original representation once they are mapped to the phonetic form because Chinese to Esperanto is a many-to-one mapping.