Here's a simple concept: If you don't like Esperanto, you don't have to speak it. But despite that simple fact, there are those who have what I call in irrational hatred for Esperanto. Why is that?
I'm of the mind that there are things that are much more worthy of condemnation that Esperanto. Like how about international terrorism? And I can't say it enough times: If you don't like Esperanto, you don't have to speak it! Let the rest of us slobs who appreciate it speak it and promote it. Anti-Esperanto folks love to talk about how "unpopular" it is. As if being unpopular makes something bad. Well, in the free nations of the world, people should have the right to practice unpopular ideas. It's not going to hurt anybody. Like I said before, Esperanto is nowhere near as bad as terrorism. Besides, Esperanto is like stamp collecting. Stamp collecting may not be popular, but it's not something worthy of high condemnation like terrorism!
Anti-Esperanto folks also like to say that Esperanto is dead. But in order for something to be dead, it has to be 100 percent dead. Not 99.9 percent or 99.999 percent. I mean, if there are at least two million Esperanto speakers worldwide as well as thousands of books and web sites written in the language, then how can Esperanto be dead? The only way it could be dead is if all Esperantists were dead and all written records of the language were completely destroyed. Yup! After all that, Esperanto would be dead.
"But Esperanto's unpopular! You can't do something that unpopular!" Oh yes I can, you fart-hole! Because freedom of choice gives me the right to do unpopular things. And if you haven't heard me the first couple of million times, if you like Esperanto, you don't have to speak it!!!
I'm of the mind that there are things that are much more worthy of condemnation that Esperanto. Like how about international terrorism? And I can't say it enough times: If you don't like Esperanto, you don't have to speak it! Let the rest of us slobs who appreciate it speak it and promote it. Anti-Esperanto folks love to talk about how "unpopular" it is. As if being unpopular makes something bad. Well, in the free nations of the world, people should have the right to practice unpopular ideas. It's not going to hurt anybody. Like I said before, Esperanto is nowhere near as bad as terrorism. Besides, Esperanto is like stamp collecting. Stamp collecting may not be popular, but it's not something worthy of high condemnation like terrorism!
Anti-Esperanto folks also like to say that Esperanto is dead. But in order for something to be dead, it has to be 100 percent dead. Not 99.9 percent or 99.999 percent. I mean, if there are at least two million Esperanto speakers worldwide as well as thousands of books and web sites written in the language, then how can Esperanto be dead? The only way it could be dead is if all Esperantists were dead and all written records of the language were completely destroyed. Yup! After all that, Esperanto would be dead.
"But Esperanto's unpopular! You can't do something that unpopular!" Oh yes I can, you fart-hole! Because freedom of choice gives me the right to do unpopular things. And if you haven't heard me the first couple of million times, if you like Esperanto, you don't have to speak it!!!
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Michigan
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Mon, July 11, 2005 - 10:06 AMIt's a strange thing for sure Yul. There are even people who actually can't stand other people because of the type of accent they have even when they DO speak the same language and get downright mean about it.
As for being a "dead" language, since it is still evolving that's wrong. And now with the internet it's spreading (growing) even more so there's another thing about it that's alive.
I just have to shake my head when "why" such an easy thing to understand and people just don't get it. Anybody can learn it in just a few weeks no matter what language they start from.That makes it a whole lot easier for people to start communicating effectively in a very short period of time. It makes it easier to go on and learn another person's native language afterward because one will have a solid friendship with grammar.
Irrational hatereds come from places in people where their ego protection forces are in full alert.There is always some underlying fear of being knocked off the "I'm so special platform". I doubt most individuals even know themselves "why". It is often a point of pride to be multi-lingual, an affirmation of ones intelligence, something that sets one apart as somehow "superior" . Esperanto contains the threat that all the learning of multitudes of languages be made moot and functionally unecessary (and so about the same as stamp collecting.) I agree with you, it's a total waste of passion to "hate a language". And worse to condescend to others no matter WHAT language they speak. -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Tue, July 12, 2005 - 5:47 AMI think you are seeing a variation on "ugly american" syndrome here.
People can refuse to learn to speak Spanish or French, because natural languages tend to be a bit more difficult. They can't come up with a working excuse, though, for not learning Esperanto because it is an easy language to learn. Fact is, though, they are just making excuses.
Truthfully, the best thing we can do with our world view is try to be a good example for other Americans and try to show others in the world that not all Americans are isolationist, etc.
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Tue, July 12, 2005 - 10:14 AMJust a side note: Years ago I was working in a big university hospital where doctors from all over the world came to intern. I had a patient from the deep south who had quite a heavy drawl and a doctor from India . BOTH of them spoke perfectly good English, but they could not understand a word each other was saying. I was interpreting between the two of them english to english to english. I still smile about that. I loved it, -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Wed, July 13, 2005 - 6:02 AMThat leads me to two comments.
First, one I meant to make yesterday and forgot by the time I got to the bottom of my post....
Here in America, we can't do something as simple as adopting the metric system. Metric is to measurement as Esperanto is to language, or at least that is the way I view it.
The other item is about your southerner and Indian. I'm a techie. I have been since I was about 10.
Back in the 80's, a problem that was encountered once in a while involved the alignment of the record/read heads in a floppy disc drive. The tolerances were specified as +/- some small number of micrometers (don't remember what the number was--not important at the moment).
Well, the thing is, if you had a disc that was recorded on a perfectly aligned drive, and you put it into a drive that was technically correctly aligned, but at either the positive or negative edge of the limits, it would work just fine. You could even write to that disc and it would read correctly in the perfectly-aligned drive.
On the othe hand, if you had a drive that was at least half way between perfect and the positive edge, and another that was at least half way between perfect and the negative edge, even though both were considered to be within specification, they would be unable to read each other's discs.
The southerner and Indian in your example are both speaking perfectly good English, both within specification, but both at the edges of the specification such that they cannot communicate directly.
I just thought of a third example.
I had a job some time ago which involved some international travel. The only time I saw a language barrier (not for me, but for the guy I was traveling with) was in England.
I'd been to Poland, but the customer there understood that we didn't speak Polish, and we understood that they spoke English as a second language, and so we picked our way though conversations carefully, sometimes falling back on French or Esperanto (yes, I actually did get to use it) to fill in the vocabulary gaps.
I'd been to the Philippines, and everyone there speaks English.
What happened in England, though, is that they were actually using different *words* for a given concept, or the same words for a different *concept*, or both.
The real winner, though, was when one of the customer's employees was trying to suggest it was time for a smoke break, and used the sentence, "Want to step out and have a fag, then?" I wish I had a camera on me that day, because my colleague's facial expression was priceless! -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Sat, December 31, 2005 - 5:01 PMRight on, brother!
I totally agree esp. in regard to the Metric system (and i would include temperature measurments with that). -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Sun, January 1, 2006 - 10:41 AMWith that thought in mind, I resolve to lose a few kilos this year.... I'm getting too heavy. :-)
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Wed, May 24, 2006 - 4:05 PMAre there really that many "anti-Esperanto" folks?
In my experience, most of the world that's even heard of Esperanto is at most indifferent to it, not hostile to it. The people who are actually *vitriolic* about the language and passionate about its flaws are almost always advocates of a rival universal language like Ido or Interlingua (or Mandarin, in the case of another thread in this very group). -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Wed, May 24, 2006 - 8:36 PMMy chief complaint about Espertanto was just that it was probably not that much easier than Mandarin -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Thu, May 25, 2006 - 5:16 AM"My chief complaint about Espertanto was just that it was probably not that much easier than Mandarin"
...but you never said why. -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Sun, June 4, 2006 - 6:04 PMI have conceded that point in consideration of the excessive number of Chinese homophones and the sometimes arbitrary idiography.
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Mon, June 5, 2006 - 4:06 AMOkay, got it.
I suppose that if you used a romanised typography, similar to how you represent chinese names within the confines of a western langauge, with the addition of some means to indicate tone (I've seen some folks use numbers for this, but that seems arbitrary--acute, grave, circumvlex and no accent mark would seem to make more sense for rising, falling, peaking and flat tones, respectively) that this would solve the arbitrary idiography problem, but the issue of homophones would still be there.
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Fri, June 9, 2006 - 10:40 PMThe tone could be notated by inserting one of 4 simple symbols in front of each vowel, if not above it. It would still be a relatively short alphabet. Ultimately, though, there would still be NUMEROUS homophones.
One of my Dada project concepts is to replace as many possible characters in the classic Tang Dynasty poems with homophones and then translate them into English literally.
If they had been first written in Esperanto, such abuses would likely have been well-prevented, so that's a major selling point for Esperanto over Chinese; Esperanto discourages misinterpretation. -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Sat, June 10, 2006 - 6:17 AMSounds like fun! You could do this sort of thing with English, also, substituting synonyms of homophones for affected words. For example:
I spelled it right; my spell checker told me so.
Becomes:
Eye spilled it write; my spill chequer tolled me sew.
Then on to:
Vision dumped it inscribe; my puddle accountant collected me stitch.
...could probably do better with the synonyms, but that is what I came up with off the top of my head without the assistance of a thesaurus.
Another way to amuse yourself in a Dadaist manner, using linguistic foibles, is to take a text and translate it a few times into different languages and ultimately back to the place it started.
I'm going to cheat and use an automated translater, but if I take that last paragraph and run it through the Fish, putting it from English to German to French to Spanish and back to English, I get this:
"Another way to meet in a Dadaist way lingüísticas particularitities, must a text takes and she some marks in the languages different and finally from the place to translate of return that began"
"lingüísticas"?!? Where the hell did that come from?!? It looks like it picked up the umlaut when it got translated to German, and then the Fish recognised that it was an adjective, but wasn't able to translate it properly when it moved it into French, then again when moving it into Spanish, and lost all hope when moving it into English. Gotta love it! -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Sat, June 10, 2006 - 7:19 PMThis is another point that Sara's father made about Esperanto, which I think might also be helpful at some point in improving the function of The Fish:
If you translate things into Esperanto before translating them into some third language, they usually come out cleaner than if you translate them directly.
That is: the process of translation into Esperanto purifies things. -
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This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Sun, June 11, 2006 - 5:26 AMYou know, that's a good point. Zamenhof made a very solid effort at not having any ambiguity in the language, and I can't think of any ambiguous examples.
I can see things getting funky still, with mechanical translation, though. There is a good creative outlet in Esperanto in the form of using aglutnenation. Consider:
Mi ĉagrinas kie mia presidento malsaĝegaĉas. Mi ne votis por lin.
First off, in most other languages, the idea of a verb "to be wise" or its opposite, "to be unwise" is a non-starter. To take the idea of such a verb, and then add suffixes indicating extremity and malevolence to it would probably leave a mechanical translator stuck with hyphenated or compound concepts, producing something like "is very badly unwise", where maybe a better translation might be "is a contemptable blithering idiot" :-)
...and yes, I let my politics creep in here, but it was the best example I could think of. -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Sun, June 11, 2006 - 6:02 PM>it would probably leave a mechanical translator stuck with hyphenated or compound concepts, producing something like "is very badly unwise"
While awkward, a literal translation would nonetheless suffice as a default.
One can always do better, but Esperanto does much to assure that we do no worse. -
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Re: I want to scream about those anti-Esperanto folks!
Mon, January 15, 2007 - 9:16 AMHere's something that could be considered obviously naive. I recently joined a message board of folks who are quite out of the mainstream (the Asexuality Visibilty and Education Network). As such, I assumed that they would be more open about Esperanto. When I mentioned my proposal that the U.N. be paid to adopt Esperanto as their official language, I got 100 percent criticism. Could this anti-Esperanto fus^aj^o be due primarily to the fact that the language is "unpopular"? And if Esperanto suddenly became popular, wouldn't most of its critics would suddenly support it?
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