8 Dec 2007
Mary Jackson

9 Dec 2007
Jan Kodol

Mary Jackson says that if Esperanto changes it will lose its regularity and uniformity. If this were the case, Chinese would have lost its regularity in its three millenia of existence. It has not. And French, which is more united today than it was 50 years ago, when French Canadians were hardly understandable to European Francophones, or when there were many misunderstandings between Belgian, Swiss and French, would have not developed toward better mutual understanding that came about with an intensification of contacts, plus the influence of TV and other medias.

When contacts slacken, a language may lose its good features, but not if there is constant communication. Latin was a unified language for three centuries, on a huge territory, from the British Isles to the Caspian sea, and it changed into dialects and lost many of its qualities only when the Roman Empire collapsed and peoples became isolated.

In Esperanto, the will to communicate, which is a the basis of people's choice of it, guarantees that the evolution will not damage it. The frequence of world wide or regional meetings in which the language is used is another guarantee.

9 Dec 2007
Mary Jackson

As I said on this thread, Chinese is not a sensible comparison. It is an isolating language. Its "regularity" derives from the fact that it has no inflections. In Esperanto, however, the inflections have no exceptions - for now. This could easily change, as it has in every other inflected language. Sound changes alone can make regular patterns irregular, for example in Germanic languages Umlaut and Ablaut were regular patterns but gave rise to irregularities when sound changes obliterated the original pattern.

Esperanto may have its regularity artificially preserved by Committees, of course, and this would be fully in keeping with its Utopian character.

Irregular verbs were banned in George Orwell's Newspeak. Who'd have thinked it?

9 Dec 2007
Jan Kodol

Esperanto is not an inflectional language, although at first glance it may look like one. In inflectional languages the interior of a root may change (come / came ; woman /women ; go / went; be / is / are). This never happens in Esperanto. Esperanto, like Chinese, proceeds exclusively by addition: to transform " I " into "mine" you add the relevant marker: mi > mia, just as in Chinese wo > wode. The pattern is exactly the same in Chinese haizimen (hai + zi + men) 'children' and its Esperanto translation infanoj (infan + o + j). In no inflectional language do you derive "second" from "one" or "dozen" from "twelve", as you do in Esperanto: du > dua ; dekdu > dekduo. Also the n in min 'me' (< mi ' I ') is an invariable morpheme that is just added, and is similarly added to other words in the same function, it has nothing in common with any inflection.

It is debatable whether Esperanto  belongs to the agglutinative or to the isolating group, but when you analyze how it functions you are forced to conclude that it is definitely not inflectional.

As far as sound changes are concerned, since none has happened in 120 years, even in the first century, when oral use of the language was far less frequent than it is today, there is no reason to imagine that this will suddenly occur. Of course, a global catastrophe of some sort may change the context. But as long as people keep on discussing from one country to another by phone, tapes or Skype, or in meetings and visits, and listening to recorded songs and lectures, attending cultural encounters and international courses (I taught in Esperanto in Poznan University, in Poland, last September, to a class of people from 12 countries, from Iran to France through Slovenia and Ukraine), and practicing all the activities the language enables them to enjoy, all ingredients are present for sounds to keep stable. The risk of changes is all the smaller since Esperanto has only 5 vowel sounds and avoids consonant clusters at the end of words.

People learn Esperanto to communicate, and they communicate abundantly. This maintains in force unconscious mechanisms that ensure that the conditions for mutual understanding are constantly preserved. Although the /r/ phoneme can be rendered in three or four different versions, there is a clear tendency, patent if you compare generations, to prefer the lingual, Italian-type /r/ even among Germans, French, Brits, Chinese and others who don't have that sound in their own language. This is a sign, among many others, that the need to be clearly understood is a predominant factor, strong enough to control the evolution of the language.

Another point is: if you exclude Esperanto, what do you use as an international, global language? English? English is clearly inflectional and thus subject to the changes you mention. If the risk of sound or inflection change is an argument to reject Esperanto, it is just as good an argument to reject English. Anyway, between two languages with the same function and the same probability of instability, I prefer the easier one, the one which is closer to the spontaneous working of my brain and thus with less of those irrational constraints that make it so tiring to express yourself in English even after thousands of hours of study and practice if  it's not your mother tongue and you don't live in an English speaking country.

Esperanto's unity has nothing to do with committees. People use the language without ever referring to authoritative decisions. Komputilo has clearly dislodged the recommended komputero or komputoro even among Esperanto computer specialists. This is an example, among many others, of how internal factors have more influence than exterior ones on the evolution of the language.

I'm afraid Mary Jackson's argumentation is based more on her negative feelings about Esperanto than on objective analysis and serene reflection.

As to her allusion to Orwell's Newspeak, is there an insinuation in it? If there is, could you, Mary, be a bit more explicit?

9 Dec 2007
Mary Jackson

In other words Esperanto inflects by means of suffixes rather than changes in the root vowel. And this inflection by suffixes is completely regular and systematic, because it has been set up that way.(Inflection just means marking for grammatical information, not necessarily by changing the root vowel.)It is therefore every bit as subject to change as Old English was when it mingled with Skandinavian languages and inflections dropped off. This hasn't happened yet because Esperanto exists in a bubble, protected by enthusiasts, whereas real languages can be buffetted around by the natural forces of language change.

As to Orwell, I don't like enforced regularity. It's doubleplusungood. And yes, I admit freely to a dislike of the supra-national, whether it be language, currency,  the UN or that abomination the EU.

10 Dec 2007
Jan Kodol

Well, there is a linguistic terminology, and in it, "inflection" does not refer just to marking grammatical information. All languages mark grammatical information. How could people understand one another without it? The term "inflection" is reserved to those languages which, like Indo-European and Semitic languages, mark grammatical and semantic information by markers that can be different for the same function, and in which the marking may affect the interior of a word. They have conjugations and many have declensions, or at least residues of declensions. The fact that in English plural is formed in a different way in children, feet and books, or that the suffix is different in liberty and freedom, classes it among the inflectional languages.

 

Of course, languages change. Why shouldn't they? Esperanto changes like any other language. But it's obvious, if you study its history, that changes are controlled by the desire to keep it understandable and by the imitation tendency. Forms that change are adopted in the whole world if they correspond to a need or represent an innovation that the speakers find useful or pleasant. For instance, the use of the e‑form for months (decembro 'December' > decembre 'in December'), a relatively recent development, has spread everywhere (the classical forms en decembro and je decembro remain of course just as much in use). You find this e‑form for months, today, in texts from Mongolia or Japan as well as in the mouth of Brazilians and Togolese. These things spread like fashions. Fortunately, the language is so structured (as are languages like Turkish, Hungarian or Chinese, which are not inflectional either) that such changes cannot affect understandability, since they could not touch grammar, only style. For me, the balance between change (life, freedom) and stability (rigor, security) is one of the most sympathetic features of Esperanto.

 

Surprisingly enough, Mary, I share something with you : I hate enforced regularity. I like Esperanto because, of all the languages I have learned, it is the one in which I am most free to choose the way I express my thoughts. It's extremely pleasant when you want to say something as banal as, say, 'I'll go to the hotel by bus', to be free to choose in a wide gamut of forms: Mi iros hotelen buse, mi iros al la hotelo per buso, perbuse mi iros al la hotelo, hotelen mi busos, or buse mi alhotelos, etc. I've used Esperanto a lot with a lot of different nationals, so I know by experience that this liberty has no disadvantage at all as far as comprehension is concerned.

I don't like enforced regularity, but I dislike even more enforced irregularity, the trait that makes it so painful to attain a good level in English and that keeps the non natives from ever feeling secure in their use of the language. Esperanto's regularity is all the more democratic since it's not enforced. You're free not to use Esperanto. In many cases, if you take part in international life, you're not free not to obey the enforced irregularities of English. Lucky you! You chose well the place where you were born!

 

10 Dec 2007
Mary Jackson
That was my point that the suffixes are regular, but they are suffixes none the less, and, as happened in many Indo-European languages, can easily get swallowed up by the root or merge with others due to sound changes and generally undergo changes that will affect this much vaunted regularitiy. Unless, as is now the case, Esperanto is deliberately and artificially kept regular because it exists in a bubble.

10 Dec 2007
Jan Kodol

Sorry, but you shouldn't take the Indo-European languages as reference. They work in quite a different way! Look at the history of Hungarian, Turkish, Kazakh, Finnish and many other languages which are not inflectional and which you hardly could call bubble tongues, you'll see that suffixes can go through centuries or millenia without undergoing changes and without being swallowed by the roots. Esperanto has more in common with these languages, structurally speaking, than with Indo-European ones (only its vocabulary is Indo-European). Thus it's likely it will evolve like these, not like English or French, in which suffixes are not autonomous units, independent from the words they help form, and thus are not felt as such by the speakers. In Esperanto when you say ebligi 'make possible', 'enable' you feel ebl and igi not as suffixes, but as full fledged words, since you constantly use them independently, for instance in ne eblas (ebl + as) 'it's not possible' or in vi devas igi la frazon pli klara 'you have to make the sentence clearer'. This gives suffixes a completely different status in the mind, even if it is not perceived consciously.

 

Another important factor is that Esperanto suffixes are made up of a vowel followed by a consonant, which makes them unlikely, if not impossible, to be swallowed by roots. In komprenebla 'understandable' (kompren 'understand' + ebl "possibility" + a "concept used in adjective function"), with the stress on the e of ebla, how could it be swallowed? Same thing about komprenigi 'make somebody understand', with stress on the first i.

 

It's not easy to be complete and concise, that's why I have spared you the difference between suffixes and endings in Esperanto. It doesn't matter because they function the same way. The difference is that endings (like o, which marks that you use the concept as a noun: komprenigo 'the fact of  bringing somebody to understanding' or as which marks that you use the concept as a verb in present tense: li gitaras 'he is playing the guitar') may consist of just a vowel as well as of a vowel followed by a consonant.

 

I know little about the history of English, but it seems to me that words like up, in, on, out, in such expressions as bring up, come in, put on, make out and the like, have gone through centuries without modifying the form of the preceding verb and without being swallowed or altered. Why should Esperanto be different only because the morphemes are written as part of the word, a simple spelling convention?

 

10 Dec 2007
Mary Jackson

Any of those things can change. The stress may be in one place now, but it could be fixed in another place in years to come. Endings that now function autonomously could easliy then be perceived as inflections and suffer the same fate as Germanic ones. It is not inconceivable that English and German speakers of Esperanto may perceive the words in a different way, or come to do so if a separte dialect develops. Anything could happen.

I take your word for the fact that endings in Turkish and Finnish have remained stable, but, while I know nothing of the history of these languages beyond the fact that Finnish is conservative, I will very surprised - in fact I will not believe - that they haven't changed in other ways. Likewise Chinese.  Ways that could be damaging if not to the regularity of the inflections, to the uniformity of the language in other ways and the ease with which it may be learnt.

Basically, if Esperanto works, changes, attaches itself as other languages do to politics and power,  it has no advantages over natural languages. If it doesn't, it certainly has no advantages over natural languages.

11 Dec 2007
Jan Kodol

I hope you enjoy this interesting conversation as much as I do !

What I don't understand, is why you appear to find that change prevents Esperanto from fulfilling its function, although you don't seem to apply the same criticism to other languages. Esperanto does change and will go on changing. So what? Such changes are very slow and they are adopted by the whole community of speakers. In the British Isles, there was a point in time, certainly, when the /a/ sound of old Germanic, French and Latin, in certain positions, gradually evolved into an [ei] sound (compare Dutch maken to English make). English did not lose its identity, or cease to be a language used to communicate from one area to another, or able to generate poetry or intellectual treatises just because of that shift. So why should things be different in the case of Esperanto?

It's quite conceivable, for instance, that stress will someday switch from the last but one syllable to the first one. It wouldn't affect the understandability of the language, as proven by the easy comprehension of speakers with a Hungarian or Finnish accent. So nothing would be lost in Esperanto's interest as a global language. If such a change occurred, it would probably happen everywhere, because it is important for people who use Esperanto to maintain enough unity in the language so that it may effectively work, and because it is easy to do so, just as the transition from [a] to [ei] in English eventually covered the whole English territory.

Anyway this is a very long term view. In short and medium term, no such evolution is likely. Of course, as you say, dialects could develop. Again: so what? People in a given area would maybe use their dialect, but they'd know how to avoid it in order to make themselves understood at the international or interregional level. Esperanto is a living language and reacts like other living languages. It's subject to the same pressures, some pushing towards dialectization, some tending towards more unity, for the sake of effectiveness.

I don't get your point about Esperanto's lack of advantages over other languages. For me, its advantages are innumerable. First, it is not the language of a given people. When I use English in an international setting, I feel inferior to native English speakers, because they can define what is right and what is wrong in my pronunciation, the way I form my sentences, my use of grammar and my understanding of the semantic field of such an such a word. I was much impressed by what happened to Mrs Helle Degn, a Danish Minister, when, chairing a meeting, and wanting to say "I just assumed my ministerial functions, so be indulgent if I'm not fully conversant with the subject", she said "I'm at the beginning of my period". In Esperanto, no people has the power to tell me "this is right, this is wrong" in the way I express myself, and it makes the relationships completely different: we're all on an equal footing. The axis is horizontal (mutual understanding), whereas in other languages it is vertical (accepted or rejected by the ancestors). Moreover, in Esperanto the accent is foreign for everybody, which eliminates the feeling of foreignness. These and other differences between Esperanto and national languages have an immense psychological importance.

Another serious advantage is easiness. I often meet people who speak quite good Esperanto and who tell me they've started learning the language a few months before. This is due to the fact that Esperanto is more adapted to the natural functioning of the brain than Western languages. Contrary to you, I don't think that such basic construction of a language can change. We don't know much about how Chinese was pronounced 3 millenia ago, but there are enough texts for us to know that grammar has not basically changed. I've researched the language of young children. I can tell you with whole confidence that if the influence of parents, environment and schools ceased to be exerted, a language like French would, in two or three generations, become much more regular than it is. Most rules that contradict the innate tendency to generalize patterns would cease to be applied, because they're enforced only from outside, and they take a decade to take roots. I guess no English speaking child says he came or my feet at first, there must be a time when it says he comed, my foots. If I'm mistaken, this is extraordinary and the causes of such a difference with other languages should be studied.

In all languages (apart from a few exceptions like Chinese), a first series of reflexes are installed in the brain, and then, when they're well established, a second series of reflexes have to be input only to repress the first reflexes: the spontaneous tendency to say falled, thinked, catched has to be inhibited and the form fell, thought, caught put in their place. (I don't know about British children, but the first forms are forms I often heard when I worked in Eastern Asia, just as I often heard childs  and womans: these are the natural forms). Since Esperanto shares with Chinese the fact that it doesn't have second level reflexes needed to inhibit the first level reflexes, it's extremely likely that its easiness will be preserved through the ages, as happened with Chinese, if you limit yourself to grammar and vocabulary (Chinese pronunciation and writing is something else, although difficulty there exists only for foreigners).

You envisage Esperanto attaching itself to politics and power. Indeed, why not. But if it does, it will lose its raison d'être and disappear, to be replaced by another global language, detached from these. Function creates the organ.

The difficulty (real or pretended?) you appear to have to see the obvious advantages of Esperanto over other languages is most intriguing.

 

 

11 Dec 2007
Mary Jackson

You envisage Esperanto attaching itself to politics and power. Indeed, why not. But if it does, it will lose its raison d'être and disappear, to be replaced by another global language, detached from these.

Apart from the last bit, that was essentially my point. When it comes down to it I don't like the fact that it doesn't belong anywhere, and that its easiness is because of its design.

The irregularities in English, for example, are hardly insuperable obstacles to learning it, and they are an interesting document of its history.

12 Dec 2007
Remush
I don't like the fact that [...] its easiness is because of its design.
Warum einfach, wenn's auch kompliziert geht? (== Kial facile, kiam tio ankaŭ komplike funkcias?  +-= Why make it simple, when you can also make it complicated?  )

If you are looking for complexity, consider Klingon.
About Esperanto and easiness read http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dgh4mq6j_11ddrv6g#116

12 Dec 2007
Jan Kodol

Mary Jackson: << I don't like the fact that it [Esperanto] doesn't belong anywhere, [...] >>

If it doesn't belong anywhere for you, it's simply because you're outside it. Personally, I belong to its community, which belongs to the world. It may sound strange, but Esperanto gives me a very strong feeling of belonging, as to most of its speakers. It can also be said that it belongs to humankind, in that it is at its disposal. I'm pretty sure that within a few decades, most people will realize its advantages and adopt it. They're masochists only up to a point. Anyway, does English belong more to London than to Wellington, New Zealand, or Redwood, NY, USA? Esperanto has spread in all directions from a starting point, like any other language. It belongs to the territory it covers, which keeps growing from year to year.

 

<< [...] and that its easiness is because of its design. >>

 

Esperanto's easiness is a fact, and is, indeed, due to its design. You don't like it, OK, that's your right. There are many facts in life that we don't like, but have to accept. This easiness is a fact I, personally, happen to like very much. I like fair play and democracy. A world in which a tiny proportion of the population burdens the vast majority with the whole of the effort needed to interact, is unaware of the magnitude of this effort, and expects the others to make it without grumbling – a high caste attitude – is the negation of fair play. When I'm forced to use English, I am clumsy and ridiculous, as if, although right handed, I was forced to use only my left hand to do what I want to do. A Japanese told me some day: "when you use a foreign language, you appear less intelligent than you are". He was right and the result of this unpleasant fact is that relationships are distorted. I don't like that, and I find it sad that you don't realise your privileged status (or, if you realise it, that you take it for granted). It's never pleasant to feel foreign, or inferior, which Esperanto protects you from. I am one of the privileged tiny minority (6% of the continental population in Europe) who can discuss complex matters in English. But I'm much more comfortable in the Esperanto world, where you see people as they are, rather than through the filter of an Angloid device which deprives them of their ease and alters their appearance.

 

<< The irregularities in English, for example, are hardly insuperable obstacles to learning it, >>

 

Well, that's true only for a small percentage of the world population. I have two brothers who, in spite of years and years of study, never were able to express themselves in English, apart from stammering a few phrases when traveling. And they're normally intelligent. If these irregularities are superable, how do you explain the results of a recent research in Hanover, in which the English level of 3700 students was tested after 8 to 10 years of study? Only 1% met the criteria for the "very good" level, and only 4% reached the "good" one: 96% could not even be considered "good". University students! One of the most mentally talented and motivated parts of society! The cause of their failure lies in the difficulties of your language, not only the irregularities, but all sorts of other obstacles. Yet, those students had, as compared to the world population, the great advantage of already perfectly knowing a Germanic tongue and thus of entering very easily in the spirit of your language!

It seems to me, with all due respect, that there is a serious gap between the way you see the world and its reality.

13 Dec 2007
russ
Mary wrote: "The irregularities in English, for example, are hardly insuperable obstacles to learning it, and they are an interesting document of its history."

Of course they are not insuperable obstacles, but they are difficult frustrating unnecessary stupid obstacles.  I could similarly say that walking to the store blindfolded with 50 pound weights tied to your feet and earplugs is not an insuperable obstacle, therefore why should people complain about such a task?

English (and Polish, and other national languages) present many serious frustrating discouraging (even though not insuperable) obstacles that cause people to waste huge amounts of time and money while learning them.

You also keep raising objections based on your own personal predictions of what will happen with Esperanto, which seems dubious since you have shown a lack of familiarity with the subject, yet you presume that your opinions are more valid than those who have actual experience and knowledge about Esperanto.  E.g. you keep asserting that Esperanto will either become irregular like national languages, or else that it will remain useless and soulless etc.  Yet in 120 years it has not acquired any irregular nouns/verbs and nevertheless somehow manages to be used by people (who don't automatically dismiss it in a kneejerk reaction) to talk about life and philosophy and art and culture and love and politics and religion and what to cook for dinner, i.e. it works as a real language, yet avoids many of the problems of languages like English.  You remind me of the church officials who refused to look through Galileo's telescope because they were certain that they knew the truth more than people who had actually observed the phenomenon in question.