Esperanto, why bother?

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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Iversen » Mon Mar 20, 2023 9:24 am

One thing more about the choice of alphabet: we're speaking a time before the Russian revolution, and French was actually quite widespread among the Russian aristocracy and middle class back then so most educated Russians would have been able to read Latin letters. Choosing Cyrillic would have closed the door to Western Europa and the Americas and the colonies in Africa and Asia. But he should have chosen letters without diacritics.

As for Volapük being a better language: no, it was more complicated in any possible way. Even its borrowings from other languages (including English) were distorted to a point were it was hard to recognize them, its grammar was much more complicated (quote Wikipedia: "A Volapük verb can be conjugated in 1,584 ways (including infinitives and reflexives)" and as far as I know it didn't have anything like the clever derivation mechanism of Esperanto. On top of that it developed several quite different 'dialects' because of people who tried to reform it. So between Esperanto and Volapük the choice is simple.

The sad thing is that Esperanto could have been reformed too (becoming something more like Ido) - quote Wikipedia:

Esperanto's inventor, L. L. Zamenhof, having heard a number of complaints, had suggested in 1894 a proposal for a Reformed Esperanto with several changes that Ido adopted and made it closer to French: eliminating the accented letters and the accusative case, changing the plural to an Italianesque -i, and replacing the table of correlatives with more Latinate words. However, the Esperanto community voted and rejected Reformed Esperanto, and likewise most rejected the recommendations of the 1907 Committee composed by 12 members. Zamenhof deferred to their judgment, although doubtful.

But even in its current form Esperanto remains a reasonably easy language with some superfluous quirks, and it must be counted as a success simply because it still is active - contrary to most of its competitors and in spite of having no army and no fleet and no country and a number of people around who can't see the point in learning a pure hobby language. I would not have complained about the omission of the accusative -n and the diacritics (called "accents" in the quote), but changing plural -j into -i would have created a conflict with the infinitive ending and replacing the correlatives with something else could have developed into a case of supreme idiocy (depending on the choice of alternative affixes). However the whole reform proposal from 1894 was scrapped, and Esperanto stayed roughly as it was originally created by Big Z - and that's the reality those of us who choose to learn it have to live with, just as we live with silly features of our other languages.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Factoid » Mon Mar 20, 2023 1:21 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Sae wrote:I'm not saying he'd get it perfect or do everything right. I just don't think it's a good comparison when it's more likely he'd not adopt a Chinese script if his goal was to create something simpler and growing up in China at the time would not make him ignorant of alternative systems, especially as a multilinguist (which Zamonhof was).

A multilinguist growing up in China... what languages would they know?


English, at the very least, as England was a very influential actor in the region.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Sae » Mon Mar 20, 2023 1:59 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Sae wrote:I'm not saying he'd get it perfect or do everything right. I just don't think it's a good comparison when it's more likely he'd not adopt a Chinese script if his goal was to create something simpler and growing up in China at the time would not make him ignorant of alternative systems, especially as a multilinguist (which Zamonhof was).

A multilinguist growing up in China... what languages would they know?

Let's say he was multilingual in Chinese and Japanese -- he may well have dismissed syllabaries as complication, because Japanese has three different writing systems (katakana, hiragana and kanji) and it's not a matter of one or the other -- you're switching between them all the time. He studied Latin and Greek -- the equivalent classical languages over there would probably have used ideographs... old Chinese definitely among them. Would he have decided that Latin script was better just because the Vietnamese had been invaded by Portugal?

And consider this: do we know that he had deep knowledge of scripts?


You don't even have to leave China to be a multilinguist.

To list a few languages that would have been available just in China (both today and during the Qing dynasty, when Zamonhof was alive):

- Mandarin
- Cantonese
- Shanghaiese
- Tibetan
- Uyghur
- Tuvan
- Kazakh
- Manchu
- Mongolian
- Oirat
- Hmong
(And more of course)

And most of those languages had/have their own alphabetic scripts.

Out of those, maybe Tibetan makes a lot of sense for a script, it was already spread across Asia because of Buddhism and it is alphabetic (and shares a common ancestor with a LOT of alphabetic systems, including Latin and Cyrrilic and systems for some of the other languages I've listed). And for a parallel, Kublai Khan, who was an Emperor of China in the Yuan Dynasty, had his scholars create a script derive from Tibetan because Old Uyghur and Chinese script was unsuitable for middle Mongolian.

Given the region was largely Buddhist, it'd still be a known and familiar script even beyond China, because Tibetan Buddhism took it's script with it.

And whatever Zamenhof's motives were for using Latin, Chinese script poses a problem that is contrary to his goal with Esperanto that Latin didn't give him and in China there are plenty of alternative scripts that don't have the same problem too. Chinese was just a dominant language.

Hence it's not a good comparison as it would make more sense for him to not use Chinese and would have had plenty of alternative solutions rather than stubbornly stick to a system that would hurt not help his goal.

We know his goal with Esperanto was to be simple and flexible.
We don't know that he was so stubborn and unwavering of a cultural bias that he would refuse to give up a difficult-to-learn script that would hinder not help his goal with Esperanto.

Would he have recognised it as a problem, though? Plenty of people will defend Chinese script to the hilt with spurious self-serving arguments about its superiority.



You can still believe something is superior whilst recognising it is harder to learn, some would even use that point to argue why it is superior. Chinese Zamonhof is already creating a new language whilst recognising Chinese is not sufficient as a universal language. But then "ease" and perceptions about "superiority" don't go hand in hand. Ease is superior to a pragmatist, but maybe not to a patriot (or artist or philosopher or personal biases and so on).

But during Zamonhof's time the "superior" minded culture was Manchu, to the point that much of its culture was reserved for the ruling class, not for the common people.

But if we're talking somebody as stubborn as suggested, then would they even entertain the idea of a universal language that isn't Chinese? If the idea is to solve a problem it means recognising a problem with his own language.

Fortunately we have occam's razor, we'd only need to entertain the idea if there was something to suggest that okay he might.

Occam's razor is not about psychology though -- it's about physical sciences.


It's more to do with problem solving, about finding the explanation that takes the fewest assumptions.

We don't know Zamonhof would stubbornly stick to a writing system that is contrary to his intentions with Esperanto, so it wouldn't make sense to accommodate that assumption, else we open ourselves to an endless list of what-ifs. What we do know was that he had a European bias and a preference for Latin and that he was creating something simple.

This hypothetical scenario proposes something that would be contradictory and would need to have a practical solution, which is not something actual Zamonhof was faced with. His bias was European and pulled from multiple European languages, hypothetical Chinese Zamonhof would need to do the equivalent to be a hypothetical Chinese Zamonhof and that presents him with options for alternative scripts that resolve this problem without contradicting a bias for the continent/region. And also a potential incentive to create his own. Whether it's new like Hangul or inheritive like Phagspa.
Cainntear wrote:
But I think there is a fair argument to be made between chosing Latin & Cyrillic. I don't think me saying Latin was widespread is me having a Western European bias, it's more that Western Europe had colonized much of the world.

Ah, so you're saying that Latin is a more neutral character set because the colonial powers that invaded lands and enslaved the local populace brought Latin characters with them...? :twisted:


Faaaaaaaaaaar from it. Colonialism is something I hate about this country's past.

I am saying it is widespread because of it. It's not a judgment on whether or not it should be used, but it is a reason to pick a script, but not the only one and is maybe the one I can see comparison against Chinese script, but the point is that the biase here would have to be strong enough to trump your goal of making a simple-to-learn flexibile language. Not that I think it is more neutral.

Exactly, and you haven't claimed that, but others have, so I'm grateful that you've brought the conversation to a point where its neutrality can be basically written off.


I figure it makes sense, given when Zamonhof lived. It of course doesn't devalue it. But you can't really claim it is neutral, just more neutral or is neutral enough (as I did express before, ultimately it doesn't matter).
Last edited by Sae on Mon Mar 20, 2023 8:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Dragon27 » Mon Mar 20, 2023 3:06 pm

Cainntear wrote:ever U sound written as O is due to people misreading scribes handwriting because they weren't aware of the reason they wrote like that.

I just wanted to point out this little subclaim. The way I always read it was that the scribes actually wrote O instead of U, so this spelling persisted, not that the scribes wrote U in a way that looked similar to O (which wasn't actually O) and the people reading it mistook it for O, so they began writing it as such.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Mar 20, 2023 3:39 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Cainntear wrote:ever U sound written as O is due to people misreading scribes handwriting because they weren't aware of the reason they wrote like that.

I just wanted to point out this little subclaim. The way I always read it was that the scribes actually wrote O instead of U, so this spelling persisted, not that the scribes wrote U in a way that looked similar to O (which wasn't actually O) and the people reading it mistook it for O, so they began writing it as such.

OK, to clarify then, the course I was taking on the Open University made a claim that the top was rounded over, but that the connection to the next letter (in the form of a brief connecting tail at the line of writing) was not omitted, i.e. that the glyph used was neither an O or a U, but had elements of both. I do not know whether this is something that was later disproven, or if a previous explanation that had ignored the ties had retained popularity despite later writers noting them.

So if I'm wrong, it's because I was told wrong.
If the other people are wrong, it's because they were told wrong.
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