Le Baron wrote:I'm only addressing this bit:Cainntear wrote:It wasn't explicit, but it's a consequence of the situation of Esperanto. Esperanto is a hobby language -- practically everyone who learns it does so because they want to. There are a handful of people who've learned it as part of university experiments and a handful of journalists who've learned it simply to develop an article. No-one has been forced to learn it for work or to integrate in a new society.
That means that pretty much everyone who has learnt it actively chose to do so, which means that everyone who speaks it actively likes it.
Unintended it may be, but liking the language is a logical entailment of your criteria; you cannot deny that simply because it wasn't part of the explicit criteria.
In the UK French, as just one example, is primarily a hobby language.
People learn French as a hobby, but most people who speak French don't do it because they decided they wanted to learn French -- that's my point.
A lot of people are actually forced to learn it on an official curriculum (and most don't really learn it) for no good reason.
And how does this address anything I said? Stating a fact without relating it to the discussion is not an argument.
Strictly speaking I think you actually have the entire argument backwards, because...
That's not a counter-argument. They learn it because they want to learn it. No-one learns Esperanto who doesn't want to learn Esperanto.
If the only people who are allowed to comment on Esperanto are people who actively chose to start studying and actively decided to continue to fluency, then you only have a sample of people who are predisposed to considering Esperanto something good. It's classic selection bias, and you're shifting the goalposts and writing tangential arguments that completely fail to address that.
There are no solid figures on who learns it and why so where do you get your 'handful of journalists' ('handful' a noun carefully chosen to denote smallness, randomness and insignificance) and these hobbyists and experiments? Can you point to them without right now scouring the web to try and find some examples? I doubt it.
Of course I can't. I would definitely need to search the web to find examples.
But once again you're hammering me for trying to have an open and honest conversation. I wasn't using "handful" to talk down someone else's data, but introducing stuff myself. I think I've only read one newspaper column on learning Esperanto. I know most language researchers don't use Esperanto, because it is more effective to use a specifically designed research conlang or a well-documented natural language that directly addresses features under study.
I could have claimed that no-one ever studies Esperanto except for personal interest, and I doubt anyone would have called me on it.
Plenty people here and in the wider world have tried many languages (for how else can you find if its appeal for whatever reason translates to real motivation?) and then don't pursue them past 'dabble' stage or A1. Simply because the motivation doesn't happen. In this thread some people have said 'I tried it, but...' then their reasons for why it never worked out or went any further. What were they doing at all that was any different from most languages people take up? Was it really 'liking' at work? More likely candidates are: simple curiosity, the desire to add a simpler language to the polyglot language count, interest in constructed languages...many more. But 'liking'? Liking the idea of something and actually developing a liking/love for something are two different things. So no it isn't a logical entailment of my "criteria". There was no 'logical' argument made which included or suggested it and no such outcome reached.
Another non-argument. I never once claimed that the only reason anyone stops learning a languages is that they didn't like it; I claimed that actually liking the language was a necessary precondition to learning Esperanto, unlike languages where there is external pressure. "Neutral communication" is not an external pressure -- it's the learner's personal view.
If you were familiar with what goes on regarding Esperanto, the actual diverse reasons for learning it, the actual different views of its value, uses and future held by speakers, rather than the cardboard cut-out, bare-bones characterisation propped-up by speculative analysis, you probably wouldn't make these utterances.
This just sounds like the whole "do your own research" line -- you are incapable of explaining where I'm wrong, so just keep blaming me for not agreeing with you.