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From: allen@osu-eddie.UUCP (John Allen)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: More on "Problems with Esperanto".
Message-ID: <69@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Jan-85 22:23:07 EST
Article-I.D.: osu-eddi.69
Posted: Fri Jan 25 22:23:07 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Jan-85 06:58:10 EST
Organization: Ohio State Univ., CIS Dept., Cols, Oh.
Lines: 53

> Allen is correct that the languages of international communication of the
> past were thrust on people rather than chosen by them, and that Esperanto
> doesn't have the political, military, economic or scientific might behind it
> that Latin, French, English or Russian have had. [Prentiss Riddle]

This is not entirely correct.  While many of these languages have been
"thrust" on people, at least one of them, French, was chosen by many people
because it was the language of culture.

>                                                   True, but that is one of
> Esperanto's chief advantages as a potential interlanguage: it is politically
> neutral.

The assumption here is one that is commonly made by people who support a
world language; "...that misunderstandings and international quarrels and
wars are *caused* by differences in language."
[_Linguistics_and_Your_Language_  by R. A. Hall, Jr.]
  That this assumption is false can be shown by wars like our Revolutionary
War and Civil War, where both sides spoke the same language, or by
Switzerland, where four different languages are spoken and the people get
along without hostility.

"An even more important factor is that it is built on a  s i m p l i f i e d
European base." [Prentiss Riddle]
This is probably Esperanto's most lauded feature and it's greatest fault.
Any natural language has various constructs that allows you to express
essentially the same meaning several different ways, but each of these
different ways give a slightly different shade of meaning.  They also have
words that have approximately the same meaning but have different
connotations.  "What you gain in simplicity, you lose in richness and
directness of expression." [R. A. Hall, Jr]

"Well, most educated people in the world today have a definite need to learn
a language other that their native tongue." [Prentiss Riddle]
While I agree with this, I do NOT agree with Prentiss's implication that
this second language should be Esperanto.  I feel that I can get many more
benefits by putting the same amount of effort into learning Russian,
Chinese, or any of the other commonly spoken languages, because these
languages have the literary and scientific publications that make it
necessary to learn a second language.  If I learned Esperanto, then I would
still have to learn one of these languages if I wanted to read these
publications, and my time spent learning Esperanto would have been
essentially wasted.

"As for the loss of those picturesque natural languages..." [James Jones], I
don't object because they are picturesque.  I object because literature in
these languages might be lost because it was not deemed worthy enough to be
tranlated into the "world language".  I also object because language can
tell us something about how the human mind operates.  If you only have one
language to study, and a simplified one at that, then it is very hard to
draw generalizations about how the mind works.

                                        -John Allen