Le Baron wrote:I see this in a very, very basic way.:
1. Esperanto is really easy and works.
2. Therefore it's worth learning.
What you've done there is make a huge leap of logic. If by "works" you mean "results in successful communication between two successful learners of the language" then 2 does not logically follow from 1. 2
only logically follows from 1 if your definition of "works" is far more subtle and refined.
In my younger years, I was generally extremely positive about Esperanto, inheriting my mother's conviction that it was a good thing (she didn't speak it) and seeing as the internet was still not mass media, Esperanto materials were so few and far between that I never ever came across any.
My love of languages sort of stalled, but I kept running across French people I could have surprisingly complex conversations and Italian people I could exchange a few halting words with. My first attempts at learning more were unsuccessful because I was using painfully poor books, because they were what passed as being seen as good in mainstream thought. When I decided I wanted to learn Spanish, I got Michel Thomas off ebay. I was very sceptical indeed, but there was something in the reviews I'd read that caught my attention despite the scepticism -- he just seemed to be doing something in a way that matched my intuitive understanding of what language was. So I bought the CDs and they were posted to my work. I took them home and started working through them. At the end of the second CD, I realised that I was reeeeaaally hungry cos I was over an hour late in preparing my dinner. I was a convert.
When I started to look at Esperanto again, I understood far more about languages. I knew that in Zamenhof's time linguistics was poorly understood, and I knew Zamenhof was not even up to date with the latest thinking. I only found out today that he wrote the language when he was about 14, so the misconceptions are understandable.
He thought "no opposites" was a good rule -- make sit easy.
No human natural language has no seperate words for hot and cold like Esperanto's "varma" and "malvarma". That alone makes it unnatural.
That was part of his "no irregularities" motivation.
No natural human language is (or at best precious few are) free or irregularities. Modern thinking is that this is not a coincidence -- irregularities make a language *easier&+* for a native. Irregular words are usually the most common -- eg I
have one
child, he
has two
children because (as scans show) it is
quicker to recall a single fixed form than to recall two word elements and stitch them together.
The fact that these are universals should be enough to imply they're needed *even before* science identifies why.
Now we've also got the issue of vi and li, which were intrinsically understood to be wrong. People argued back things that that was because the complainer didn't personally like Zamenhof's arbitrary decision being different from their arbitrary decision. Hmmm.
The assumption that this is arbitrary was unfounded, and it wasn't until the turn of the 20th->21st century that we got that. The idea that the first language was sign language gained ground in the late 20th century, and Ramachandran then suggested that *all* language was sign language... just that we made the signs with our mouths. "Me" means I point inwards with my lips and contain the sound. "tu" and "thou" mean pointing forward with the tongue and rounded the lips to "narrow" the selection. "Vous" and "you" maintain some pointing, but feel less tight.
"Vi" has a consonant that feels plural not simply because it's used that way in French, Spanish, Italian etc, but because it involves broad and flat lips that mean you cannot point to a single person. "Li" feels like a 3rd person not simply by habit, but arguably because you can fairly easily say "he"/"she"/"il"/"elle" out of the side of your mouth.
Zamenhof also minimised differences -- eg verb tense indicators -as -is -us -os. Language naturally employs redundancy to prevent confusion. Look at the variety in vowel and consonant phonemes in numbers 0-10 in natural languages (something Zamenhof has
mostly replicated in his number). These maximal differences make numbers hard for foreigners to learn but they make mishearing almost impossible (Zamenhof's kvar, kvin and ses, sep pairs appear to be him attempting to regularise to an extent, and would probably be easier to confuse that four, five and six, seven; six, sept; or seis, siete); there is similarly maximal distance between tenses in natural languages, but Zamenhof's regularisation means minimal difference and so there is zero redundancy -- weaken your vowel enunciation or mispronounce it entirely and you've changed the test.
There's also the question of how the phonemes reflect meaning, which is far more subtle still. The future is uncertain and open, but the past is finished and there's no changing it. Tense endings tend to reflect this.
Not that language does undergo random mutation through use, so not *every* sound is meaningful; some *are* arbitrary results of change. However, other things *are not*.
Esperanto was made in an entirely arbitrary manner.
Does this make it a worse language? I would argue yes, others would argue no. I accept that the answer is subjective.
Does it make it a worse
gateway language? I would argue yes and cannot see the answer as subjective. A good gateway language should prepare you to expect things that are common in other languages -- Esperanto does not do this.
I have no interest in learning Esperanto because I am afraid its unnaturalness will skew my expectations and probabilities enough to make mastery of other languages harder.
Now here's an interesting thought: is Esperanto most especially dangerous to Krashenites; people who do not read explicit rules...?
. Although you might be right about me being ripped apart for this type of question. But I am genuinely curious why people learn constructed languages. I can see the appeal of making one.
