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Monday, July 21, 2014

CCSS and Esperanto

Why don't we speak Esperanto?

You know Esperanto. It's a constructed language created in the late 19th century by a young man who was very interested in languages and who thought he might come up with a neutral language that transcended all the biases and baggage of previous languages. Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof became an opthamologist, so he wasn't technically a language expert, but that shouldn't matter, right?

If we come up with a good solution to an issue in human society, can't we just get everybody to do that?

Well, no. That's not how human stuff works.

For one thing, Esperanto isn't really neutral-- it leans almost exclusively on the linguistic underpinnings of European languages while ignoring Asian forms. It's neutral only if you assume that the default position for humans is to be a white guy from Europe.

But more importantly, that's just not how language works. It is a living breathing growing thing that resists all attempts to lock it in place and force it to follow the forms prescribed by authorities.

That's why people love Latin. It's a dead language that never changes because nobody really uses it. Latin and Esperanto are like a really nice set of paints that you lock up in a closet and never use because that would mess them up.

But language has to get out and live and change and grow, all through being used by live human beings. Languages literally have lives of their own-- Latin did not disappear because all the Romans died, but because it slowly morphed into new languages (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese). Old English is technically English, but nearly incomprehensible to English ears centuries later.

Yes, it's seductive to people who don't really know much about language to imagine that we could design a language that was cleaner, more efficient, less messy, more orderly, and then we would just get everybody to use it in exactly the same way, and the world would be better. But that seductive idea is only seductive if you don't understand humans or language.

You see where I'm going. It's seductive to think that we could come up with a neat, efficient, one-size-fits-all education system that would be orderly and clean, and we just get everyone to use it exactly the same way. It's seductive to think that if you don't know understand education or human beings.

You come up with these systems and wait for the world to catch on to your awesome plan, or you leverage money and power to try to force the world to catch on to your awesome plan. But in the end, you're only embraced by a small community of like-minded people and rejected by people who insist on acting, well, human. Perhaps if they had written the Common Core in Esperanto...

1 comment:

  1. Dear Peter Greene,

    1) You taught English for 35 years. English and Esperanto seem to be in competition. So it's just easy to understand that you are against Esperanto.
    And that you published some errors about Esperanto...
    Yes, we already know it, the English lobby doesn't like Esperanto...

    2) Probably you don't speak Esperanto, you didn't read any poem in Esperanto, not any book, not even one page written in Esperanto... Is this a good base to write about a language? Would you accept someone who didn't speak French to write about French?

    3) When you wrote that language "is a living breathing growing thing that resists all attempts to lock it in place and force it to follow the forms prescribed by authorities", I first thought you wrote about Esperanto. Because people speaking Esperanto are constantly inventing new expressions in Esperanto using the word system of the language. It's just fun to do it :-)

    Yes, we do respect some basic rules - as do the speakers of every language: You wouldn't accept, if I wrote that "I writed" this text - you want me to use "I wrote" it, won't you? Similar with Esperanto - mi skribas, mi skribis (I write, I wrote).

    4) You wrote "Latin and Esperanto are like a really nice set of paints that you lock up in a closet and never use because that would mess them up." Oh, it really seems you are not familiar with Esperanto... The Esperanto wikipedia http://eo.wikipedia.org/ has more than 200,000 articles now (and now you may think, we do not use all these words, do you really? :-)

    The Chinese government publishes news in Esperanto every day on http://esperanto.china.org.cn/ .

    It's just totally wrong what you wrote, quite sure Esperanto is used every day. There are even several thousand native Esperanto speakers (and I know one of them quite well, because she is my daughter, now 21 years old...).

    5) You wrote "Yes, it's seductive to people who don't really know much about language to imagine that we could design a language that was cleaner, more efficient, less messy, more orderly, (...)"

    Really funny :-D

    First, Esperanto speakers do speak three foreign languages in the mean, Esperanto and two other foreign languages. My mother language is German, I do speak Esperanto, French, English, Spanish, Italian and Dutch (and I have some knowledge in other languages). (I did study French for some time, but my main study subject was mathematics.) Quite sure, I know Esperanto people who know more than ten languages... So, please, just don't think we Esperanto speakers "don't really know much about language"...

    Maybe you don't know it, but Esperanto is more efficient and a bit more orderly than other languages. It's easy to verify, just open an Esperanto text book... (Did you do this before writing this article?)

    6) You speak about "human" as if you were the happy one who knows what this is and people speaking Esperanto don't. Please, with how many Esperanto speakers did you speak about what is human? Come on, don't tell stories whithout knowing anything...

    You wrote an article about Esperanto and you didn't mention any facts about how Esperanto is used nowadays (some facts I already mentioned above):
    - More than one hundred Esperanto books published every year.
    - Facebook in Esperanto, Wikipedia, Mozilla Firefox, Linux...
    - Esperanto songs on youtube
    - Esperanto speakers in more than 120 countries, even in e.g. Nicaragua, Burundi and Nepal

    How about getting some information about Esperanto now?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

    Have a nice day

    Louis Wunsch-Rolshoven

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