3 ms·

Yeah, the article is a bit too long, I haven't gone through it yet but I intend to. But I disagree about a few points I've read so far. Esperanto case declinat

by myth2018 8y ago

Yeah, the article is a bit too long, I haven't gone through it yet but I intend to. But I disagree about a few points I've read so far. Esperanto case declinations consist basically of marking direct objects with an -n suffix. You forget it sometimes, and many jokes among Esperanto speakers are about forgetting the accusative, but it is not that hard and gives you some nice flexibilities regarding word ordering. I don't remember of adjectival concords in Esperanto, but I'm not a linguistics expert, I speak Esperanto but maybe there is something there which I haven't realized, or some rule that maybe has become second nature to me due to my mother tongue. It sounds indeed more familiar to european-languages speakers but well, chineses find Esperanto easy so I don't know.. The notation may be a bit clumsy for keyboard users, of course, but one has to consider that computers with ansi keyboards didn't exist by then and, anyway, there is already a widely used convention to overcome the lack of those two funny symbols: to simply use an "x" after the targeted letter. I admire Esperanto's ability of being such a rant magnet. When it comes to other languages, people usually simply don't learn them when they don't feel interested enough.

jcranmer 8y ago
When I was in elementary school, we were taught English grammar in English class. Actually, we weren't. We were taught Early Modern Latin grammar using the English language, and everyone pretended that English was somehow a simple variant of Early Modern Latin. Why were we taught such an egregious abomination? Because the traditional study of grammar was in the study of a very rigorous classical Latin and Greek, which was extended to vernacular languages by the Late Middle Ages. For the presciptivists of the Early Modern, it was a short step to use the same framework to try to describe English--and when the framework is woefully underequipped to deal with English grammar, they simply declared that such constructs shouldn't be used because you can't do it in Latin. Linguists only really developed the capability to tackle English about 100 years ago, and primary education still hasn't caught up. The complaint in the rant on Esperanto essentially boils down to pointing out that Zamenhof's idea of what constitutes a sufficient description of a grammar is following that ancient underpowered Latin grammar rubric. The second major theme is that Esperanto doesn't look much beyond Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, and its considerations for what's important, what's omitted, and what's variant is largely derived from consideration of how those languages are similar or different.
- myth2018 8y ago
  Uhm.. I tend to disagree, I think this rant is not based on such elaborate and architected arguments. Are there some references about them? The criticism I usually hear is something in the lines of Esperanto has been defeated in the international language championship and now refuses to shut the mouth up and go back home.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    The author says somewhere in that rant explicitly that Esperanto is a Romance/Germanic/Slavic creole and there are already too many of those, which is a pretty clear restatement of what I referred to as the second theme. Most of the rant itself is essentially a lot of nitpicking at the corners of the language. For example, the complaints about the passive voice structure or the gerunds in Esperanto, or the entire discussion of the difference between tense and aspect. This discussion can generally be simplified as "linguistics is more complex than is presented by its author." http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/b.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/b.html gives a more thorough elaboration on this topic in particular by going line-by-line through the Fundamento and pointing out some of the misconceptions of linguistics embedded in it (among other things).
    - myth2018 8y ago
      Those are very interesting theoretical points, but in practice nobody who actually speak the language complains about them. So, I don't know if they are relevant on a practical standpoint. One may demonstrate that Zamenhof overpromoted his product (maybe out of ignorance, given Zamenhof was an amateur linguist). But the thing works beautifully well anyway and the criticism around there seems not to care about this.
      - em-bee 8y ago
        the rant does contain a number of interesting arguments, when each is looked at by itself. but for most arguments there is no attempt at actually solving the discussed problem, so we are stuck taking the authors word for it. a few are obvious and really should be solved. gender neutrality for example. given todays climate, that is a real problem that other languages like english and german are dealing with now, and esperanto will have to follow suit. but most others are more an issue of the perfect being an enemy of the good. sure, those issues could be fixed, but is it worth the effort? from an idealistic perspective maybe yes, but as long as english dominates, and there are no viable alternatives to esperanto that actually are better, the whole argument is rather moot. either solve the problems and come up with a better solution, or put up with what we have. everyone else is putting up with english, so surely dealing with the issues that esperanto has can't be that hard. for certain, a better language is conceivable, but i'll rather use esperanto despite its few faults than wait for that perfect language that may never materialize. and if it does, then knowing esperanto will make it easier to judge said new language.

jcranmer 8y ago

When I was in elementary school, we were taught English grammar in English class. Actually, we weren't. We were taught Early Modern Latin grammar using the English language, and everyone pretended that English was somehow a simple variant of Early Modern Latin. Why were we taught such an egregious abomination? Because the traditional study of grammar was in the study of a very rigorous classical Latin and Greek, which was extended to vernacular languages by the Late Middle Ages. For the presciptivists of the Early Modern, it was a short step to use the same framework to try to describe English--and when the framework is woefully underequipped to deal with English grammar, they simply declared that such constructs shouldn't be used because you can't do it in Latin. Linguists only really developed the capability to tackle English about 100 years ago, and primary education still hasn't caught up. The complaint in the rant on Esperanto essentially boils down to pointing out that Zamenhof's idea of what constitutes a sufficient description of a grammar is following that ancient underpowered Latin grammar rubric. The second major theme is that Esperanto doesn't look much beyond Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, and its considerations for what's important, what's omitted, and what's variant is largely derived from consideration of how those languages are similar or different.

myth2018 8y ago
Uhm.. I tend to disagree, I think this rant is not based on such elaborate and architected arguments. Are there some references about them? The criticism I usually hear is something in the lines of Esperanto has been defeated in the international language championship and now refuses to shut the mouth up and go back home.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  The author says somewhere in that rant explicitly that Esperanto is a Romance/Germanic/Slavic creole and there are already too many of those, which is a pretty clear restatement of what I referred to as the second theme. Most of the rant itself is essentially a lot of nitpicking at the corners of the language. For example, the complaints about the passive voice structure or the gerunds in Esperanto, or the entire discussion of the difference between tense and aspect. This discussion can generally be simplified as "linguistics is more complex than is presented by its author." http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/b.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/b.html gives a more thorough elaboration on this topic in particular by going line-by-line through the Fundamento and pointing out some of the misconceptions of linguistics embedded in it (among other things).
  - myth2018 8y ago
    Those are very interesting theoretical points, but in practice nobody who actually speak the language complains about them. So, I don't know if they are relevant on a practical standpoint. One may demonstrate that Zamenhof overpromoted his product (maybe out of ignorance, given Zamenhof was an amateur linguist). But the thing works beautifully well anyway and the criticism around there seems not to care about this.
    - em-bee 8y ago
      the rant does contain a number of interesting arguments, when each is looked at by itself. but for most arguments there is no attempt at actually solving the discussed problem, so we are stuck taking the authors word for it. a few are obvious and really should be solved. gender neutrality for example. given todays climate, that is a real problem that other languages like english and german are dealing with now, and esperanto will have to follow suit. but most others are more an issue of the perfect being an enemy of the good. sure, those issues could be fixed, but is it worth the effort? from an idealistic perspective maybe yes, but as long as english dominates, and there are no viable alternatives to esperanto that actually are better, the whole argument is rather moot. either solve the problems and come up with a better solution, or put up with what we have. everyone else is putting up with english, so surely dealing with the issues that esperanto has can't be that hard. for certain, a better language is conceivable, but i'll rather use esperanto despite its few faults than wait for that perfect language that may never materialize. and if it does, then knowing esperanto will make it easier to judge said new language.