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Esperanto Is A Living Language
Mary Jackson has kindly posted a video by Claude Piron, one of the most distinguished Esperanto authors, a psychologist and U.N. interpreter who is an outstanding linguist. I urge all NER readers to watch it in spite of Mary's apparent belief that it supports her arguments that trivialize and mock Esperanto and that readers should try to avoid giggling or falling asleep. I confidently leave it to all those who have not made up their minds about the issue on a-priori grounds to learn something valuable they were not aware of (at the risk of giggling or falling asleep). It takes about 5 minutes.
Mary claims that no one has answered her arguments that Esperanto is an artificial language that cannot change as normal living languages do.
To those who still persist in labeling Esperanto an "artificial" language, please let me explain that although devised, it is a living language as much as modern Hebrew or Nynorsk (one of the two official languages in Norway). One hundred and thirty years ago there was not a single native, primary or habitual speaker of any of these languages. They were "devised" by devoted linguists and deeply dedicated men convinced that Yiddish or Dano-Norwegian (the languages most commonly spoken by East European Jews and educated urban Norwegians respectively) could NOT serve as "national languages" - the vehicle embodying the culture, future national development and historical literature of these two peoples.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (instrumental in the development of modern Hebrew) and Ivar Aasen (pioneer of Nynorsk), like Zamenhof , struggled to draw upon the legacy of the past to formulate a new modern literary and spoken language. Esperanto differs only in that it is not the speech of a distinct nation or ethnic group but a self-chosen diaspora of those who use it for practical utilitarian purposes and for a minority as their chosen vehicle for the expression of a cosmopolitan culture enduring and maturing for the past 120 years..
All three languages - Esperanto, Modern Hebrew and Nynorsk are LIVING languages changing as a result of the usage of those who speak and write them. Each has had an "Academy" but it has been the daily decisions of speakers in contact through correspondence, visits, tours, seminars, conferences and the production of a massive literature and cultural creativity,, not the Academy, that have changed and developed each language, its idiomatic expressions and slang.
