Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

Tom Wier wrote:

> On <sci.lang> some time back, there was a guy who would endlessly
> decry the inadequacies of Esperanto, a wacko in the opposite extreme.
> Any time someone bothered to mention anything nice about it, he'd
> attack it, but selectively.  Your comment was very true for him:  he spoke
> Cantonese and Mandarin, IIRC, and while the morphological and phonological
> systems were almost as evil as Hitler (or so it sounded reading what
> he said), the syntax was just fine.  I don't remember hearing any complaint
> from him about *that*.
It's funny how people can see the same thing in opposite ways ...
If you mean the notorious LSD, I have found his criticisms always
to be both fair and reasonable. He would (and still does) decry
mandatory marking of tense and number, and the rather complex
Indo-European style grammar, and the Euro-based vocabulary,
in what purports to be a neutral world auxiliary language.

I like and admire Esperanto very much, but he does have a point.
And I don't mean to argue or import AUXLANG discussion here.
Rather, this points out the relatively (in some ways) simpler
and elegant grammar of East Asian natlangs, and a healthy regard
and respect for non-IE languages in addition to the IE-type.

Note that Chinese, English, and the sorta-conlang Bahasa Indonesia
share the SVO and isolating type of grammar that Bickerton claims
is universal in pidgins/creoles, and that Lingua Franca and Swahili
and other trade langs follow this pattern. There may (or may not)
be some tie-in with adult ability to learn a 2nd language.

(In my correspondence with the "wacko", he made various other
interesting points as well. Let's not be attacking people so
lightly, particularly when they put forward a minority view.
They are like trace elements, essential to a healthy diet.)