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From: tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto
Message-ID: <212@sjuvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Oct-86 16:01:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: sjuvax.212
Posted: Tue Oct 21 16:01:15 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Oct-86 22:29:11 EDT
References: <102@ritcv.UUCP> <2081@ihlpa.UUCP>
Reply-To: tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody)
Distribution: net
Organization: St. Joseph's Univ., Phila. PA
Lines: 58

In article <2081@ihlpa.UUCP> normt@ihlpa.UUCP (N. R Tiedemann) writes:
>> Can someone please explain what Esperanto is?  I've never heard of it
>> . . .
>>         Steve Wall  @  Rochester Institute of Technology
>
>Esperanto is a "universal" language that was invented by an international
>group of linguistics about 20 (I think) years ago. They intended for it to
>be the language that everyone in the world would learn and be able to communicate
>with. It incorporated different grammerical structures and words from most
>of the modern languages and invented some new ones to boot. To my knownledge
>it never made it past the linguistics conventions. It is not really spoken
>by anyone, and the only place one can learn it is from a book. If you go to
>any college library there will be a couple of grammer manuals on Esperanto.
>(I looked them up once at the UW in Madison.)
>
>		Norm Tiedemann
>		..ihnp4!ihlpa!normt
>		AT&T Bell Labs

1.  Esperanto was created by a single individual, Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, in
1887.
2.  It was, and is, intended to be a universal auxiliary language for
international communication.
3.  About 85% of the Esperanto word roots are borrowed from Latin, but
English, German and other languages are sometimes called upon.
4.  The grammar appears to be basically Indo-European.
5.  Morphologically, it is a highly agglutinated language, more so than
any other Indo-European language.  In terms of agglutination, its closest
neighbors would be Turkish, Japanese, and Zulu.
6.  Esperanto *is* spoken by many people, including me.  Every year, there
is an international congress, which is generally attended by people from
about fifty countries.  The last one was in Peking, at which it transpired
that there are about 400,000 Esperantists in China alone.  It is hard to
estimate how many Esperanto speakers there are in the world because, among
other things, it is hard to define "Esperanto speaker."  Book sales and
society memberships are unreliable indicators because many Esperantists
cannot afford to buy books or pay dues.  They learn from friends and
borrowed books. A fair guess would be one or two million.
7.  You can learn Esperanto from books.  It is taught in schools in some
countries, and in universities.  In the United States, it is taught in
the summer at San Francisco State University, and during the regular
term at U. Santa Barbara, I believe.  Esperanto is the tenth most taught
language in Finland. 
8.  The main advantage of Esperanto over natural languages, as an international
medium, are (a) it is not the national language of any country or ethnic
group; (b) it is easier to learn than any natural language, because it is
more regular.  Proposition (b) is often criticized on the assumption that
Esperanto is only easy for the speakers of Indo-European languages to learn.
In response, it is fair to say that speakers of Indo-European languages will
find Esperanto easier than speakers of non-Indo-European languages will, but
even speakers of non-Indo-European languages will find it easier than other
natural non-Indo-European languages.  The best way to confirm this (indeed,
the only way) is to ask Japanese and Chinese and other non-I-E language
speakers who have studied both Esperanto *and* other foreign languages.

-- Todd Moody