Talk:Esperanto

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Former good articleEsperanto was one of the good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
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February 25, 2005Featured article candidateNot promoted
March 4, 2005Peer reviewReviewed
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Current status: Delisted good article

not a language according to most linguists[edit]

Per WP:NOTFORUM. Nothing useful is going to come out of this discussion. Kahastok talk 17:51, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Apparently linguists now understand that Esperanto and other international auxiliary languages are not languages but parasitic systems based on real languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C09jMAH6X18&feature=youtu.be&t=1231 at 20'30" and 22'30". --Espoo (talk) 11:36, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure how a couple of sentences by one linguist who hasn't studied Esperanto supports the claim that "most linguists say Esperanto is not a language". Mutichou (talk) 19:43, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
+1. Myriads of linguists have no doubt that Esperanto is a full-fledged language, and one with far more speakers than, for instance, the average indigenous language of Vanuatu. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 20:48, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
I don't believe anything from youtube, so I guess i shouldn't comment. --Malerooster (talk) 20:54, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
The title is uncomplete. Better add language, such as e.g. in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_language "It isn't a language unless you can speak it." 1 Alifono (talk) 19:45, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
Not only anyone who cheks his facts, and studies what Esperanto actually is, rather than believing the lies spread about it by its many enemies, will have no doubt that it is a language, and one extremely easy to learn and speak; but professional linguists who studied the various linguistic properties of Esperanto have arrived at the conclusion that it has no intrinsic properties that put it apart from the many languages spoken all over the world. Of course its history is different, and it doesn't belong in any of the big language families like Indo-European, Semitic, Sinitic, etc.; some linguists classify Esperanto among "contact" and "creole" languages, why not? But "parasitic system" is nothing but a slur with no base in reality; and attributing it to "linguists" without qualification, i.e. supposedly to "all linguists" is a lie pure and simple.
For more detailed arguments than I could write here, see this table-of-contents page resending to articles in a multitude of languages including English, French and Esperanto by Claude Piron, who certainly knew what he was talking about (see the wiki page about him). Most of these articles are about Esperanto or about the lies spread about it. — Tonymec (talk) 15:06, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
Also, this comment misrepresents what Chomsky actually said, which was a classification of Esperanto according to his ideas. He did not dispute the fact that Esperanto can be used as a means of communication. I think this results from his narrower definition of language being understood to mean languages in general. TucanHolmes (talk) 11:52, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
"[N]ow understand that" – this value-laden assertion is not an "understanding". Whatever you think of Esperanto as a project, you cannot fairly deny that it is a language spoken by many more than a lot of natural languages. There are even several native Esperanto speakers, meaning that the language (even if initially artificial) is arguably now a natural language with its own community of speakers, which will evolve in its own way. IMHO, that is closer to an impartial view of what linguists now "understand". Moreover, this comment does nothing but disparage Esperanto in a POV-based way, and does not propose anything constructive. Archon 2488 (talk) 14:15, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Origins[edit]

User:Tonymec:

The source that we have for Esperanto's similarity with other languages says:


.

This cannot be used to justify the claim "the phonology is Italo-Polish". The phonology of Esperanto is neither ot Italo-Polish. It is, in fact, with a few tweaks and relatively marginal changes, very close to Polish. - Comment by Kahastok talk 21:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC) continues below

@Kahastok: It is very close to Polish and very close to Italian. Just like these two languages, it has the five vowels /a/, /ε/, /i/, /ɔ/, /u/, and a set of consonants that gives little difficulty to either. AFAIK the only consonant not present in Italian is /x/ (ĥ) but it is the rarest letter of the whole Esperanto alphabet, and it is becoming rarer as words containing it have a tendency to be replaced by neologisms not containing it, e.g. -rĥ- → -rk- anywhere by Academy Addendum 8, ĥoro (choir, choral group) → koruso, etc. The Esperanto phonology cannot be said to be either "Slavic" or "Romance" without qualification since both Russians and French usually have a very noticeable accent reflecting the customs of their respective mother languages. Not so with Poles and not so with Italians. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tonymec (talk • contribs) 00:11, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
Just like these two languages, it has the five vowels /a/, /ε/, /i/, /ɔ/, /u/, and a set of consonants that gives little difficulty to either. No, Italian has a seven-vowel system, neither /ʒ/, /h/
nor /x/, an extremely weak /s~z/ contrast, and a different stress system, see Italian phonology. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 01:24, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Similarly, the source says:


This goes directly against your unsourced claim, "about three-quarters from Romance, two-thirds from Germanic and one-half from Slavic languages, with these groups' parency acording for the overlap". (sic) - Comment by Kahastok talk 21:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC) continues below

If your source says that Esperanto has no more than 10% of its vocabulary in common with English and German together, then it is at best mistaken and at worst lying. For one thing, English has such an enormous store of French-derived words that any source asserting that Esperanto has "75% of Romance words but no more than 10% in common with English" should be regarded as suspect. For another thing, any reputable linguist should know that Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages share many words that are recognizably cognates even if with the passing of time they have ceased to be exactly synonymous. When putting together the "fundamental vocabulary" of Esperanto, Zamenhof built upon this shared vocabulary, and when adding neologisms afterwards it was often done the same way. La maro (the sea) resembles both French la mer and German das Meer; domo (a house) will be recognised by Russians as meaning дом and by the French as cognate with domicile or even, if they studied Latin, as borrowed from Latin domus. Danci is translated by English to dance, French danser, Dutch dansen, German tanzen, Russian танцевать "tantsevat'". There are countless such examples. Indeed, anyone asserting that words in common with French, words in common with German and words in common with Russian cannot possibly add to more than 100% because nothing can add to more than 100% is either ignorant or dishonest.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Tonymec (talk • contribs) 00:11, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

You further wish the article to claim that the semantics are Germanic. Let's go back to the source:


Polish and Russian are not Germanic languages. They are Slavic languages. So that's also directly rejected by the source. - Comment by Kahastok talk 21:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC) continues below

OK, so I was mistaken when mentioning German semantics, though I would have sworn I read about it somewhere. However, Claude Piron, who spent much of his life as a translator and interpreter of Chinese, English, Russian and Spanish into French for UN and the WHO, gives so many examples of words, phrases and sentences which can be translated word-for-word or element-by-element between Standard Chinese and Esperanto, including under various synonymous changes of word-order, but not between Esperanto and any European language, that I'm tempted to believe him when he says that Esperanto is, in a sense, an Asiatic language under European vestments, the only difference being that in Esperanto, unlike in Chinese, the phrase structure is immediately apparent (with, for instance, adjectives agreeing with their noun) — and, of course, that Esperanto, like pinyin but unlike hanzi, is written with one variant of the Latin alphabet under the principle "one letter, one sound".— Preceding unsigned comment added by Tonymec (talk • contribs) 00:11, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

I will be reverting based on this source. Kahastok talk 21:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

When quoting sources talking about Esperanto, one should be particularly careful, because, strange as it may appear, many authors, including Ph.D.'s in linguistics, have made ex abrupto pronouncements about it without ever studying what Esperanto actually is and how it functions. Examples of such prejudices about Esperanto are listed and refuted in Some Comments on Ignorance About Esperanto by Claude Piron, who was both a better linguist and a better Esperantist than I am; and in Psychological Reactions to Esperanto, translated by William Auld, he goes in search of the psychological mechanisms which created those prejudices. (After spending many years as a translator, he studied psychology in order to understand unreasoned contrary-to-fact prejudices against Esperanto; and he became a university professor in psychology and pedagogy teaching at Geneva University.) And BTW, when quoting Piron's Esperanto, a Western language? I ought also to have mentioned his Esperanto: European or Asiatic language? which explores in much greater detail the similarities between Esperanto and Chinese.
Oh, and you reproach me the fact that I put "too much weight" on one author's opinion's, namely Piron's; I'm quoting him because I know that he knows what he's talking about, both when talking about Esperanto and when talking about various languages including Chinese; I could probably have quoted Helmar Frank, Detlev Blanke, Bertil Wennergren, Gaston Waringhien, Ivo Lapenna, John Wells or Humphrey Tonkin if I had had ready access to their writings; the fact is that Piron has a whole site full of articles in various languages, and that this site was found sufficiently valuable to be kept up (and all dues paid) even after the author's death, which happened in 2008. The table of contents is arranged by language, scroll down to "English", which is approximately one-third of the way down, to find the English titles. Or, since your Babelbox says you're proficient in French, you may be interested in the articles in French, Piron's mother language. — Tonymec (talk) 00:11, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
I don't know if Piron masters any Sinitic language, but several grammatical features of Esperanto are extremely difficult for native Mandarin speakers, especially tense, number, and the definite article. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 01:24, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Please do not break up my talk page comments, this makes the text very difficult to follow and is not allowed per WP:TPO.

On phonology, I'd endorse this comment from LiliCharlie. Also bear in mind that phonology is more than just the phonological inventory. Esperanto phonotactics, for example, are far more permissive than Italian phonotactics.

On word origins, the fact that a word has cognates in multiple languages does not mean that a given word was not based on one of those languages. The word maro is clearly based on Italian mare, and not German Meer, for example. More to the point, all of of these, we have a source. That trumps whatever argument you make that is not based on a source.

Piron and other Esperanto activists are WP:PARTISAN. It is fanciful to suggest that any connection with Chinese is anything more than coincidental and there is no evidence that Zamenhof considered Chinese speakers when creating Esperanto. Esperanto as an Asian language would look really really different. Kahastok talk 08:52, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

I would only compare Esperanto's phonology to other languages, but I wouldn't say it has another language's phonology. Esperanto's phonology is—Esperanto. Depending on what phrasing and words are used, it will sound more or less similar to various languages.
Esperanto videos on YouTube are mostly mistaken by the site to be in Italian (Obviously some algorithm isn't a reliable source, but I felt compelled to note that, since it indicates similarity across the potentially biggest audio sample size). TucanHolmes (talk) 18:52, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
I had always heard that Esperanto was strongly influenced by, if not based on, Portuguese. The written language looks Portuguese to me; perhaps it's the extensive use of 'j'. No source for this, just what I've hesrd. My 2¢ worth, mostly to get this page on my Watchlist ;-) --D Anthony Patriarche, BSc (talk) 12:33, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

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