In light of some of the recent comments regarding Esperanto, I feel I should digress a bit and address the issue. While comments have been made regarding Esperanto as the future for a worldwide lingua franca, I for one submit to a more Einsteinian approach to language use and evolution: language cannot be created but can be destroyed, and certainly can change to other forms.
Esperanto is a feat in its own right. With vision for a language which could "foster harmony between people from different countries," L.L. Zamenhof completed Esperanto in the 1880s. Since then it has acquired between 100,000 and 2 million speakers, has seen the publication and translation of literary works, and has a passionate following that remains strong today. (Thank you, wikipedia.=)
That being said, many of my blog readers have hit some very important points. As a student of culture, I have been consistently taught that language and culture are inextricably linked. While Esperanto presents a good option for communicating in the multinationally influenced world we now live in, it lacks the naturally evolving culture that goes alongside. From this perspective, language nor culture can be created.
Also, with Esperanto's use of a modified Latin alphabet and the associated phonetic counterparts, there seems a large portion of the world left out of the mix...namely those using various Asian spoken and written forms. One may say that an alphabet of some form had to be chosen; but why the Latin alphabet and the primarily Western-based grammar? After all, by wikipedia's average estimation, almost twice as many people worldwide speak Chinese than English (the most common Latin alphabet language) followed by Hindu/Urdu (whose alphabet is based on Sanskrit). Esperanto clearly has certain socio-political influences, which could not only favor certain languages and cultures over others, but potentially hinder or destroy those from non-Western nations and cultures.
Finally language is not something you can force upon someone. Even during colonization, when English or French or Spanish was brought to other areas of the world, the lingua franca did not evolve in its original form. Pidgins, creoles, and full-fledged new languages were born and evolved into their present-day counterparts. And this didn't happen just in one place, it happened almost everywhere, in places separated by oceans and terrain. As a property of language itself, language (and culture) cannot be created...it can only evolve to different forms.
As an aside, I welcome any and all comments to my blog. But please, if you have political affiliations related to particular topics, I do ask you identify yourself properly. As much for the informational purposes of my readers as for the integrity of the blog I write.
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Hello! I'm British and have no political affiliation in the USA or elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteYou're right: language and culture are inextricably linked. As the Esperanto language has grown, so has the cultural output of its speaker population. There is,for example, well over a century of Esperanto poetry. Whilst there is some naïve versifying, there is some particularly finely crafted poetry by a Hungarian called Kalocsay, for example. There is Esperanto poetry now in its third and forth editions, and in print for some 70 years. I’m also very fond of satirical and comic verse by a Frenchman called Schwartz. And no history? A good introductory guide to the history of the language and its speakers is the Enciklopedio, published in two fat volumes in the 1930s. A scholarly volume by Ulrich Lins called ‘La Danĝera Lingvo- Studo pri la persekutoj kontraŭ Esperanto’ (my copy dates from 1990) outlines the suffering of users of this planned language in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Japan. Esperanto has its own heroes and villains, myths and legends. It has its own songs and even its own anthem and flag. All grew up as the language grew.
You're right that "language is not something you can force upon someone." It shouldn't be. Esperanto is a voluntary speech community, unsupported by governments. People can take it or leave it.
Of course Esperanto has a culture! It's a very cosmopolitan one, with notable tendencies towards both idealism and practicality, and a marked respect for, and interest in, other cultures, large and small.
ReplyDeleteBut I will concentrate on some of your other points.
I myself dropped Esperanto for a few years after first learning it, precisely because I was concerned that it was likely "too European" and thus not giving sufficient place to the interests of non-europeans.
However, at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, I by chance met a group of Japanese and Korean Esperantists, who explained to me why they felt my concerns were unfounded and based on misapprehensions of the pertinent facts.
One important point was that while the vocabulary clearly was largely derived from European languages, the grammar clearly was not -- and can be considered to be much more like Chinese than a European language.
They also reminded me that Zamenhof had attempted to create vocabulary "out of whole cloth", creating tables of the possible, pronounceable combinations of letters to which he assigned meanings -- and discovered that the human brain doesn't seem geared to recall such vocabulary. In fact, he couldn't remember such vocabularies himself. There appears to be some connection between words and meaning (or at least word-groups and meanings) that makes purely arbitrary words difficult even for polyglots. So Zamenhof resorted to combing the dictionaries available to him, to find word-forms that were common to as many languages as possible.
They also pointed out that this approach was not possible with Asian languages. A good knowledge of Japanese is of little us in learning Korean, and knowing both is of little use in learning, say, Vietnamese or Thai. So they weren't bothered by Esperanto's supposed "European bias", and even (politely) suggested that if I continued to be, I was perhaps just making excuses.
They had similar things to say about using a latin-based alphabet (and isn't it just so funny how Europeans b*tch about Esperanto's "weird" accented letters (Ĉ,ĉ, Ĝ,ĝ, Ĥ,ĥ, Ĵ,ĵ, Ŝ,ŝ, Ŭ,ŭ), latin-based or no?).
Incidentally, it is worth pointing out that these discussions were carried out -- quite readily -- in Esperanto. Even though they each had about 12-14 years of English lessons, and I had 2 semesters of evening-school Japanese. My Esperanto was rusty, and they had studied the language for about 6 months, but we communicated far, far more easily in Esperanto than in those languages of more formal study.
Needless to say, this experience renewed my interest in Esperanto.
Bernardo Verda
Does this mean that future posts will be about sex and religion?
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for commenting, Bill!
ReplyDeleteI personally find Esperanto a very interesting topic of discussion, especially since its existence differs so greatly from the origins of most other languages of the world.
I find it interesting you use the term "cultural output." I guess that's where find my troubles. The creation of a language and the resulting "output" of culture vs. an evolution of both culture and language, mutually influenced from the very beginning.
But I do agree with you...I doubt Esperanto would be forced upon anyone, given the vision for its inception in the first place.
Hi Bernardo! Thank you as well for commenting and reading!
ReplyDeleteI would be curious to find out what the socio-economic stats are for speakers of Esperanto. My guess would be most speakers at the least college graduates if not academics, which I find problematic regardless of its cultural origins.
Also, I'm not convinced of the relation of Esperanto to Asian languages. Is it just a simplified grammatical system that may have been a convenient coincidence? Or does Esperanto use groups of sounds in combination (i.e. xiang-fragrant shui-water, means perfume) like Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese etc. in both writing and speaking?
I do find it interesting the ease with which you were able to communicate with your Japanese friends in Esperanto! Is it really THAT easy to learn? And is it easier to learn for those who know "Western" languages?
PS Sex and religion are never off limits in my book! As long as it stays PG-rated and respectful=)
ReplyDeleteThat was my dry humor . . . you know, 3 things not to talk about. Sex, POLITICS and religion. Frankly, I don't understand what you meant about identifying yourself properly if you have certain political associations. Sounds very socialist and controlling.
ReplyDeleteThe only way to find out how many people speak Esperanto worldwide would be to have some sort of census. The question being "do you speak Esperanto" in about 6,800 languages.
ReplyDeleteI'll just carry on using it :D
Your readers may be interested in http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
Hello again, Sarah!
ReplyDeleteI don't know if anyone has made much study of Esperanto and socio-economic status. But Esperantists seem to come from all walks of life. Going by official organizations, there are Esperanto associations devoted to law and medicine, and others focused on journalism (including a chapter of PEN), and some focused on literature, music or the arts. There are organizations for railway and construction workers, cyclists, blind people and the Boy Scouts, and associations for collectors of postal stamps and postcards, players of chess and Go. There's anti-globalization and Green/environmental groups, and religious affiliations from Atheist, Baha'i, Buddhist and Catholic through Protestant, Quaker, Spiritualist. There is also a relatively large and active Esperanto Wikipedia (Vikipedio) community -- of course access to the web might also be considered a marker of higher socio-economic status. My own experience matches.
As I understand it, Zamenhof knew little if anything about Chinese. He simply worked very hard to simplify and to strip away every superfluous linguistic element that he could, that left him with enough flexibility and expressiveness to meet both technical and aesthetic considerations. And he tested and tested and tested, to make sure that his ideas worked as well in practice as they looked in theory -- many apparently good ideas ended up in the waste basket.
You might find the following links particularly interesting. The author was a doctor who worked for over a decade at the UN and WHO as a translator into French from Chinese, English, Russian and Spanish.
Esperanto, a western language?
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/westernlanguage.htm
Esperanto: european or asiatic language?
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm
And finally -- Yes, it is that much easier. Depending on which native and target language combination one is comparing to (after all, Japanese consider Hungarian the easiest European language), Esperanto is at least 5 times, and perhaps up to 15 times, easier to learn. This is mostly due to the very marked regularity of Esperanto grammar.
I first learned Esperanto at university (there was a campus Esperanto club at the time). In those days, there was no World Wide Web, so I learned via the famous 10-lesson Esperanto Postal Course. Of course, I didn't bother with the mail, as I could just hand the previous day's lesson over directly to my German professor, see it marked, and receive the next sheet straight from him. Each lesson was printed on a single sheet of paper (in earlier lessons that included room for answers).
At the end of those 10 lessons I understood the Esperanto grammar better than my French (5 years in junior and senior highschool, plus 2 semesters at the university) or German (2 semesters) all in under a dozen hours of self-study (of course, it helped quite a bit that Esperanto was not my first "foreign" language). A weekend course really helped to nail that all down, and make sure I pronounced it correctly. Afterwards, my concerns were mainly to improve my still limited vocabulary, get comfortable with complex sentences, and practice my speaking and listening skills. Of the three languages, today my German is useless, and my French limps, but my Esperanto, though not much used, is good enough that I am able to enjoy my recently acquired Esperanto translation of "Lord Of The Rings".
Bernardo Verda