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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.
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Why Esperanto?
At the outset, one of the main arguments Esperantists used for learning Esperanto was that no ethnic language could ever gain acceptance as the international language of the world, due to the opposition of speakers of other ethnic languages. Thus the world would have to adopt an ethnically neutral language like Esperanto, if it were to ever have an efficient means of international communication.
Since the widespread acceptance in the second half of the 20th century of English as a medium of international communication, this argument has largely been abandoned for others. Esperantists emphasize two or three main points:
Easier 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, based on the Romance and Germanic languages, is recognizable to anyone who already knows one of these languages, which includes most of the world's educated population. There is, in addition, a regular and productive system of affixes which are used to form new words, so that people need only learn a fraction of the number of roots they would require for the same level of communication in an ethnic language, and can have more confidence that their speech is correct. Swiss psychologist Claude Piron, for example, despite being a United Nations English-to-French translator, had more confidence in his Esperanto than in his English, and attributed this to the more accessible nature of the language.[2]
Neutrality
Esperantists believe that Esperanto is a more neutral medium of international communication than English or any other national language. They propose that an international language should accommodate all people, so that everyone can come together on a level playing field.
It is often pointed out that Esperanto is not neutral, as it is heavily based on European languages. 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 than 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. 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 as a more accessible system of international communication, the pressures involved in reaching fluency might be less, and linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. See linguistic diversity below for more on this debate.
Common objections
Lack of neutrality
As noted above, Esperantists often argue for 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, and semantics, all of which are thoroughly European. The grammar is arguably more European than not, but Claude Piron among others argues that the derivation system is not particularly European, though the inflection is.[1] 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 as, for example, India and China together constitute about 40% of the world's population.[2]
There are two common defenses to this: One is to admit that Esperanto is not neutral in the sense that everyone can learn it with equal effort, but that 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 derivational morphology in particular is said to make its grammar closer to many non-Indo-European languages, such as the Turkic and Bantu languages. However, Esperanto's inflectional morphology is just a more regular version of heavily affixing European languages such as German, and many difficulties of European grammar remain in Esperanto.
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, so their vocabulary would do the most to make Esperanto as easy as possible to learn for the largest number of people in the largest number of countries. The same philosophy applies to not including vocabulary from other languages: While most educated people speaking Bantu, Indic, and Chinese languages will have 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 than having to memorize a new root, but at first sight it can be perplexing to European-language speakers.
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. Indeed, the principal complaints about the orthography are the diacritics, which are unique to Esperanto, not the choice of the Latin alphabet as their base. The orthography also dispenses with Western European etymological spellings in favor of regularity, for example kv (originally kw) for Romance qu; this generates a similar debate.
The inflectional morphology is harder to defend. The obligatory use of verbal tense, for example, is seen as an unnecessary complication for speakers of many languages such as Chinese, who speak a language without grammatical tense. Although the case system allows a flexible word order, both it and adjectival agreement are widely condemned. However, even in syntax 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 verbal li sanas for adjectival li estas sana "he is well".
Artificiality
On the other hand, speakers of Western 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 четвёртый (četvertyj) from четыре (četyre)); also English government, French gouvernement, Interlingua governamento, but Esperanto registaro (derived regularly from the verb regi 'to rule', as German Regierung is from regieren, and Russian правительство (praviteljstvo) is from править (pravitj) ). This is a result of using derivation to reduce the core vocabulary that needs to be learned, and helps non-European speakers. As the examples above show, the difference is primarily with Anglo-Romance, not with European languages as a whole. According to the 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 (Western) European languages.
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: Esperanto novels written by English and Polish authors, for example, are equally easy for both English and Polish native speakers to read. However, while the English author's Esperanto work will translate readily into English, translating the Polish author's Esperanto work into English will prove much more difficult, and vice versa when translating from Esperanto into Polish. 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 a speaker of a Western European language, 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.
Esperanto counteracts linguistic diversity
As noted above, some Esperantists feel that if Esperanto were widely used, linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. They argue 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 easy-to-learn languages such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, which have had deleterious effects on minority languages.
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 the more computer-friendly x-convention being used.
Not gender neutral
Esperanto is frequently accused of being inherently sexist, because the default form of some nouns is masculine while a derived form is used for the feminine, which is said to retain traces of the male-dominated society of late 19th-century Europe of which Esperanto is a product.[3][4] There are a couple dozen masculine nouns, primarily titles and kin terms, such as sinjoro "Mr, sir" vs. sinjorino "Mrs, lady" and patro "father" vs. patrino "mother". In addition, neuter nouns are often assumed to be male unless explicitly made female, such as doktoro, a PhD doctor (male or unspecified) versus doktorino, a female PhD. This is the situation with the English suffix -ess, as in baron/baroness, waiter/waitress etc. Esperanto pronouns are similar. As in English, li "he" may be used generically, whereas ŝi "she" is always female.[5]
The number of inherently masculine words has gradually diminished over the years. It is now standard, for example, to use originally masculine words for professions such as dentisto "dentist" to refer to any person, male or female, and dentistino is only used to emphasize femaleness, as "lady dentist" is used in English. This change is due to social transformation, and parallels similar socially driven changes in English and other languages. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, in some situations one can replace them with the neutral tiu "that one" which, unlike English "that", can refer to people. There are also proposals for dealing with the remaining inherently masculine words such as patro "father", but none have gained general acceptance. (See Esperanto gender.)
Unnecessary case and number agreement
Speakers of languages without grammatical case or adjectival agreement frequently complain about these aspects of Esperanto. In addition, many find the Classical Greek forms of the plural (nouns in -oj, adjectives in -aj) to be awkward, proposing instead that Italian -i be used for nouns, and that no plural be used for adjectives. These suggestions were adopted by the Ido reform.
Esperanto has failed
Esperanto has failed to live up to the hopes of its creator, who dreamed of it becoming a universal second language. Because people were reluctant to learn a new language which hardly anyone else spoke, Zamenhof got people to sign a promise to learn Esperanto once one million people made the same promise, but only half that number was reached. Many critics say that one's time would be better spent learning English or another natural language.
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 with relatively little study 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 been repeatedly demonstrated that high-school students who study Esperanto for one year and then go on to three years of an ethnic language, whether French or Japanese, will speak the ethnic language substantially better than students who spend all four years learning it[6]. Thus the improved access to more widely spoken ethnic languages more than makes up for the time spent learning Esperanto.
Other constructed languages
Various languages and reforms have been created to address these criticisms. Yet despite numerous attempts, none has as many speakers or as extensive a body of literature as Esperanto. The only ones with any significant number of speakers are Ido, an Esperanto reform, and Interlingua, an independent "naturalistic" creation that aims to be intelligible without study to a European polyglot.
References
- ^ Le Defi des Langues by Claude Piron. Harmattan, 1994.
- ^ CIA-The World Fact Book, July 2007
- ^ Bertilo (in Esperanto)
- ^ [1] (in Italian)
- ^ Kalocsay & Waringhien, Plena analiza gramatiko (1985:73)
- ^ BOLLETTINO UFFICIALE MINISTERO DELLA PUBBLICA ISTRUZIONE ANNO 122°, ROMA, 25 MAGGIO - 1° GIUGNO 1995, N. 21-22 (Official bullettin of Italian Ministry of Public Instruction) contains many experiments and studies about propedeutic value of Esperanto. Translation in English of the original document
External links
- Other articles and studies by Claude Piron.
- Is Esperanto's Vocabulary Bloated? The debate over borrowed vs. derived vocabulary.
- Farewell to Auxiliary Languages: A critical discussion of the concept of an international auxiliary language.
- The Esperanto article in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica contains criticism of several features by Henry Sweet.
- Criticism and discussion about esperanto and artificial auxlanguages (in Italian)
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