Esperanto is a eurocentric language, regardless of what some crackpots (like Claude Piron
Your anti-Esperanto rant seems far more crackpot-ish than anything I've read by Piron. E.g. you claim "Loyalty to Esperanto is meant to override curiosity about other cultures", which flies in the face of theory and practice, since the primary goal of Esperanto is to permit people from different cultures to communicate more easily. Esperantists whom I know certainly seem interested in other cultures, and typically enjoy talking about their cultural differences and similarities with Esperantists from other places.
You assert that you can have no "true contact" (whatever that means) with a foreign country unless you learn the language of the country. You blithely ignore that people simply cannot learn dozens of languages. Last year I visited Finland, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary; should I have learned all 4 languages in the few months I had before my trip? That is madness. I had various valuable experiences connected with the local cultures, making use of English and Esperanto. I learned Lithuanian folk dancing using no verbal language at all! It is absurd and presumptious to compare my experiences (as your rant does) to the experience of visiting a foreign country and only eating at McDonald's or other chain restaurants.
Your assertions that Esperanto is just as hard as English for Asians fly in the face of what I've read and been directly told by by Asians who've studied both, as well as common sense (Esperanto's spelling, pronunciation, and grammar are simpler than English's, even if they are more accessible for Europeans than Asians, and to ignore that is disingenuous. Yes, L/R confusion is a problem for Asians in both Esperanto and English - but English has many additional problems for Asians which Esperanto does not have.)
Your assertions that people are only permitted to speak Esperanto at Esperanto gatherings are also false in my experience. At the UK in Peking, I spoke English with quite a few Chinese people who had only started to study Esperanto a few weeks before the event and had been studying English for years in school. And at other events I have similarly seen people speaking various languages. Of course part of the purpose of an Esperanto event is to speak Esperanto (duh), so it shouldn't be a sinister surprise that Esperanto is encouraged. At the US go congress one is permitted to play other games, but of course people tend to play go. At Esperanto events I've attended, other languages are used too, informally as well as part of the formal program, as you surely know.
You also grossly misrepresent Esperantio as some sort of monolithic cult that plots to convert everyone. In my experience it is far more like any other interest - the participants will happily help an interested new person learn, they will sometimes publicize the language or its events to raise visibility, etc - the same as go players, stamp collectors, or anything else. You don't even mention (since it doesn't fit your conspiracy scenario) that there are Esperantists who explicitly don't want Esperanto to spread widely, preferring the smaller feel of the existing culture. And in my experience most Esperantists don't really have strong feelings about it and don't seriously believe that everyone in the world is going to be speaking Esperanto - they simply use and enjoy the language.
Anyway, this is the sort of thread that can become an endless timesink, so I'll leave it at that.
Ah, it is always inspiring how many people are so sure about the "facts" on a subject with which they evidently have no actual experience. Somehow this impossible language that can't be real (according to people like AC) nonetheless exists and is spoken by people who happily use it without caring that according to many people they are not using a "real" language. Why, it even has a history and culture, and it evolves, and is spoken by some people as a first language, and is used every day by many people. But how can this be?! I heard that was impossible according to anonymous experts on the intarwebs!
"Not really a language at all." WTF does that mean? What is a language, if not something that people can talk with, write with, etc? You seem ignorant of the fact that plenty of people use Esperanto every day. And it is an ignorant falsehood to claim Esperanto has no culture or is only taught from a book.
Japanese and Chinese have a much harder time with English. Esperanto is easier to learn than other languages has far fewer irregularities and exceptions than national languages. You seem to be saying that because it is not perfect, it sucks.
Criticizing Esperanto for diacritical marks is absurd. Do French, German, Spanish, etc also all suck because they have diacritical marks? (And it's hardly the fault of a language if a web page author or webmaster doesn't know how to display text correctly. It is perfectly simple to make Unicode text (whether Esperanto, German, or whatever) display fine on webpages.)
The only people who are going to learn esperanto are people who find it easy to learn new languages.
That's bass-ackwards... I learned Esperanto because I found it hard to learn new languages, so it was a pleasure to learn a language that I could actually get competent at in a reasonable amount of time.
"The real question is this: if you need a second button on your mouse to be productive, why doesn't a third make you even more productive? Or a fourth? Or a fifth?"
- Goofy argument. If you need a keyboard with a few dozen keys to be productive, why don't even more keys make you even more productive. Imagine how productive you'd be with a million keys on your keyboard!
"The additional buttons are for additional actions. Pointing and clicking make a lot of sense as metaphors. But multiple buttons with which to click are just bad interface design."
Nothing you wrote proves this. Indeed, I honestly thought you were trying to defend right-click by your preceding text, talking about learned standards etc. Just as a light switch is where you expect it to be, so are right-click popup menus. Apparently you actually meant to attack right-click because you learned (on a Mac) a different way of creating the popup menus, and your Mac experience is inherently more valuable than the experience of Windows users.
Pointing and clicking may make sense as a metaphor, but so what? It's JUST A METAPHOR. The computer's "desktop" is supposedly a metaphor for a real-life desktop, but it doesn't really work like one.
I'm more interested in doing useful easy work on my computer than respecting a contrived metaphor. Pressing with different fingers is a well-understood action - you do it whenever you type, or play certain musical instruments, etc. It is silly to pretend that it is confusing.
"I imagine that left-clicking and right-clicking are hard skills to pick up for severely dyslexic folks, too."
And typing is hard to pick up for people with certain disabilities too. Monitors are really hard to use for visually impaired people. Does that mean keyboards and monitors are are just bad interface design?
Cxar ili estas sensciaj pri la lingvo, kompreneble, kaj slashdotoj mokas cxiun, pri kiu ili ne scias!:/
Cxi tiu artikolo havas interesan teorion pri via demando.
The slashdot site isn't very friendly to foreign languages anyway, as it disallows one to enter foreign language characters via UTF-8 or even via html entities (hence the need for using x-system in the Esperanto text here, alas).
Heh, yeah I studied Latin and German both...:) (Also Finnish... once I'd figured I just sucked at learning languages, I decided I'd fulfill the requirement with a wacky language since it just didn't matter, I wasn't going to get fluent at anything, I thought...!)
So I've been pleasantly surprised at how much easier I've found Esperanto to learn than other languages. In 6 months I am already getting pretty good, easily reading and writing it every day, as compared to years of frustration with other languages. In fairness, I am probably more motivated to learn a foreign language now than I was in school - but part of that is because I've been so encouraged by my faster progress... it's a postive feedback loop:)
I highly recommend checking it out to anyone who felt frustrated studying languages in school. lernu.net is a great place to start and learn the basics quickly. (And contrary to some of the bogus rants you see, there is definitely an Esperanto community, culture, history, literature, etc. with plenty of people around the world you can communicate with.)
English is sufficiently ambiguous (just like any other spoken language) that I can't tell if you're kidding or serious when you claim English is good enough because it's perfectly unambiguous.
Certainly English is much harder to learn than many languages, and Esperanto is much easier to learn than most. (I began studying Esperanto 6 months ago and am amazed at my progress, compared to attempts to learn other languages in the past, including Latin, German, and Finnish...)
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that an awful lot of NON-white non-immigrant Americans also only know English.
Your anti-Esperanto rant seems far more crackpot-ish than anything I've read by Piron. E.g. you claim "Loyalty to Esperanto is meant to override curiosity about other cultures", which flies in the face of theory and practice, since the primary goal of Esperanto is to permit people from different cultures to communicate more easily. Esperantists whom I know certainly seem interested in other cultures, and typically enjoy talking about their cultural differences and similarities with Esperantists from other places.
You assert that you can have no "true contact" (whatever that means) with a foreign country unless you learn the language of the country. You blithely ignore that people simply cannot learn dozens of languages. Last year I visited Finland, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary; should I have learned all 4 languages in the few months I had before my trip? That is madness. I had various valuable experiences connected with the local cultures, making use of English and Esperanto. I learned Lithuanian folk dancing using no verbal language at all! It is absurd and presumptious to compare my experiences (as your rant does) to the experience of visiting a foreign country and only eating at McDonald's or other chain restaurants.
Your assertions that Esperanto is just as hard as English for Asians fly in the face of what I've read and been directly told by by Asians who've studied both, as well as common sense (Esperanto's spelling, pronunciation, and grammar are simpler than English's, even if they are more accessible for Europeans than Asians, and to ignore that is disingenuous. Yes, L/R confusion is a problem for Asians in both Esperanto and English - but English has many additional problems for Asians which Esperanto does not have.)
Your assertions that people are only permitted to speak Esperanto at Esperanto gatherings are also false in my experience. At the UK in Peking, I spoke English with quite a few Chinese people who had only started to study Esperanto a few weeks before the event and had been studying English for years in school. And at other events I have similarly seen people speaking various languages. Of course part of the purpose of an Esperanto event is to speak Esperanto (duh), so it shouldn't be a sinister surprise that Esperanto is encouraged. At the US go congress one is permitted to play other games, but of course people tend to play go. At Esperanto events I've attended, other languages are used too, informally as well as part of the formal program, as you surely know.
You also grossly misrepresent Esperantio as some sort of monolithic cult that plots to convert everyone. In my experience it is far more like any other interest - the participants will happily help an interested new person learn, they will sometimes publicize the language or its events to raise visibility, etc - the same as go players, stamp collectors, or anything else. You don't even mention (since it doesn't fit your conspiracy scenario) that there are Esperantists who explicitly don't want Esperanto to spread widely, preferring the smaller feel of the existing culture. And in my experience most Esperantists don't really have strong feelings about it and don't seriously believe that everyone in the world is going to be speaking Esperanto - they simply use and enjoy the language.
Anyway, this is the sort of thread that can become an endless timesink, so I'll leave it at that.
Ah, it is always inspiring how many people are so sure about the "facts" on a subject with which they evidently have no actual experience. Somehow this impossible language that can't be real (according to people like AC) nonetheless exists and is spoken by people who happily use it without caring that according to many people they are not using a "real" language. Why, it even has a history and culture, and it evolves, and is spoken by some people as a first language, and is used every day by many people. But how can this be?! I heard that was impossible according to anonymous experts on the intarwebs!
"Not really a language at all." WTF does that mean? What is a language, if not something that people can talk with, write with, etc? You seem ignorant of the fact that plenty of people use Esperanto every day. And it is an ignorant falsehood to claim Esperanto has no culture or is only taught from a book.
Japanese and Chinese have a much harder time with English. Esperanto is easier to learn than other languages has far fewer irregularities and exceptions than national languages. You seem to be saying that because it is not perfect, it sucks.
Criticizing Esperanto for diacritical marks is absurd. Do French, German, Spanish, etc also all suck because they have diacritical marks? (And it's hardly the fault of a language if a web page author or webmaster doesn't know how to display text correctly. It is perfectly simple to make Unicode text (whether Esperanto, German, or whatever) display fine on webpages.)
That's bass-ackwards... I learned Esperanto because I found it hard to learn new languages, so it was a pleasure to learn a language that I could actually get competent at in a reasonable amount of time.
Well of course the nick is misspelled, but surely it was intentionally done to be L337!
"The real question is this: if you need a second button on your mouse to be productive, why doesn't a third make you even more productive? Or a fourth? Or a fifth?"
- Goofy argument. If you need a keyboard with a few dozen keys to be productive, why don't even more keys make you even more productive. Imagine how productive you'd be with a million keys on your keyboard!
"The additional buttons are for additional actions. Pointing and clicking make a lot of sense as metaphors. But multiple buttons with which to click are just bad interface design."
Nothing you wrote proves this. Indeed, I honestly thought you were trying to defend right-click by your preceding text, talking about learned standards etc. Just as a light switch is where you expect it to be, so are right-click popup menus. Apparently you actually meant to attack right-click because you learned (on a Mac) a different way of creating the popup menus, and your Mac experience is inherently more valuable than the experience of Windows users.
Pointing and clicking may make sense as a metaphor, but so what? It's JUST A METAPHOR. The computer's "desktop" is supposedly a metaphor for a real-life desktop, but it doesn't really work like one.
I'm more interested in doing useful easy work on my computer than respecting a contrived metaphor. Pressing with different fingers is a well-understood action - you do it whenever you type, or play certain musical instruments, etc. It is silly to pretend that it is confusing.
"I imagine that left-clicking and right-clicking are hard skills to pick up for severely dyslexic folks, too."
And typing is hard to pick up for people with certain disabilities too. Monitors are really hard to use for visually impaired people. Does that mean keyboards and monitors are are just bad interface design?
The slashdot site isn't very friendly to foreign languages anyway, as it disallows one to enter foreign language characters via UTF-8 or even via html entities (hence the need for using x-system in the Esperanto text here, alas).
So I've been pleasantly surprised at how much easier I've found Esperanto to learn than other languages. In 6 months I am already getting pretty good, easily reading and writing it every day, as compared to years of frustration with other languages. In fairness, I am probably more motivated to learn a foreign language now than I was in school - but part of that is because I've been so encouraged by my faster progress... it's a postive feedback loop :)
I highly recommend checking it out to anyone who felt frustrated studying languages in school. lernu.net is a great place to start and learn the basics quickly. (And contrary to some of the bogus rants you see, there is definitely an Esperanto community, culture, history, literature, etc. with plenty of people around the world you can communicate with.)
English is sufficiently ambiguous (just like any other spoken language) that I can't tell if you're kidding or serious when you claim English is good enough because it's perfectly unambiguous. Certainly English is much harder to learn than many languages, and Esperanto is much easier to learn than most. (I began studying Esperanto 6 months ago and am amazed at my progress, compared to attempts to learn other languages in the past, including Latin, German, and Finnish...)