rdearman wrote:Cainntear wrote:Esperanto does not behave like natural languages.
There is this nasty little thing, often called "human nature" where humans tend to change things over time to suit themselves. Given enough time, and people, humans will force their nature on to any language.
I have no problem with that statement, but it does raise the question of whether enough time has been given. You think there has, I think there hasn't.
So if there is a problem with numbers, using your example, humans will simply drop what doesn't work and adopt what does, even if it seems irrational from the outside.
Except there's an active centralising tendency
Esperanto is more than 130 years old, and it has changed from the original. Probably fewer changes than English because Esperantists actively try to stop the evolution of dialects, phonology, morphology, etc. but nonetheless it has changed and evolved just like natural languages. I would argue that for the last 75 years it has become a natural language and, like the Académie Française, Esperantists are fighting a loosing battle to stop it from changing.
And yet, Esperanto is still very much mutually comprehensible with the original form, and many rules and patterns remain unchanged. Those rules were constructed, and there's a deep ontological argument about whether something consciously constructed can ever become natural just through having existed, or if it has to be actively altered by natural forces to become natural, or if it never ever becomes natural.
As discussed here, antonyms exist, but the community actively resists them. But antonyms are something languages appear to "want" to have (as much as we can anthropomorphise language evolution!) I would be interested to hear if anyone knows of a language that was not consciously constructed or engineered that naturally evolved a word for cold that is effectively "unhot". I am led to believe there is none, and for me personally, if a constructed language does one thing that no known natural language does, I do not believe we can claim it to be natural.
Esperanto isn't any different from programming languages, which are all constructed languages. They change over time with features or bugs fixed, just like Esperanto.
Computer languages evolve by conscious direction. Natural language normally do not, the interference of pedantic schoolteachers and well-intention academies notwithstanding.
If there are rules that the Esperanto community has chosen to add to Esperanto consciously, that's not like evolution in natural languages, and only sustains the status of Esperanto as a conlang and not a natural language.
And computer languages are very different from Esperanto except in one respect: their inventions were both informed by models of language that are now considered naïve. These models are radically different though -- Zamenhof was going by traditional teaching and grammar, whereas the computer programming pioneers were mostly informed by Chomsky's generative grammars and his bizarre notion that grammar carries no semantic meaning.
So I would argue that Esperanto does behave like natural languages, just because humans are involved.
That same statement would justify calling Navi or Lojban natural languages, which renders the term meaningless.