Justin B Rye 29-Feb-08
MAILBOX MAIN SEXISM

Ranto Appendices - N

FAQ

If you've come here looking for the Mailbox section, that's been moved to the end as Appendix Z.  Here to take its place as the first of the Appendices is a new page, the Frequently Asked Questions list.

i) What makes English so much better than Esperanto, then?

Did I say anything about English being good?  It has all the unfair advantages of a widely used natural language, but it also has plenty of annoying features of its own; so if you write webpages about its shortcomings as an international language (oh, here's one) I'll be more than happy to link to them.

ii) What's so difficult about inflections like <-ajn>?

Any grammatical mechanism is going to seem natural and self-evident to you if your mother-tongue does it.  But imagine how disorientating it would be if Esperanto adverbs had obligatory tense-prefixes to show agreement with their verbs, or if there were different pronouns for referring to people older and younger than yourself.  You'd be constantly having to remind yourself to pay attention to people's ages just to be able to produce grammatical sentences.  That's what Esperanto's like for the vast majority of us who aren't accustomed to compulsory case-agreement on predicate adjectives.

iii) Can't we just work around these problems?  For instance, you can just ignore any aspects of Esperanto you think are overcomplicated.

To deal with that second part first: no, that's not an option - if I ignore the language's rules, I'm left with no way of parsing sentences.  Esperanto needs fixes, not workarounds; but its fundamental grammatical rules were declared "untouchable" a century ago.  You can come up with your own private-language reform-scheme if you like, but you'd better not use it on an Esperanto newsgroup!

iv) Why do you give examples of features from all those exotic languages, as if it would make sense to combine Cantonese pronouns, Swahili verb-endings and Thai noun-classifiers?

If you design your artificial interlanguage with the starting assumption that Cantonese is more "exotic" than German, you can't expect to produce one suitable for the whole planet.  However, the idea isn't that it should "multiply together" all the world's grammars, it's that it should use only the truly universal "common factors", and you can't find those by surveying Yiddish, Polish and Latvian.

v) Why are you so obsessed with Esperanto?

Actually, these days I rarely think about conlangs at all unless someone else raises the topic.  You don't need to be a fanatic to recognise Zamenhof's mistakes, and writing webpages costs nothing.  Nor is it some sort of fringe viewpoint - on the contrary, the number of people not learning Esperanto is growing every day!

vi) Have you read "Psychological Reactions to Esperanto"?

Yes, and I'm impressed by how effective it is at making Esperantism look like Scientology, but I wasn't planning on mentioning it - it's Esperanto I object to, not Esperantists.  But since you insist, here's a link.  Happy now?

vii) What about such-and-such an alternative Constructed International Auxiliary Language?

There are half a dozen or so big names, all featuring clear design improvements on Esperanto, and minority candidates to suit any taste.  I'm not going to try to summarise my views on all of them here... I'd end up having to turn my whole site into yet another conlangopaedia.

viii) But don't you realise that nobody speaks any of those?

Well, approximately nobody, but then again by the standards of Hindi approximately nobody speaks Esperanto, either.  The pragmatic solution to communication barriers is to pick the language everyone else speaks regardless of its shortcomings; the idealistic solution is to pick one on the basis of its technical merits.  Picking a poorly engineered artificial language gets you the worst of both worlds.

ix) If other conlangs are simpler and more regular than Esperanto, why haven't they become globally successful?

It would hardly be the first case of a better product losing out because a rival brand was first-to-market.  But the main factors that make a language successful with the general non-hobbyist population have little to do with its grammar (except in that it helps if you already speak something closely related).  The main things that matter are how strong the social pressures are obliging you to acquire it, and whether appropriate teaching materials are conveniently available.

x) Isn't it unfair to expect Zamenhof to have known about modern linguistics?

Sure; there was essentially no chance that a nineteenth-century European polyglot was going to design anything worth keeping - it's like criticising some Victorian inventor's efforts to build a steam-powered helicopter.  Except that I don't know of any organisations dedicated to promoting gyrolocomotives as the best possible form of transport...

xi) Why do your webpages use ASCII substitutes for aitch-circumflex, the IPA schwa symbol etcetera rather than displaying them directly in Unicode?

Three reasons:

1. Politeness: I'd be locking out anyone stuck with an antiquated browsing environment - not everyone has the option of upgrading.  I'd also be locking out anyone choosing to use a low-bandwidth browser to make websurfing tolerable on a pay-by-the-second dialup connection.
2. Consistency: I prefer to be able to quote my pages directly in e-mail.  If I'm composing messages on a basic VT100 console, and you're reading them via Yahoo! Mail, only plain seven-bit text will work.
3. Laziness; letters I've got on my keyboard are easier to type.  Switching to Unicode would mean rewriting an awful lot of text, with a considerable degree of reorganisation, and then maintaining low-end and high-end versions in parallel for years afterward.

I'll be introducing Unicode characters here and there (<ĥ>, [ə]) as support for it gets easier, but hey, they're only symbols.  It's what they stand for that matters, not what they look like.

xii) Why isn't there an Esperanto version of your essay?

Because it's not aimed at Esperantists; it's a warning to people who might consider learning Esperanto in future.  There's no point putting the "Danger - do not open" signs on the inside of the door!

xiii) Will you do my homework for me?

Glad to - just give me your teacher's e-mail address and I'll send it direct.