Esperanto as an international language
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Esperanto was conceived as a language of international communication, more precisely as a universal second language. Since publication, there has been debate over whether it is possible for Esperanto to attain this position, and whether it would be an improvement for international communication if it did.
Why Esperanto?
In the early years, one of the main arguments Esperantists used was that no ethnic language could ever gain acceptance as the international language of the world, owing to the natural opposition of speakers of other ethnic languages. Thus, they argued, the world will have to adopt an ethnically neutral language like Esperanto, if it is to ever have an efficient means of international communication.Since the wide acceptance of English as a medium of international communication in the second half of the 20th century, this argument has seldom been used. Esperantists have instead placed greater emphasis on their other arguments. They emphasize three main points:
Easy to learn
Esperanto was designed to be easier to learn than any ethnic or national language. The morphology is regular (that is, there are no irregular verbs or nouns), the spelling is phonetic (for each letter there is one sound), and the vocabulary, being based on the Romance and Germanic languages, is largely recognisable to anyone who already knows a western language. There is, in addition, a regular and productive system of affixes which are used to form new words, so that learners need only learn a fraction of the number of words they would need for the same level of communication in ethnic languages.In practice, it has been shown that Esperanto is learned much more quickly than ethnic languages when the same amount of effort is invested. Precise figures are hard to give, because it depends on the language background of the learner, and the languages it is compared to. However, for a European-language speaker learning either Esperanto or another European language, Esperanto is said to be learned 5 to 10 times as quickly.
Neutrality
Esperantists believe that Esperanto would be a more neutral medium of international communication than English or any other national language. They criticise the current system where an advantaged group of native speakers don't need to make any effort, while everyone else is required to invest substantial time and money to learn English – something that many people cannot afford. To remedy this bias, Esperantists propose that an international language should accommodate all peoples, so that everyone can come together on a level playing field.It is often pointed out that Esperanto is not completely neutral, as it is easier for some people to learn than for others. See neutrality below for more on this debate.
Linguistic diversity
The current system of international communication threatens linguistic diversity. Speakers of many minority languages may not pass their language on to the next generation, preferring instead that their children learn a language of wider communication as their mother tongue. Not only English, but Mandarin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, Hausa, Swahili, Hindi, Nepali, Russian, and other national languages are replacing minority languages in their areas of influence. On top of this, English is replacing other widespread languages like German and French in their positions as languages of diplomacy and science.Many Esperantists believe that if Esperanto were widely used, linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. With a more level and accessible system of international communication, the pressures involved in reaching fluency might be less. However, it is possible that Esperanto could start replacing other languages as well. See linguistic diversity below for more on this debate.
Common criticisms
Neutrality
As noted above, Esperantists often market Esperanto as an ethnically neutral means of communication. However, it is often accused of being Eurocentric. This is most often noted in regard to the vocabulary, but applies equally to the orthography, phonology, grammar, and semantics, all of which are thoroughly European. The vocabulary, for example, is about two-thirds Romance and one-third Germanic; the syntax is Romance; and the phonology and semantics are Slavic. Critics argue that a truly neutral language would draw its vocabulary from a much wider variety of languages, so as not to give unfair advantage to speakers of any of them. Although a truly representative sampling of the world's thousands of languages would be unworkable, a derivation from, say, the Romance, Semitic, Indic, Bantu, and Chinese languages would strike many as being fairer than Esperanto-like solutions. See the Color argument for more information.There are two common defenses to this: One is to admit that Esperanto is not absolutely neutral in the sense that everyone can learn it with equal effort, but that nevertheless it is fairer than the current system, since everyone makes a step towards common ground, even if the steps are not equally sized.
Critics reply that the steps required vary substantially, and that Esperanto merely substitutes European-language speakers for English speakers as the advantaged group.
Another response is to point out similarities of Esperanto to non-European languages. Esperanto's agglutinative morphology in particular is said to make its grammar closer to many non-Indo-European languages, such as the Turkic and Bantu languages.
Critics reply that Esperanto's morphology is much like heavily affixing European languages such as German, only more regular. The main non-Indo-European aspect is that the accusative plural inflection is formed by a sequence of the accusative and plural suffixes, rather than by using a separate portmanteau suffix, but this is a very minor part of what makes up a language. In other aspects, Esperanto is biased towards the European languages.
There is, however, a more substantial defense, at least in terms of the vocabulary and orthography. It is remarkable that, despite Zamenhof having been an ardent supporter of the Russian language and also having had a good knowledge of Hebrew, there is practically no Slavic or Semitic vocabulary in Esperanto. He believed that, while including these languages might help people from the Russian Empire or the Middle East, it would only hinder the accessibility of Esperanto to the rest of the world. The Romance and Germanic languages, on the other hand, were (and are) learned in schools all over the world, and so their vocabulary would do the most to make Esperanto as easy as possible to learn for the largest number of people. The same philosophy applies to not including vocabulary from other languages: While people speaking languages belonging to or influenced by the Bantu, Indic, and Chinese families will have likely been exposed to a Romance or Germanic language at school before coming across Esperanto, the reverse is not true. With a "universal" vocabulary, every learner would recognize only a small portion of Esperanto and find the vast majority alien, making acquisition universally difficult; while with a Romance-Germanic vocabulary, educated people around the world find the majority of the vocabulary familiar. Zamenhof's primary concern was ease of acquisition rather than theoretical equality.
This approach also leads to the opposite criticism, that Esperanto isn't European enough, or at least not Western European enough. For example, the regular morphology and extensive use of affixes to build vocabulary from a small number of root words may make the language much easier to learn for the non-European, but trips up Europeans who, learning the Romance root words, expect the vocabulary to come as second nature. An example is the word registaro for "government". This is regularly derived from the verb regi "to rule", and so is easier to learn for non-Europeans who would otherwise have to memorize a new root, but at first sight it is misleading to European-language speakers, who might expect a more familiar word.
The writing system can be defended the same way. The Latin alphabet is the most widespread script in the world, and no one has actually proposed anything more universal. Also, the orthography dispenses with Western European etymological spellings in favor of regularity.
The syntax is harder to defend. The obligatory use of verbal tense, for example, is seen as an unnecessary complication for many such as Chinese, who speak a language without grammatical tense, and the case and adjectival agreement systems are widely condemned. However, even here there is some flexibility. For example, the European pattern of describing something with esti "to be" plus an adjective is being gradually replaced by a verbal pattern of the East Asian type, so that is it becoming increasingly common to see li sanas for li estas sana "he is well".
Artificiality
On the other hand, speakers of European languages often complain that the orthography and endings in Esperanto can be significantly different from their etymological cognates in national European languages, more so than in many competing constructed languages. For example: English quarter, Italian quarto, Interlingua quarto, but Esperanto kvarono (derived regularly from the numeral kvar 'four', as German Viertel is derived from vier, and Russian четвертй (četvertj) from четыре (četyre)); also English government, French gouvernment, Interlingua governamento, but Esperanto registaro (derived regularly from the verb regi 'to rule', as German Regierung is from regieren, and Russian правителйство (praviteljstvo) is from правитй (pravitj) ).According to these critics, given Esperanto's lack of neutrality as a world language, it should at least aim to be a common European tongue, and therefore its lexicon and spelling system should be a consensus of the European languages. Defenders reply that by 'European', critics actually mean Romance, and that doing so would have resulted in an irregular spelling system, irregular grammar, and bloated vocabulary, which might be more accessible in the initial stages of learning, but which would soon make the language more difficult to learn even for Europeans.
Esperanto has no culture
This criticism is leveled by people who wish to learn a foreign language to gain access to or insight into another culture. Some Esperantists maintain that Esperanto does have an international culture, or interculture, developed over the past century, which includes among other things a significant original literature that provides the Esperanto community with a common background – a distinctive feature of any cultural community. Critics argue such things are superficial and don't add up to a true culture; Esperantists don't have an inherent conception of the world the way, for example, the French or Japanese do.However, for many Esperantists, this is precisely the point. Esperanto is intended to be an ethnically neutral auxiliary language. The lack of an inherent culture is one of the things that makes Esperanto so much easier to learn and to use than other languages: In an ethnic language like English or Chinese, the student has to learn innumerable arbitrary expressions. It's not enough to learn the grammar and vocabulary; many perfectly grammatical expressions are unacceptable because people simply don't speak that way. In Esperanto, such considerations are much less important. Speakers can say what they'd say in their native tongue, or whatever makes sense at the moment, and Esperantists from other language backgrounds aren't likely to notice the difference. Don Harlow has noted that the difference in language background only becomes apparent when translating into an ethnic language: Novels written by English and Polish authors, for example, are equally easy to read for both English and Polish native speakers. However, an English author's work will translate easily into Polish, while a Polish author's work will prove much more difficult to translate into English. That is, Esperanto can accommodate either language more easily than they can accommodate each other, and this is partially due to the lack of culturally fixed ways of speaking.
Difficulty in achieving fluency
Key figures within the Esperanto movement have lamented how few learners of the language progress to a high level of fluency. Notably, the author Julio Baghy critiqued mediocre Esperantists in his ironic poem Estas mi Esperantisto ("I am an Esperantist"). Author Kazimierz Bein, while attending a conference at which it was generally agreed that everyone in the world should learn Esperanto, remarked that the first who ought to learn it were the Esperantists themselves.Defenders recognize that the problem may be one of overmarketing. Esperanto is often presented as "easy to learn", which many students misunderstand as "can be learned without effort". Learning Esperanto is relatively easy, but only compared to learning a new ethnic language. For an English speaker, the core grammar, basic vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling can be learned in a matter of days. In theory, students now have a vocabulary equivalent to ten times the number of root words they know, due to Esperanto's highly productive word formation. However, fluency requires skills that are not so readily acquired. In spite of its systematic grammar, Esperanto, like any other language, can be learned well only through extensive practice. Many students become disappointed when they realize that the fluency hurdle is much harder to overcome than the basics, and give up. So, defenders say, the problem is not peculiar to Esperanto, but a general problem that any international language, natural or artificial, has to face, and that it has been shown that fluency is easier to achieve in Esperanto than in national languages.
Another camp may accept the issues presented by critics, but believes that Esperanto may still be useful as a research tool to identify the difficulties in speaking a foreign language that are not due to irregular spelling, morphology, or syntax. In fact, it seems that concentrating on these deeper aspects of language learning is what makes Esperanto such a valuable educational tool, preparing students with the skills and confidence they will need to more easily learn other, more irregular, foreign languages later on in life.
Linguistic diversity
As noted above, some Esperantists feel that if Esperanto were widely used, linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. They believe that the main reason that speakers of smaller languages prefer to raise their children speaking a regional or national language is the fear that their children might not learn it as well as a native speaker later in life, and thus be disadvantaged economically or politically. However, if Esperanto were the medium of wider communication, they believe fewer people would have this fear, because Esperanto is easier to acquire than ethnic languages, and because one doesn't need to be a native speaker in order to speak it well.Critics counter that Esperanto could simply take over from national languages and continue the destruction of linguistic diversity that is already taking place. The very ease of acquiring Esperanto might even accelerate the process. They point to other "simple" languages such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea which may be having this effect. However, languages such as Tok Pisin tend to be learned natively in ethnically mixed families in large cities, where the parents do not have a common language, rather than as an attempt to give their children a head start.
There are however those, primarily the anationalists, who see the substitution of the national languages by Esperanto as a desirable goal.
Special characters
While Esperanto is written in the Latin alphabet, it uses six modified letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) not found in other languages or the ISO Latin-1 character set, and these have caused problems with typesetting. For many this is Esperanto's prime fault. Zamenhof purposely created unique letters to have a phonemic script which was not too much like those of existing national languages, but critics have argued that the philosophy of one character – one sound does not justify new characters.Zamenhof recommended the use of the digraphs "ch", "gh", "hh", "jh", "sh", and "u" when reproducing these letters proves difficult, but in practice the diacritics were often written in by hand after typing a document. With the recent advent of computer fonts and especially Unicode support, however, the problem has largely been resolved. Today digraphs have been relegated to email and chatrooms, with either Zamenhof's system or a more computer-friendly set of digraphs in "x" being used.
Sexism in Esperanto grammar
Esperanto is frequently accused of being inherently sexist, because the generic form of nouns is used for males while a derived form is used for females. For example, doktoro is a doctor (male or unspecified), while doktorino is a female doctor. (The use of -in to form the feminine of nouns is reminiscent of German, as in Maler "painter", Malerin "female painter".) Pronouns are similar. As in English, li "he" may be used generically, whereas ŝi "she" is always female. Also, there are a couple dozen nouns which are inherently masculine unless made feminine, such as patro "father" vs. patrino "mother", and others such as damo "lady" which are inherently feminine.To some critics, this aspect of the language has the implication that masculinity is the default, and that femininity is the exception. The feature is particularly irksome to some English speakers, perhaps because the corresponding suffix -ess is becoming less common in that language.
Defenders reply that this asymmetric treatment of male and female is not specifically a feature of Esperanto, but a general feature of European languages. In each Romance language, for instance, grammatical genders are assigned to all nouns — even to unsexed objects, or in opposition the biological sex (as autorité = "authority" in French, guardia = "policeman" in Italian, and virilidad = "masculinity" in Spanish, which all have feminine gender even when referring to men). In fact, given the arbitrary assignment of grammatical gender, Romance and German speakers generally do not make the sexist assumptions claimed by the critics. Viewed in this broader context, argue Esperantists, "sexist language" is shown to be a matter of cultural assumptions and interpretations by the speakers, not of the language per se.
Moreover, the number of inherently masculine words has gradually diminished over the years. It is now acceptable to use the originally masculine doktoro to refer to a female doctor, for example, and doktorino need only be used to emphasize femaleness. Sometimes virdoktoro (literally "man-doctor") is used to emphasize maleness. This is due to social transformation, rather than an inherent bias of the language. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, one can replace them by the neutral tiu ("that one") — which, unlike English "that", can refer to people. There are also proposals for dealing with inherently masculine words such as patro "father", but none of things have gained general acceptance. (See Esperanto gender.)
Esperanto has failed
Esperanto has not lived up to the hopes of its creator, who dreamed of it becoming a universal second language. Many critics say that one's time would be better spent learning English or another natural language that brings significant benefits.Many Esperantists concede that the language has little chance of ever competing with English. However, many people today learn it for other reasons. For example, many Esperantists have tried learning a natural language for years without success, but find that they can correspond in Esperanto, read its literature, and travel abroad using programs such as Pasporta Servo that cater to Esperanto speakers, and in addition enjoy the fact that many of the people they meet have similarly internationalist views of the world.
Others advocate the propaedeutic value of Esperanto, noting that an elementary-school pupil learning Esperanto in the classroom for 15 minutes a day will be able to correspond with penpals abroad by the end of the year, and argue that such a positive experience will make it more likely for the child to go on to learn, and to be successful at, other languages later in life. It's also been repeatedly demonstrated that high-school students who study Esperanto for one year and then go on to three years of a natural language, whether French or Japanese, will speak that language substantially better than students who spend all four years learning it. Thus the improved access to more widely spoken natural languages more than makes up for the time spent learning Esperanto.
Other planned languages
Several planned languages that emerged in the twentieth century have attempted to address these criticisms. Yet despite numerous attempts, none has approached the number of speakers or the extensive body of literature that Esperanto enjoys. Some of these languages were independent creations, while some, like Ido, which enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900s, are modifications of Esperanto.The only other planned languages with any significant number of speakers at present are the Romance-based Interlingua and the Esperanto-offspring Ido.
External links
- [Learn Not To Speak Esperanto], a detailed criticism
- [Is Esperanto's Vocabulary Bloated?]
- [Farewell to Auxiliary Languages], critical discussion of the concept of an 'international auxiliary language"
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