Prix Nobel pour l'espéranto ?

Bartscj   Thu Dec 06, 2007 3:45 pm GMT
Hello,

In response to Xie, who wrote "I find that both plural and accusative markers are entirely unnecessary".

Concerning the plural, unless you have some truly ingenious solution, it is necessary and the obvious place to put it is on the thing that is plural. The other likely solution is to put it on the verb, but one can easily imagine sentences without a verb so the noun really is the place to put it.

Could you explain why, in your opinion, the plural is not necessary ?

As for the accusative, it has been the subject of endless debate. Some people are for, others against. One must always weight the usefulness against the added complexity. In this case, it was deemed that the gain in flexibility (for many people coming from many languages) outweighed the minor increase in complexity. You are free to approve or disagree, I myself have reservations, but that was the reasoning.

Xie also mentioned the diacritic marks, which most people call accents. That is another subject of endless debate. To remain perfectly phonetic (one letter for each sound, each sound always produced by the same letter), you need one letter for each sound (not combinations of letters). In Esperanto, a letter with an accent is simply another letter. It might have been better to use other letters, who knows, but it is truly not an issue. The letter "s" without an accent is one letter, the letter "s" with an accent is simply another letter. No big deal.

By the way, English is one of the languages most divergent in terms of sounds and the letters required to produce them. That explains why it is a phonetic nightmare. It would greatly benefit from more letters or from accents on letters to identify separate sounds.

Ciao,
F. Bartsch
Guest   Thu Dec 06, 2007 10:59 pm GMT
Many languages do perfectly well without plural.
Liang   Fri Dec 07, 2007 1:23 pm GMT
Bartsj /Bartsch asks why Xie thinks plural is not necessary. I think I can reply for him. He's Chinese, and Chinese is a language which works quite well without plural. This is not completely true, there are ways of making it clear that you speak of several things, or just one, but they're not as rigid as in English or Esperanto. For example, the first words of the United Nations Charter in Chinese are "Wo Lianheguo renmin", 'We the people of the United Nations'. Well, "wo" means usually ' I ', 'me'. There is a plural form: "women" ('we'). But in this case, the plural form is not used, because the plural meaning is evident (plus tradition for this kind of texts). In a sentence like "Ta song wode shu laile" 'He sent my book(s) here', whether it's about one or more books is a matter of context. Although such a way of expressing oneself may seem very strange to Westerners, I don't remember a single case in which there was a problem.
I personnally use Esperanto every day and it's a language I like very much, but I could use and like it just as well if it hadn't plurals. Westeners don't realize it, but very often although you speak of many. . . (whatever) or even of all, you use a singular, which is strange. Why say "War is something terrible" in singular? Are not all wars terrible?
Why "Man belongs to the animal kingdom". Is this valid for just one man? Understanding is just as much a matter of tradition than of form.
Kodol   Fri Dec 07, 2007 1:26 pm GMT
"One concert can do much more than Esperanto did in all its existence".
I like good concerts as well. I' ve enjoyed a few good concerts in Esperanto in the last few years. If you want to hear Esperanto music, go to http://www.vinilkosmo.com .
Romand   Fri Dec 07, 2007 1:44 pm GMT
Why oppose things that are complementary? A concert is a good thing. But this fact doesn't keep Esperanto from being a good thing as well. Esperanto's contribution to many people's well-being is quite valuable:
– It has saved lives (I could quote cases, but it would take too much space).
– It has enabled families to be reunited after the wars. The International Red Cross found it extremely useful to help locate displaced persons.
– It helps people with little money to travel and discover how people from other countries actually live, through a network of free lodging which covers a hundred countries or so (see http://www.tejo.org/eo/ps).
– It solves many human problems. An institution in which I worked with refugees had many problems because nobody there understood Albanian. When a young worker from Kosovo arrived who spoke Esperanto, we could at last communicate through him. The impact on the whole atmosphere was felt by the whole staff as a miracle.
– It helps people traveling in faraway places in difficult situations. I found it more useful than English in Japan.
– A number of people met in Esperanto camps or other encounters and ended up forming very happy couples.
– It gives much cultural and other pleasure to many people.
– It provided the framework in which many deep friendships have developed.
– It promotes tolerance and mutual understanding. To quote just one example, it has provided the settings in which Japanese and Korean young people could, in an easily acquired common language, express and discuss the hate and resentment they felt toward one another. To express your feelings with the needed precision, you need a language you can really master, which English is not for most of the peoples in Eastern Asia.
Concerts are pleasant, but I don't think it makes sense to compare them to Esperanto.
Xie   Sat Dec 08, 2007 6:13 am GMT
> Concerning the plural, unless you have some truly ingenious solution, it is necessary and the obvious place to put it is on the thing that is plural. The other likely solution is to put it on the verb, but one can easily imagine sentences without a verb so the noun really is the place to put it.

I have been quite biased when discussing this, mainly because, while plurality may make things more specific, unless Chinese, a language without plural markers, where everything could be ambiguous in terms of quantity, the concept plurality could somehow adds some "difficulty" - so, when you say a plural of a word, it must be -oj, not -o, which sounds sort of clumsy.

I may have written something about these 2 prominent features and the overall "difficulty" of this language. My slightly refined view about both is: as I maintained earlier, it still seems that "difficulty" isn't a very good thing for promoting a language. I've read somewhere about the (complex) discussions about such (complex) matters. Still, I couldn't figure out whether Esperanto could be conceivably objectively easier than other languages (with whatever topological features, and the majority of them) except native languages of everyone. The selling point would be rather something else.

With relation to overall difficulty, we may think about pedagogical values of Esperanto (as I've read perhaps in Wikipedia, for example, a case of kids learning French / learning Esperanto before French, holding everything else constant) as well. Personally, difficulty doesn't interest me any more, because I believe only "practical" difficulty (i.e. finding learning materials; Esperanto isn't even exactly "easy") and motivation really count.

>Xie also mentioned the diacritic marks, which most people call accents. That is another subject of endless debate. To remain perfectly phonetic (one letter for each sound, each sound always produced by the same letter), you need one letter for each sound (not combinations of letters). In Esperanto, a letter with an accent is simply another letter. It might have been better to use other letters, who knows, but it is truly not an issue. The letter "s" without an accent is one letter, the letter "s" with an accent is simply another letter. No big deal.

That could be interesting. The Latin script isn't exactly perfectly neutral. For Zamenhof, it might have been better than the Cyrillic script, but the Cyrillic has more letters, which would mean you can possibly create Esperanto without inventing (the) new (Latin) letters. Even if accented letters are necessary, I'd say it's still possible to use existing ones, like those in Romance languages, while maintaining its "neutrality".

If you ever know Chinese and discuss Esperanto with ordinary Chinese speakers (*note that Esperanto has been promoted to some degree in China), it might be natural to hear about doubts over the accented letters, plural and accusative markers and so on. It'd be natural to say how "biased" Esperanto grammar, vocabulary..or the whole language system itself is for being eurocentric. The things are there and won't change. They are inherent problems that not even, conceivably, any other existing or future conlangs could ever solve once and for all. It might not be worth discussing much more, though, since the ultimate purpose, rather than sub/objective (which I can't really figure out) difficulty, lies in the neutrality itself.
Liang   Sat Dec 08, 2007 1:43 pm GMT
Is it really so difficult to judge easiness with some objectivity? When a dozen Chinese, Japanese and Korean teachers tell me that after ten years of English their students are hardly able to make themselves understood in that language, whereas after only one year they can really express themselves in Esperanto, I think there is no doubt that Esperanto is easier. It may be four times more difficult for an Eastern Asian than for a European, but it certainly is 50 times easier than English, a language plagued with many exceptions, an excessive amount of words with the same meaning (freedom / liberty, brotherly / fraternal, etc.), a crazy spelling and no consistent derivation (heal / therapeutic ; city / urban; woman / feminine etc. compared to sanigi > saniga, urbo > urba, ino > ina).
Another example: in an experiment in Zagreb, Croatia, two groups of similar students (same age, same neighborhood, same major) were compared. One group learned Esperanto, the other German. Their communication ability was tested. The German group needed three years to reach the level that the youths in the Esperanto had attained after only 36 hours of the language. "Easy" does not mean much, and in some respects Esperanto is not easy, but it is certainly easier than other languages (except maybe Indonesian and Haitian creole).
Tim Morley   Sat Dec 08, 2007 1:55 pm GMT
Thank you, Leland Bryant Ross, for making use of one of the oft-quoted alternatives to Esperanto -- translation by machines -- and thus for showing how hopelessly inadequate it is as a solution to international communication problems.

Even the very first line of your message in French -- "Il est venu en très pratique - quand je sortais en courant de l'argent à Zurich..." makes no sense whatsoever until one translates it word-for-word back into English (so why not just publish it in English?)

Roughly speaking, you've written: "It came with very practical - when I exited by running the money in Zurich..." which can only be the result of a cut-and-paste from BabelFish or similar.
Xie   Sat Dec 08, 2007 2:27 pm GMT
>>Is it really so difficult to judge easiness with some objectivity? When a dozen Chinese, Japanese and Korean teachers tell me that after ten years of English their students are hardly able to make themselves understood in that language, whereas after only one year they can really express themselves in Esperanto, I think there is no doubt that Esperanto is easier. It may be four times more difficult for an Eastern Asian than for a European, but it certainly is 50 times easier than English, a language plagued with many exceptions, an excessive amount of words with the same meaning (freedom / liberty, brotherly / fraternal, etc.), a crazy spelling and no consistent derivation (heal / therapeutic ; city / urban; woman / feminine etc. compared to sanigi > saniga, urbo > urba, ino > ina).

That's how some recent discussions in other forums have inspired me. Yes, Esperanto has a phonetic alphabet, only two cases, one plural marker, 4 tenses and (nominally) no exceptions whatsoever. The total number of grammar rules is only 16 as has been claimed. Everything is simple. Good.

But now, it is, after all, a language, not something called simple-speak with limited vocabulary, limited possibilities of developing one's idiolect, etc. Since it has to be used as if it were a natural language (so that it would deserve to be a language), you can expect to use <<vocabulary>> very often and still have to learn a lot of words. Yes, this process has been made much easier than many languages with tricky exceptions (not even Chinese could be excluded from this category), but as I have been told, you can't coin words to the extreme - to make yourself understood and somewhat conform to conventional usage. In Esperanto, I guess synonyms could still exist, but would be in an entirely different fashion from that of other (natural) languages.

I wouldn't deny that English, like many others, may have been riddled with millions of exceptions, this process, given better learning conditions. I'd just forget ineffective language education, which might have been a universal problem but just in China but everywhere, simply because native languages are normally taught through genuine exposure, for example, rather than taught in a confined classroom setting where terrible accents, for example, often prevail.

What I've found fascinating is a comparison of <<other>> languages, in terms of how long people have to learn any particular language as a foreign language (not native, not the second). I don't really know the case of Esperanto as a native or a second or a third. For one thing, in reality, I personally learnt all the rules in literally a dozen or so hours only (thanks to Esperantists and Zamenhof), but since I learnt terribly without enough motivation and learnt for too little time, I didn't get functional in it with *enough* practice; yet, I'd suspect that it *might* really be quite easy.

In practical terms, however, I don't know if I could possibly learn Esperanto at all, if I hadn't known English. If there hadn't been *enough* websites teaching it, could I? That's irrelevant to theoretical discussions, of course.

>>Another example: in an experiment in Zagreb, Croatia, two groups of similar students (same age, same neighborhood, same major) were compared. One group learned Esperanto, the other German. Their communication ability was tested. The German group needed three years to reach the level that the youths in the Esperanto had attained after only 36 hours of the language.

Indeed, in relation to Esperanto, I've been paying more attention to *the* irrelevant discussions. I can only say that people don't need 3 years to learn German (I've spent 5 months, with limited success, and in the recent 3 months there's a huge boost in my level, given good courses; I could get fairly familiar with the whole grammar, not just the basics, maybe a few months later, spending only 1/2/3 hours daily), and I may guess that you could be speaking Esperanto as a pseudo-native within just 3 years.
Xie   Sat Dec 08, 2007 2:55 pm GMT
>>But now, it is, after all, a language, not something called simple-speak with limited vocabulary, limited possibilities of developing one's idiolect, etc.

What I mean is, for example, specialist vocabulary. I guess Esperanto wouldn't be a language for specialist purposes... and what about idioms of every language? I'd be glad to hear from experienced Esperantists about translating from their native languages to Esperanto.

Another issue I'd like to hear about is *how much you could use Esperanto*. By common sense, you could use it almost exclusively with Esperantists, but may I know how possible it could be? That would come down to the worst topic I'd want to say about learning a language - literally, you could guess, USEFULNESS. I know that "objective" difficulty of this language, compared to others, is largely irrelevant to usefulness, but wouldn't it be important to use a language much enough to stay fluent in it? Situated in a Chinese city, my exposure to Esperanto (even if I know a lot of Esperanto), not given regular contact with Esperantists (who would most likely appear as net friends only; ok, given that I don't have chances to travel, either) could be as little as most other geographically remote languages. I guess this could be an important reason that many would regard it as .... to be frank, just plainly useless.

As an average young Chinese who lives in a fairly well developed area, while I appreciate this project for its nobility, as I see it, in reality it is a rather luxurious business. Ok, if things, not people, could get a nobel prize, I could certainly give it credit for its ideals. On the other hand, however, I couldn't help thinking about people who are supposed to be helped by this project - for example, humanitarian projects? When I was small and didn't know much about the world, I saw some sort of posters (of UN??) about this. I couldn't possibly join some of the UN projects if I didn't know French/Spanish (how could people expect a 13- or 15-year-old to know it?). If Esperanto had been used by, ok now, organizations that are *similarly* *neutral* ones, I could have participated in teenage international activities. It didn't take place, but as I see it now, Esperanto is at least good for keeping young people to do millions of other, possibly, stupid or destructive things that could ruin their life - for me, this language, unlike some others people might have been forced to learn, would give one a different perspective on life.
Tim Morley   Sat Dec 08, 2007 3:32 pm GMT
Xie asked: "What I mean is, for example, specialist vocabulary. I guess Esperanto wouldn't be a language for specialist purposes..."

Esperanto has quite well developed terminology in a wide variety of fields -- botany, IT, philosophy, railway engineering, and many others. The words used by specialists discussing these subjects would likely be difficult to understand by other Esperantists, but then their conversation would be difficult to follow by non-specialists in any other language too.

There is a fairly strong tendency in Esperanto to re-use existing roots to describe new phenomena rather than inventing new ones. Thus "pixel" is "bildero" or "bildpunkto", both immediately understandable to any Esperanto speaker; "email" is "retpoŝto" (lit. "network mail"), again made up of existing roots; "surbendigilo" (lit. "putting-onto-tape machine") for "tape recorder". In this last example, English has followed the same pattern, i.e. re-using the existing words "tape" and "record", whereas French for example invented a whole new word, "magnetophone".


Xie also asked: "and what about idioms of every language?"

If we take "idiom" to mean "an expression whose actual meaning is not obvious from the literal meaning of its individual words", then Esperanto has only a very small number of these. Examples in English include "to push the boat out", "head over heels in love", "to put up with something", "to see a plan through", "to see through a plan", etc., and Esperanto doesn't have direct equivalents. The existence of such expressions would be somewhat contrary to the general aim of Esperanto users, i.e. to be understood as widely as possible, since each individual expression must be learned by heart (in addition to first learning the words that make up the expression) in order to be understood.

However, there is no restriction at all in using metaphors, vivid imagery, emotionally charged words, swearwords, wordplay, etc. so any suggestion that Esperanto is some dry, rigid or lifeless simply shows a lack of exposure to the language as it is used.

[b]<b>test</b>[/b]
Tim Morley   Sat Dec 08, 2007 3:49 pm GMT
Xie also said: "I'd be glad to hear from experienced Esperantists about translating from their native languages to Esperanto."

I've done some translating between Esperanto, French and my native language English, although I'm certainly not a professional. I'm not sure from your question exactly what you are looking for, but I'd be glad to answer a more specific question if you'd care to write one.

What I will say is that translating *into* English or Esperanto is massively easier for me than translation into French, even though I've been studying and speaking French for over twenty years, and on a daily basis for the last seven or so years. Translating *from* Esperanto, I rarely need a dictionary to understand the text, but often need help to find equivalent expressions, in English or (even more so) in French. Translation *from* French, I constantly need to refer to dictionaries and to native speakers to make sure I have fully understood the original.

And Xie also asked: "[...] how much you could use Esperanto. By common sense, you could use it almost exclusively with Esperantists, [...]"

Well that's somewhat obvious; I can only use French with French speakers too! Here's my short answer to your question though: I originally learned the language so that I could meet and talk comfortably with foreigners when I go travelling, and I have been rewarded a hundred times over in this respect. It has deepened my knowledge of how language works. It has broadened my mind by putting me in touch with people from countries that I have never visited. And now (shock! horror!) I'm even earning money by teaching the language to three classes at a primary school, as part of the Springboard2Languages programme. (See http://www.springboard2languages.org for more details).

For a much fuller answer from me and from 20-odd other Esperantists, see this blog post and the following comments:
http://timsk.wordpress.com/2006/08/04/response-to-nicole-martinelli/
greg   Sun Dec 09, 2007 3:23 pm GMT
Johan Valano : « Many languages, like French or Spanish, put the subject after the verb in relative clauses: "la fille qu'aime mon frère" (the girl my brother loves). »

Oui mais on trouve aussi souvent : <la fille que mon frère aime>.


<la lettre que Pierre a postée>
<la lettre qu'a postée Pierre>

<le succulent repas que son épouse nous a préparé>
<le succulent repas que nous a préparé son épouse>
Tim Morley   Sun Dec 09, 2007 8:00 pm GMT
Certainly, Greg, both are possible in French, but a French speaker trying to speak English may well fall into the trap suggested above by Johan above.

His point is that French and English often depend solely on word order to distinguish subject from object (the above case being an exception in French but not in English, hence the possible confusion), whereas subject and object are explicitly marked in Esperanto, regardless of word order.
Guest   Sun Dec 09, 2007 8:09 pm GMT
Why not just have it like in English where there isn't an exception? That seems more logical to me.