mankso wrote:

I hope it might give some comfort knowing that Hitler, Stalin and their ilk felt similarly about Esperanto.

You can't call something a real argument until somebody gets compared to Hitler.

That said I wouldn't want to see this forum turn into some kind of walled community.

I think we gladly welcome people who want to contribute productively to the discussions here.  To the best of my knowledge, Resolve is not a student of RTK, but he actively posts here, and I'm sure all the members would be glad to chat even with people who haven't designed kickass SRS programs
But showing up with a belligerent attitude and no interest in Japanese is not a good way of "starting off on the right foot."

And now I present an excerpt from the last two pages of How to Learn any Language

Every attempt to launch an artificial international language has so far failed. Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Kosmos, Monoglottica, Universalsprache, Neo-Latine, Vertparl, Mundolingue, Dil, Volapuk, even an international language based on the notes of the musical scale, all started out weak and gradually tapered off. My guess is they always will. You can no more "vote" a language into being the international language than you can vote warmth into a blizzard.
  Languages attain prominence something the way individuals and countries do, through all kinds of force, including war. There's an added element in prominence, however. Brute force is not enough. The winning language must have a degree of acceptability to the losers.
  Russian emerged from World War II as a mighty language, but it failed to bluster beyond the bounds of the Communist empire. Russian even failed to inspire people to learn it inside their empire. Students in Hungary, Romania, and East Germany knew no more Russian after eight years of schooling than Americans know French after similar exposure.
  English, on the other hand, was welcomed. Africans and Asians may not have rejoiced at being forcibly incorporated into the British Empire, but they recognised that the English language, if learned by all, was a unifying tool that enabled different tribes who lived five miles apart to communicate for the first time, in a language brought down upon them from thousands of miles away.
  A wolf will lift his neck to let a larger wolf know that he accepts the other's dominant role as leader. The entire world has lifted its neck to acknowledge English as
the language of choice in the modern world. It wasn't all military and commercial power, either. American movies, songs, comic strips, TV series, even T-shirts all helped make English the international language of the earth by acclaim.
  But only the shortsighted will consider the dominance of English reason to return foreign language materials to the bookstore and forget the whole thing. It's precisely because the peoples of the world honour our language that we get so much more appreciation when we go out of our way to honour theirs.

Esperanto is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem, a Catch-22.  Hardly anybody wants to learn it because not enough people speak it, and not enough people speak it because hardly anybody wants to learn it.  And as far as I can see, it will always be that way.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2007 September 09, 9:28 am)

I do remember looking into Esperanto, and thinking it was interesting - but realized that I was missing out on a hell of a lot of culture. It's a little bit like learning Python, PHP, or C++ - congratulations, you can talk to a computer. Likewise, you can talk to a person in Esperanto, but there's no real feeling of "wow, this person is actually interested in my culture and is talking to me in my language. That's very nice - odd, but nice - of them".

Esperanto is a different mindset. A cool one, but different, and probably doomed. The way the political winds in the world are blowing, this will never take off unless something revolutionary happens; e.g. the USA explodes. It's an unrealistic, utopian ideal. I mean, it's built into the name: "esperanto - 'hope' ".

And actually, I do remember a program coming on NPR featuring a bunch of Esperantists. I listened because while I am convinced that Esperanto is useless (except maybe as a bridge language to make the concept of new languages easier, I'll allow that), I find it quaint.

The Esperantists in the program made complete asses out of themselves. Of course, they were assisted by the program host, but still. They really came off as fairly self-righteous and closed-minded in their own special way. Not very enticing (sorry, RTK mode).

Speaking of wikipedia references and the Esperantist's final jab at the forum, I think this might be helpful in this situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_L … _and_usage

Last edited by dihutenosa (2007 September 09, 10:28 am)

dihutenosa Wow, it's almost comical now that you pointed out Godwin's Law (I learn everyday)

I only have one thing to add...

mankso wrote:

Please return to your tatami, washi, fude, suzuri & sumi. I hope it might give some comfort knowing that Hitler, Stalin and their ilk felt similarly about Esperanto.

You forgot the Wasabi !!!

Megaqwerty wrote:

nilfisq wrote:

i think that's the best conclusion to extract from this discussion, danieldesu

Does the desu here serve as a copula or something else? Last night on Guild Wars, I saw someone with the name BlahBlahデス. I didn't think anything of it last night, but with danieldesu here, I fear there may be some sort of a pattern.

My name is Daniel, so my username は danieldesu!
(or if I was telling someone my name, I might say "daniel desu")

As for Esperanto, I remember looking into it when I was looking at various languages (before deciding to study japanese), and thought that it actually took some cues from Japanese.  It's been a while since I looked at it, but I vaguely remember it using some sort of particle system to denote various parts of a sentence or something, or maybe words in certain parts of a sentence always ended in a certain way (kinda like particles).

Last edited by danieldesu (2007 September 09, 5:08 pm)

I'm genuinely suprised that this is new information to people (no offense)!

Well, from now on whenever you see somebody arguing over serious business (tm) on the internets, you can use Godwin's Law.

Or alternatively (and perhaps more relevantly to mankso's ejaculation): Reductio ad Hitlerum.

@danieldesu: In Esperanto, it is easy to tell what the word is functioning as. For example: cat is kato. If you want it to be a direct object, you put an "n" on the end, making it "katon." Japanese would use the particle を for this function.

猫 - kato
猫を - katon

Perhaps, that is what you are talking about?

Last edited by PrettyKitty (2007 September 09, 11:32 pm)

yorkii - too much time on the internet. if you look at my stories, a good chunk of them are internet memes/fads.

Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers:
http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/novembe … tions.html

and Table 1.4 on p.21 in
Omaggio, Alice C.: Teaching Language in Context - Proficiency-Oriented Instruction. Boston, MA.: Heinle & Heinle Publ. Inc. 1986.

JimmySeal - to be fair, though, I can't think of another commonly used language that is harder than Japanese to learn for an English speaker. Possibly Arabic, I've never tried...

Well, I would think that when people start throwing around terms like "x times harder", then they're treading awful close to pseudolinguistics. Labels like this - especially in the case of the above quote, where they are conveniently grouped in multiples of five - seem totally arbitrary.

It's a nice way to sell to a layperson - and not necessarily entirely dishonest or purposefully misleading. But still, a bit of a turn-off for anyone who's studied any language semi-seriously.

For example, I'd never rank Japanese as 20 times harder than Chinese, or Chinese as 20 times harder than Spanish.

But again, we risk judging the true value of the language by the nuts who support it. And as we all know, there are plenty of students of the Japanese language who are utterly insane. It'd be a pity to see someone say "wow, these people are totally batshitinsane. Japanese sounded cool, but all these animefreaks/videogamenerds/pervs/etc are a total turnoff."

Re 'infinitely easier' - I agree this is a rather careless and exaggerated assertion, meant to be understand very loosely, not literally.
Re 'five times easier than French or Spanish' - I would even go so far as to claim from personal classroom experience that this should be more like 'ten' times easier, i.e. one can reach the same level in 1/10th of the time <I>ceteris paribus</I>. However, there really are too many subjective variables to make such categorical claims, and it might be better to talk about the usual four skills separately.

>the more I learn about it, the less I like it.
<I>De gustibus non est disputandum</I>. But I find it rather hard to understand how one can have such strong objections to something with which one has claimed to have little or no personal knowledge. All my comments come after a lifetime of practical Esperanto-speaking contacts in many countries - the language obviously works as is, so all theoretical discussion is in vain. I have tried to stick to facts, not suppositions. And is it not remotely possible that I could have, if not firsthand, then at least secondhand knowledge of Hitlerian and Stalinist repression of Esperanto and Esperanto-speakers, which obviously colors my so-called "missionary and generally offensive" statements? The title of Ulrich Lins' book "Die gef?hrliche Sprache" was indeed aptly chosen. By the way, I have met not a few nuts studying other languages also, Japanese included - I'm not denying we have our share as well.

I cannot support 'one ethnic language (i.e. English) for the world' because of its implication of linguistic, economic and cultural neo-colonialism, and the actual  destruction caused to other minor language and cultures (vide e.g. N. American indigenous languages). The only alternative, as I see it, is to work for a common, non-ethnic, non-territorial, second language. It is unlikely that any major nation-state will support this, since only the smaller ones would have anything to gain here with the introduction of a 'buffer-language'.
[This is not intended to be offensive to anyone].