Anti-Esperanto
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There’s a good piece over at Progressive U arguing against Esperanto and the general ideal of a universal language that we could all speak without wearing a linguistic badge of national identification.
The EU uses both English and French as its official working languages, while the UN includes both of them as well as Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Spanish. While some point out that adopting a neutral language such as Esperanto throughout such international political organisations would both cut costs and reduce the sense of second-class-citizenship felt by those whose mother-tongues are not considered the primary languages of business…
…Even ‘neutral’ languages like Esperanto use the Latin alphabet and are based on Romance grammar rules. These do not reflect global diversity and can be especially difficult to learn for those whose languages do not use words or alphabets but rather characters like Chinese or Japanese…
Meaning is given to words by their cultural context rather than a dictionary definition. This means people from different cultures may use the same word to mean different things in different contexts, even when speaking the same language. Crucial cultural distinctions maybe overlooked if translation is no longer considered.
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Subliminal learning on May 23rd, 2006
For en Trogo // Away in a Manger on December 24th, 2006
On being direct on December 1st, 2006
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July 28th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Esperanto survives as the most popular constructed language because it makes compromises on every language issue, that is, it is a middle ground. The author of this criticism would perhaps endorse and entirely new vocabulary, phonetic and script system “unrelated” to any other culture. But in this way the incredibly pervasive (though not totally pervasive) Latin system would be junked, and the Latin system itself (a dead language) in a sense loses its life. I think that by using an existing system that is a common link between many current systems helps the large majority of learners learn more quickly. The second most pervasive language influence in the world would be Chinese, which could either be more heavily represented in a new constructed language like Esperanto or the major basis of an entirely new constructed language. Many people have suggested this because Chinese has many simplicities to it already.
The current situation (so I’ve heard) is that Esperanto is 15 times easier to learn than other national languages for speakers of western languages, and 5 times easier for others. Its a compromise that - considering the influence of Latin is the greatest - is quite tolerable.
November 10th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
The point of Esperanto was NEVER to convert the world to one language. It was simply a device created so the world could communicate. I see it as everyone’se second language. If the world knew esperanto…Belgians wouldn’t be required to learn French, English, AND German. Also us lazy Americans would also do our part in the whole “world communication” thing.
February 11th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I saw a text in esperanto and I was able to make something out of it only because I speak spanish fluently and I’m familiar with latin.Basically you need to be familiar with spanish or someother romance language to learn esperanto easily and well.In other words you already need to know another language that has a latin alphabet and an easy grammar to speak esperanto.We already have that:english.No need for esperanto.