Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:

> At 8:34 pm -0500 9/6/99, Tom Wier wrote:
> .....
> >What in particular are you saying is simple about Vorlin?  I don't
> >know much about the language, but it seems to me that just about
> >any definition of "easy" is going to meet up with resistance
> >*somewhere*.
>
> Again, from bitter experience, I can confirm that this is so.  Basically,
> more often than not, "easy" means 'having a similar structure to my own
> language' while "difficult" means 'far too different in structure from my
> own language".
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*.

> In any case, throughout the few thousand years of recorded history, ease or
> difficulty has had little or no bearing on people learning a language for
> international communication.  It's what is most widely used that's the
> over-riding factor.
True, but often other cultures would take the interlanguage as their own,
altering it and in many cases simplifying it.  Take the Greek Koine, for
example.

> >For example, I found Esperanto's case system was a *cinch* --
>
> Two cases is not over-taxing.  But when the majority of mankind get on
> quite fine without any case system, one does wonder why a constructed
> auxiliary has it.
Well... the majority of mankind at the moment? I'd say that on the whole,
languages go through phases where cases are or are not important distinguishing
grammatical features, and if a lot of languages happen at one moment in time
to be isolating, I'm not sure you can say that there's any inherent reason for that.
Who knows? In another millennium, maybe most languages will have swung back
the other way. Maybe Esperanto will be morphologicly *deficient*, not overly
sufficient as many know seem to think (maybe polysynthesism will be all the rave
in 2999). :)

> >I totally agree.  I don't think I'd be learning Classical Greek now unless
>
> Whereas I would  :)
>
> Give me a natlang I've not met before & I'll spend hours & hours on it just
> for the fun it.  If someone, e.g. gave me an Innuit grammar I'd devour
> greedily.  I'd not care a damn whether I ever met an Innuit or found
> anything to read - those would be bonuses.  I just love finding out about
> and discovering languages for their own sake.
>
> Weird, I guess - but then don't most people think that about conlangers ?    :)
Well, I can see what you're saying here... it would be interesting to go
learn Kwakiutl or something sometime. But with Greek in particular, I knew it
would require so much work learning the countless inflections (inflections,
not agglutinations) that one really has to think about the number of hours
put into really learning the language.  Greek is one of those languages that's
*really* worth it if you're willing to put in the time to learn it in any more than
a superficial manner... but if you're not, I'd say no.  This is, of course, just
my opinion (I've also spent many an hour poring over Teach-Yourself books
at Barnes and Noble... but I can't really call that learning).

For me, learning Greek also meant I could get credit for an extra
major for very little extra effort (only 12 more hours or so of
coursework), so there were more than just linguistic reasons why
I finally chose to take it. :)

===========================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

"Things just ain't the way they used to was."
     - a man on the subway
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