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This is a rather offhand generalization. The field of linguistics is extremely vast and there are quite a few linguists who are also interested in that part of it. The very idea of such a thing as a functioning artificial language is hopelessly naive. Not if you observe it in its practical use. In countries like Poland, Hungary, Finnland, Latvia, Russia, Japan, China, Uzbekistan and many others, Esperanto proves to be quite useful, especially in small towns, where English is not of much use. I know of Americans who had a similar experience in France. I've had access through Esperanto to a segment of the local populations with which most foreigners have no contact, and a possibility of discussing in depth various topics with much more ease and comfort than in any other language. Esperanto is no more naive than E-mail. It's a method of communicating which has many advantages over others and which doesn't need to be available in every household to be worth the small investment in time and effort. In my experience, it is much more cost effective than English. The successful examples (viz. Esperanto) are an excellent reflection of Western imperialism. Sorry, but perusal of Esperanto publications and contacts with members of the Esperanto community reveal this to be a prejudice. A majority of people in this community learned the language precisely to have at their disposal a language free of political, economic and other power connotations. Esperanto was not born in the West, is not especially widespread there and is so different from Western languages in most of its linguistic traits that you would be very hard put to defend your opinion on the basis of factual analysis. Only the word roots (but not their semantic scope, which results from a century of global interaction) are to a large extent Western, but no serious scholar can base a judgment on such a superficial feature. The lexical part of most Caribbean Creoles is more Western in origin than Esperanto's. If such a Creole language is used as a means of intercultural communication, do you see it as a reflection of Western imperialism? Languages such as Esperanto reveal considerable ignorance of the structures of other languages. What other languages? As I have established in my article "Esperanto: A European or Asiatic Language?" (Esperanto Documents No 22, Rotterdam: UEA, 1981), Esperanto is more an isolating language than an agglutinating or flexional one. Derivation of 'my' from 'I' or of 'first' from 'one' (mi > mia ; unu > unua) is something you find in Chinese and in Esperanto, but not in Turkish, Hungarian or any Indo-European language. In no Western language do you have infinite series like the Esperanto samlandano, samrasano, samlingvano, etc, corresponding to the Chinese tongguo, tongzu, tongyu, you have to use other words like fellow-citizen, person of the same race, speaker of the same language. In Chinese, you don't have to learn a special word to express the idea 'coreligionist', you use the ready-made pattern: tongjiao, just as in Esperanto: samreligiano. Structurally speaking, Esperanto has very little in common with Western languages. Languages such as Esperanto are no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or English. When I observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia, especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans, I made it a point to ask people how much time they had devoted to acquiring the language. Since I was comparing communication in international settings according to whether they used English only, simultaneous interpretation, consecutive interpretation or Esperanto, I asked the same question of people using a language other than their mother tongue. Most of these Asians with a rather crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity, nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is based on erroneous data. (See my research report "Esperanto: l'image et la realite'", Cours et Études de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8, 1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this book can be found in Language in Society, 26 (1), 143-147, 1997). Proponents of languages such as Esperanto buy into the "language is/can be logical" myth. No, sir.
A linguist knows that a language should not be confused
with what its speakers say of it. Esperanto is based
on an all-encompassing law of trait generalization,
which is something quite different, and which is the
reason why it is so much more pleasant to use than any
European language. In Western languages, you cannot
generalize patterns. The student who has noticed the
pattern in farm > farmer, report > reporter
cannot generalize it to fish > fisher (fisherman)
or teeth > teether (dentist). In Esperanto
he can: farm' > farmisto, raport' > raportisto,
fiŝ' > fiŝisto, dent' > dentisto Proponents of languages such as Esperanto pretend that languages don't change or can somehow be regulated This is not true. I challenge you to quote a document emanating from the Esperanto community with such an absurd pretension. Most users of Esperanto are well aware that their language developed naturally, through usage in a kind of diaspora, on the basis of Zamenhof's project, with which it should not be confused. A fellow linguist, Jouko Lindstedt, Head of the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages at the University of Helsinki, Finnland, is the moderator of an Internet list, "Denask-L", whose participants are mostly members of binational families having Esperanto as their family language and the children's mother tongue. Simply reading their exchanges and comparing their language with similar texts from before WW2 and with texts from the 19th century proves beyond doubt that the language has never ceased to change, not under any agency, but spontaneously, as any other tongue. On that subject, see my article "A few notes on the evolution of Esperanto" in Klaus Schubert, ed., Interlinguistics No 42 of the series Trends in Linguistics - Studies and Monographs (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 129-142. I believe that a scientific, scholarly approach is
as warranted in linguistics as in other fields. Many
linguists seem to be unaware that before spreading opinions
on Esperanto, it is worth taking one's tape recorder,
attending encounters of speakers of the language, visiting
families where it is in daily use, analyzing the tapes
and all kinds of published or written documents (handwritten
correspondence is linguistically quite interesting)
and, well, just behave as a proper linguistic scholar
does for any Bantu or Filipino language. |