CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto [THEORY: French Linguistic Thinking.]

On 7 Jun 99, at 15:25, Ed Heil wrote:

> > to another as close as france and norway ! as for UE, this guy knows
> > more than he displays about the antique "parfait de langue" project
> > (although he
>
> > is very verbous). i suspect he is a conlanger. what worries me is that
> > he
> is
> > now an esperantist convert... ;-)
>
> Really! I hadn't read his "search for the perfect language" book yet.
>  Is that where it all ends?  Esperanto?
I read _La Sercxado de la Perfekta Lingvo_ (Danielle Mistretta's
Esperanto translation of Umberto Eco's original) last year.  The
bulk of the book is about medieval and early renaissance
philosophical languages, with one chapter near the end devoted to
auxiliary languages.  He regards (regarded at the time he wrote the
book) Esperanto as more usable than most of the other auxiliary
languages he treats in that chapter.  The last chapter is about
computational linguistics and other late-20th century developments
in the field.

His chief comment on Esperanto: Zamenhof apparently wasn't
optimising for a single quality, as some other IAL designers have
done - recognizability for Romance speakers, quick learnability,
logic, or what-not - but did a good job of optimizing for what Rick
Harrison calls "vor", a compromise between technical and esthetic
criteria - in particular, between the regular derivation and non-
polysemy of languages like Volapuk or Vorlin and the relative
recognizability of languages like Interlingua.

Eco visited Argentina, among other places, in a book tour.  The
president of the Argentina Esperanto Association talked with him
then, & I talked with her about't later when we were both in S.F. for
the summer Esperanto course.  He apparently said that Esperanto
would be a good solution of the multiple-translation problem if it
weren't for "the egotism of the governments" (this may be off a bit,
as it was translated from Spanish into Esperanto into English in
the course of being reported :).



Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/gzb/gzb.htm
*gjax zaxnq-box baxm-box goq.