Esperanto as an international language
Encyclopedia
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.
. 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 vocabulary, for example, is about two-thirds Romance
and one-third Germanic
; the syntax
is Romance; and the phonology and semantics are Slavic
. 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. 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 these families cover about 60% of the world's population, compared to a quarter for Romance and Germanic.
quarto, but Esperanto kvarono (derived regularly from the numeral kvar 'four', as German Viertel is derived from vier, and Russian четвёртый (četvërtyj) 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 (pravitel'stvo) is from править (pravit') ). 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, Esperanto should aim to be a common European tongue, and therefore its lexicon and spelling system should be a consensus of the Western European languages.
. 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.
critiqued mediocre Esperantist
s 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 in Esperanto requires an automatisation of skills and therefore extensive practice, as does fluency in any human language, despite Esperanto's systematic grammar.
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.
, 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 diacritic
s 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.
, 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. 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 analogous to 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.
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.)
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.
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.
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
was conceived as a language of international communication, more precisely as a universal second language
Second language
A second language or L2 is any language learned after the first language or mother tongue. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or lingua francas ....
. 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.
Common objections
There have been numerous objections to Esperanto over the years. For example, there have been criticism that Esperanto is not neutral enough, but also that it should convey a specific culture, which would make it less neutral; that Esperanto does not draw on a wide enough selection of the world's languages, but also that it should be more narrowly Western European.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 EurocentricEurocentrism
Eurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European culture...
. This is most often noted in regard to the vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
, but applies equally to the orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
, phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, and semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
, all of which are thoroughly European. The vocabulary, for example, is about two-thirds Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
and one-third Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
; the syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
is Romance; and the phonology and semantics are Slavic
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
. The grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
is arguably more European than not, but Claude Piron among others argues that the derivation system is not particularly European, though the inflection is. 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
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
, Indic, Bantu
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
, and Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
languages would strike many as being fairer than Esperanto-like solutions, as these families cover about 60% of the world's population, compared to a quarter for Romance and Germanic.
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, InterlinguaInterlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
quarto, but Esperanto kvarono (derived regularly from the numeral kvar 'four', as German Viertel is derived from vier, and Russian четвёртый (četvërtyj) 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 (pravitel'stvo) is from править (pravit') ). 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, Esperanto should 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 cultureCulture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
. 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
Esperanto literature
Esperanto literature began before the official publication of the constructed language Esperanto; the language's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, translated poetry and prose into the language as he was developing it as a test of its completeness and expressiveness, and published several translations and a...
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.
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 BaghyJulio Baghy
Julio Baghy was a Hungarian actor and one of the leading authors of the Esperanto movement...
critiqued mediocre Esperantist
Esperantist
An Esperantist is a person who speaks or uses Esperanto. Etymologically, an Esperantist is someone who hopes...
s in his ironic poem Estas mi Esperantisto ("I am an Esperantist"). Author Kazimierz Bein
Kazimierz Bein
Kazimierz Bein was a Polish ophthalmologist, the founder and sometime director of the Warsaw Ophthalmic Institute ....
, 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
Esperanto vocabulary
The word base of Esperanto was originally defined by Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887. It contained some 900 root words. The rules of the language allow speakers to borrow words as needed, recommending only that they look for the most international words, and that they borrow one...
. However, fluency in Esperanto requires an automatisation of skills and therefore extensive practice, as does fluency in any human language, despite Esperanto's systematic grammar.
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
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin is a creole spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an official language of Papua New Guinea and the most widely used language in that country...
in Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...
, which have had deleterious effects on minority languages.
Special characters
While Esperanto is written in the Latin alphabetLatin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, it uses six modified letters (ĉ
C
Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets...
, ĝ
G
G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...
, ĥ
H
H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....
, ĵ
J
Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic...
, ŝ
S
S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent...
, ŭ
U
U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
) 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
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
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
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
"ch", "gh", "hh", "jh", "sh", and "u" when reproducing these letters proves difficult, but in practice the diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s were often written in by hand after typing a document. With the recent advent of computer fonts and especially Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
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 sexistSexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
, 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. 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 analogous to 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.
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 caseGrammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
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
Ido
Ido is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages...
reform.
Esperanto has failed
One common criticism made is that 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 asked people to sign a promise to learn Esperanto once ten million people made the same promise, but the target has never been reached. Many critics say that one's time would be better spent learning English or another, natural language.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 literatureEsperanto literature
Esperanto literature began before the official publication of the constructed language Esperanto; the language's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, translated poetry and prose into the language as he was developing it as a test of its completeness and expressiveness, and published several translations and a...
as Esperanto. The only ones with any significant number of speakers are Ido
Ido
Ido is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages...
, an Esperanto reform
Esperantido
Esperantido is the term used within the Esperanto and constructed language communities to describe a language project based on or inspired by Esperanto. Esperantido originally referred to the language of that name, which later came to be known as Ido. The word Esperantido is derived from Esperanto...
, and Interlingua
Interlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
, an independent "naturalistic" creation that aims to be intelligible without study to a European polyglot.
External links
- Other articles and studies by Claude PironClaude PironClaude Piron was a psychologist and a translator for the United Nations from 1956 to 1961....
. - 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)
- Esperanto and its Critics: An examination of some Idist objections by W E Collinson.