3 ms·

I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? Are you suggesting that an auxiliary language should have elements from as

I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? Are you suggesting that an auxiliary language should have elements from as many languages as possible? That such a "balanced" or "blended" approach is better b/c it allows people from more linguistic traditions to feel a little more comfortable? Maybe a little, but such complexity would sacrifice learnability. English has been adopted as a common lingua franca though very different from Arabic and Swahili. The driving factors have more to do with geopolitics and economic power than linguistics or conceptual familiarity.

Sniffnoy 4y ago
> I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? In general, it doesn't. The claim is not that being Eurocentric makes Esperanto a bad auxlang. The claim is that being Eurocentric means that Esperanto is failing at its design goals; Esperanto is a bad Esperanto. The myth this point is responding to begins with "Esperanto is internationally neutral". That's the problem -- a general auxlang doesn't need to be neutral (English isn't!), but Esperanto claims to be (remember, Zamenhof just called it "the international language") and fails. You're also correct that a blending approach is probably untenable. However, looking outside European sources gives one a wider range of options with which to optimize over. Some of those options people may realize without exposure to the particular languages, but others -- such as, say, ergative-absolutive alignment (not that I'm suggesting that's a good option to use) -- they won't. E.g., why isn't Esperanto an analytic language? That would probably make it the easiest. Zamenhof correctly recognized (if not in these terms) that making it agglutinative was better than making it fusional. Why not go further and make it analytic? Likely because he hadn't studied any analytic languages... Or look at the phonetic inventory; you're not going to get something good by somehow blending the phonetic inventories of the world's languages, but what you could do is look for something simple and minimal that few people will have trouble with. Instead, we get rare distinctions that will only be familiar to Polish speakers. Is having such distinctions in general bad for an auxlang? Of course not! But it's bad for one that claims to be the international language. Again, I suggest reading through JBR's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" and its appendices.

Sniffnoy 4y ago

> I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? In general, it doesn't. The claim is not that being Eurocentric makes Esperanto a bad auxlang. The claim is that being Eurocentric means that Esperanto is failing at its design goals; Esperanto is a bad Esperanto. The myth this point is responding to begins with "Esperanto is internationally neutral". That's the problem -- a general auxlang doesn't need to be neutral (English isn't!), but Esperanto claims to be (remember, Zamenhof just called it "the international language") and fails. You're also correct that a blending approach is probably untenable. However, looking outside European sources gives one a wider range of options with which to optimize over. Some of those options people may realize without exposure to the particular languages, but others -- such as, say, ergative-absolutive alignment (not that I'm suggesting that's a good option to use) -- they won't. E.g., why isn't Esperanto an analytic language? That would probably make it the easiest. Zamenhof correctly recognized (if not in these terms) that making it agglutinative was better than making it fusional. Why not go further and make it analytic? Likely because he hadn't studied any analytic languages... Or look at the phonetic inventory; you're not going to get something good by somehow blending the phonetic inventories of the world's languages, but what you could do is look for something simple and minimal that few people will have trouble with. Instead, we get rare distinctions that will only be familiar to Polish speakers. Is having such distinctions in general bad for an auxlang? Of course not! But it's bad for one that claims to be the international language. Again, I suggest reading through JBR's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" and its appendices.