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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Currently Esperanto is in a weird "double dilemma":
With the Eurocentrism being part of the first dilemma - yes, it could be solved by better design, but every Esperantido (including Ido, that you mentioned) has only a fraction of the L2+ linguistic community behind Esperanto.
While not everything, I feel like a lot of issues can (and should) be addressed by its linguistic community; I see the -iĉ- masculine suffix as an example of that (addressing the "males are default" social issue that "leaked" into the language).
Reminds me of the programmer's expression: "there are two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses"
Yup. It's a bit like this, but on two levels - people complaining about natlangs because "nobody"* uses Esperanto, and complaining about Esperanto because "nobody"* uses the other auxiliary conlangs.
*I mean, proportionally.
I generally have a problem with it the statement that Esperanto is poorly designed. When considering that it does enough things right. That it uses internationalisms, that it can be sung, that it gives enough expressivity, that it's mechanical enough to be learnt by it's grammar, etc.
It always sounds as if Esperanto is Latin with a thousand of exceptions, designed like french with spoken language does not equal the written text of the language, etc.
When in fact the opposite is the case. People then point to one of the current language projects, which are supposedly "better" in one dimension or another. That's just optimizing to some standard of perfect.
By "poorly designed" I'm conveying "full of sub-optimal decisions that introduce unnecessary complexity and unintended consequences". Justin B. Rye has a full rant on that; I'd like to pick specifically the following issues:
In special, Esperanto as defined in the 16 rules is full of assumptions on how a language works that boil down to "you should know it, because it works like in European sprachbund languages". And sometimes those assumptions break even for those European languages.
Later auxiliary constructed languages show a lot of improvements in this regard. And while they do focus often on one or another aspect, as you hinted, often the result is cleaner.
The source of the internationalisms is often a disputed point on itself. It relies for example a lot on Romance and Latin vocab, even when it doesn't make much sense (e.g. "sango" comes to my mind).
When someone starts with Justin B. Rye as an argument, then I stop listening. This pile of junk he put together just to utterly "destroy" a language and its community is something which should not be paid any credibility as if I listen to someone who spends hours and hours of writing up why vaccines are a bad thing. He is an individual who had bad experiences with Esperanto speakers, had the privilege of having time at his hands and seemingly a degree in linguistics (which I can't verify) to write his "ranto" up. A piece of junk which is solely intended to piss off and frustrates anyone who did look into Esperanto or even dared to learn it and who happens to be able to read English.
He would not be the first or the last linguist who shits on Esperanto full length without any actual facts behind the criticism.
That's not "poorly designed", that's a misnomer for "not perfect enough". Perfectionism is the enemy of good. And Esperanto is a working language which is in itself more or less consistent. One could argument that its inventor did not want to create the perfect language, but a working one which is the template for the actual language, which he knew would evolve out of it. Today's Esperanto is already a different one than the one published in 1887.
And? What is that for an argument? It has 16 rules, which are still 16 rules, which are rooted in how other languages do their thing. Then the rest of the booklet which the inventor of the language published was full of exercises to show the implicit rules. It can be argued that the original booklet was a result of brevity and to reduce printing costs, it's 42 pages damn it. Also some marketing which he used at the time of writing. Still, these rules are useable and give people enough to learn the language.
One could even argue that the 16 rules are not just 16 of the kind, even when reading them they have sub-parts, are longer than just say "-o marks nouns" or something. Criticizing Esperanto because of them is just an act of ill will. "Look ma! They are not just 16 rules ... looolz!" no shit Sherlock!
TL;DR: I'm calling the claim "poorly designed" as nonsense and ANY re-iteration of it as trolling or dishonest attempt to derail any rational investigation of Esperanto as a language.
I'll speak first as a moderator of this community. Please refrain from:
I'd also like to encourage you [and everyone else in this comm] to be extremely careful with arguments relying on "who" said something or their "credibility", as in your first paragraph. It's simply more conductive to analyse what is said than who is said it.
*NOTE: I'm cutting you some slack on this because you're discussing with me, and I personally don't mind this too much. But do not act like this against other users of this community, OK?
Ah now the authority is speaking. As if it was me who started to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about Esperanto. By just welcoming the blessed opinions of JBR.
It's not out of nowhere, people who use the same tactics in argumentation are grouped together. And even when you don't like it. Then don't like the opinion I have about your argumentation style. As you already noted about my style of argumentation.
When an argument goes in a certain direction, then there is little left of what the person really is intending. Experience counts more than uncertainty.
In general I would agree with you there. But in the end let's face it, the arguments of an architect regarding the construction of buildings weighs more than the arguments of Joe the neighbour regarding house building. In the end you only have logic and "argumentation style" to prove or disprove what you are saying. This in turn means that arguments are forced to follow a certain direction inevitably because of "logic", which leads to the same conclusions, which leads to echo chambers of people who follow these conclusions.
If for example you approach road design by seeing that all the cars are blocking them, so you by the force of logic you widen the road, the problem still exist, you widen the road more. Based on the experience of people who did research into road construction, infrastructure building you would have known that using trains, bike lanes, smaller roads and more clever design of cities would really solve the problem. Sheer basic logic does not solve shit.
And so it is in attempting with disproving or proving JBR.
Cute, I'm only in normal conditions and this is already considered "excessive snark". Adopting a defensive tone is what I did, because I think you are spreading FUD about Esperanto.
TL;DR: I still call your claim that Esperanto is poorly designed "nonsense".
Now, speaking as a user discussing with another user:
First off. You're clearly assuming that I'm arguing against Esperanto usage, when I'm mostly talking about its design demerits, and how they descriptively impact its usage. Specially Esperanto as designed by Zamenhof back then; that, as yourself highlighted, is not the "same" Esperanto as now, and being promoted by plenty Esperantists under the incorrect claim that "you only need to learn 16 rules! It's so easy~" [more on that later].
And keep in mind that what I'm saying comes from the PoV of a conlanger, not the PoV of someone soapboxing which language people should use. When it comes to prescriptions of which lingua franca people should use, I'm simply lukewarm towards Esperanto.
With that out of the way: some of the claims in JBR's page are garbage, but some are actually sensible, even if you dislike them. (And some are as outdated as its layout.) It's still good discussion material about the language, regardless on how it affects its community.
The difference between "poorly designed" and "not perfect enough" is solely where you arbitrarily place the quality threshold. And the exact same argument that you're using can be used against you:
So, where do you put that bar? And more importantly, why you put it there instead of higher or lower?
I'm not going to assume what Zamenhof "wanted", regarding design, but the idea is rather curious. Contemporary Esperanto does show some developments, as if the community was addressing design issues from its original design. From the top of my head: /x/ seems to be losing phonemic status.
It is an argument against how Esperanto was designed. It is not an argument against (or for) its usage, although it's one of the factors behind it. Drop down the defensive tone and you'll see.
It has a bazillion rules, as any speakable language. Complexity is intrinsic to human linguistic communication; the very fact that Esperanto works shows that it does not have "just 16 rules". Except that those rules are not usually acknowledged by the linguistic community, even if they were the ones making them.
And which features Zamenhof took from those other languages can be criticised. For example: the article + case mark combo. It's unnecessary - you need to know two systems to be able to proficiently use the language, when one would do.
Let's call wine "wine" and bread "bread": implicit = hidden.
Esperanto as designed back then was not useable, without plopping ad hoc rules borrowed from the community's native languages. And it's currently useable because of those rules being incorporated into the language, even if implicit = hidden.
And I could argue that orange is blue or that potatoes grow on trees.
And, again, I'm criticising Esperanto's design.
And curiously enough, in no moment you actually addressed the claims. Instead you:
Rational investigation requires criticism, like it or not.
(By the way. I believe that a lot of the design issues that I mentioned will be eventually addressed within the language, not by ditching Esperanto but by slowly changing it, in a mix of natural evolution and co-designing.)
Rational investigation requires criticism, like it or not. Yes it does. But your response and your whole argumentation is not criticism but trolling, just designed to provoke an emotional response which you can then tear down and enjoying while doing it. Like what you did earlier and also on my reply.
As I wrote disproving JBR or making any response to him is like responding to an anti-vaxxer. I don't have the damn time, nor could all my responses be trusted, because I'm not a linguist, so who cares anyway? Musing all day about the details of where JBR was right and where he talked as an English speaker out of his ass, just to piss off more people -- brings what exactly? Those people who already made up their opinions will still stick to them, those who will learn Esperanto anyway will learn it anyway. The damage has already been done, because those who are undecided will not learn it or even consider it a language at all. WELL DONE!
And reactions then like yours always boils down to the "bad Esperantist", who reacts pissed off to shitty ideas, shitty opinions thrown around by people who should shut their mouths for good.
No it's not. A poorly designed pocket knife for example will hurt you, a not perfect knife is just lacking a feature which you would like, but which does not harm you.
I really tried to not assume that, but the way you argumented, how you twisted my response all lead me to the conclusion that you are argumenting against the usage of Esperanto at all as most people who follow the exact argumentation chain do. Using JBR as valid source would be one point in that chain. Like as I quote some news article of Russia Today to prove that the war of Russia against the Ukraine is right, because Ukraine is full of national socialists.
[Speaking as a moderator]
You're assuming again the intentions of another person.
You're again drawing an association of someone with anti-vaxxers, without having grounds to do so.
Now you're simply making shit up.
You're insistently behaving in ways that you were warned against. And even without that, your overall behaviour across this thread has been uncivil and irrationally defensive right off the start; I cut you some slack because it was towards me, but it's clear by your profile that you're expected to behave the same way towards other users in this community in the future, and also to use the community to soapbox if allowed.
As such, you've been deemed unfit for this community, and hereby banned from it, accordingly to the Lemmy's code of conduct that this instance follows.
I'll keep your comments visible for the sake of transparency.