To say I haven't been paying much attention to the international movement would be an exaggeration: I admit, I haven't been paying any attention to it. But just because the World Esperanto Association has taken that counterproductive and truculent stance doesn't make it the right stance to take. Esperanto, like AA, ought to be "a program of attraction rather than promotion," in my opinion. Attacking English will only reinforce the average person's impression of Esperanto as a toy for dreamy peaceniks and cranks, when the reality is that Esperanto could be very useful as an international lingua franca.
Actually, "real languages" don't HAVE dialects, they ARE dialects. What we think of as standard English is just another dialect of English; it has developed and changed over time, as have all other dialects of English. Scots, American English, Australian English, "standard English": these are all DIALECTS that have developed simultaneously. There was never one single, "correct" version of English from which all the others have diverged; they've all developed alongside each other. The linguist John McWhorter sums it up by saying, "Dialects is all there is."
And yes, if Esperanto acquired NATIVE SPEAKERS, there would eventually be various Esperanto dialects. All languages change over time.
Esperanto is pretty cool. But you're not going to create any new "samideanoj" by saying silly things like "English is... hard to learn and destructive to culture." That's not what the Esperanto ideal is all about.
When I administrated HP-UX boxes for a living, I found HP support engineers to be quite knowledgeable about HP hardware, but once you got past the ISL> prompt, they were no help. They couldn't spell UNIX.
It has the most useless update facility in the world that seems to rely on hopelessly long downloads of fixes to its own software
Sounds like Gentoo Linux:-)
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To say I haven't been paying much attention to the international movement would be an exaggeration: I admit, I haven't been paying any attention to it. But just because the World Esperanto Association has taken that counterproductive and truculent stance doesn't make it the right stance to take. Esperanto, like AA, ought to be "a program of attraction rather than promotion," in my opinion. Attacking English will only reinforce the average person's impression of Esperanto as a toy for dreamy peaceniks and cranks, when the reality is that Esperanto could be very useful as an international lingua franca.
Actually, "real languages" don't HAVE dialects, they ARE dialects. What we think of as standard English is just another dialect of English; it has developed and changed over time, as have all other dialects of English. Scots, American English, Australian English, "standard English": these are all DIALECTS that have developed simultaneously. There was never one single, "correct" version of English from which all the others have diverged; they've all developed alongside each other. The linguist John McWhorter sums it up by saying, "Dialects is all there is."
And yes, if Esperanto acquired NATIVE SPEAKERS, there would eventually be various Esperanto dialects. All languages change over time.
Esperanto is pretty cool. But you're not going to create any new "samideanoj" by saying silly things like "English is... hard to learn and destructive to culture." That's not what the Esperanto ideal is all about.
When I administrated HP-UX boxes for a living, I found HP support engineers to be quite knowledgeable about HP hardware, but once you got past the ISL> prompt, they were no help. They couldn't spell UNIX.
It has the most useless update facility in the world that seems to rely on hopelessly long downloads of fixes to its own software Sounds like Gentoo Linux :-)