community-based, non-corporate, participatory media
Free Esperanto Classes
by branden
Saturday, Jun. 14, 2003 at 7:26 PM
info@cease.info 412-361-3022 5125 Penn Ave - the Thomas Merton Center
You can learn Esperanto in just six lessons!
You can learn Esperanto in just six lessons!
The Esperanto Society of Pittsburgh and CEASE are hosting free Esperanto classes at the Thomas Merton Center. The classes start June 30 so sign up soon! Classes will be Monday and Wednesday from 5:30pm - 7:30pm until July 16. Please contact Instruistino Diana at 412-722-1777 or XXXXXXXX (email address removed at request of owner) to register.
For more info, dates, and times visit http://www.cease.info and http://www.shs-institut.de/esperanto
Esperanto is a language introduced in 1887 by Dr. L.L. Zamenhof after years of development. He proposed Esperanto as a second language that would allow people who speak different native languages to communicate, yet at the same time retain their own languages and cultural identities. Esperanto is four times easier to learn than other languages.
ELNA: http://www.esperanto-usa.org
Indymedia International Language
by Jesse H.
Tuesday, Jun. 24, 2003 at 9:48 PM
instead of presuming that English, a colonial/imperialist language will be the lingua franca of the world, how about more use of Esperanto internationally, particularly in the Indymedia network, given that it's much easier to learn, and that some people in almost every country in the world speak it and of course the language of the particular country, we'd have both a "lingua franca" and encourage language diversity and the opening up of more Indymedias.
esperanto is as 'imperialist' as english
by saleh
Saturday, Jun. 28, 2003 at 7:58 PM
salehw@yahoo.com
(only a reply to the comment, not the main story or the classes themselves)
esperanto is a mix of not all the world's languages but western/latin-based languages, so it's probably not consistent to praise it over English on the basis of imperialism. it might be a good "international" language for indymedia if international means western europe, but not if it means the whole world, because it would be a double-exclusion to non-euros.
fyi: there are also other, much more successful, "blend" languages that allow different national groups to maintain their identity, such as Swahili and Urdu, which have been so successful that they are now 1st-languages for some internationalist communities and are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.
Esperanto is anti-imperialist
by Bovenon
Saturday, Jul. 05, 2003 at 12:30 AM
there's the reality of language linguistics and simplicty. Ironically (based on the false attack on Esperanto as "imperialist"), Esperanto is popular in the Koreas (both north and south), China, Japan etc as it's much easier for folks to learn Esperanto than to learn the other countries language, and thus Esperanto can serve as a Pan-Asian alternative to what is the defacto world imperialist language English, which is a difficult language to learn fluently and that often the elites use as their language. Esperanto has strong socialist/anarchist roots and is anti-nationalist, something that be of us in the ever empire like U.S.
inclusiveness and popularity
by Saleh
Friday, Jul. 11, 2003 at 1:43 AM
salehw@yahoo.com
Hi,
I used quotes, by the way, to show that I wasn't attacked Esparanto as imperialist, but rather comparing it's relationship outside Europe to English.
almost any language is easier to learn than English (I would say English is the most difficult language to learn based on statistics of irregularities in grammer, but it depends on how you think - Turkish has only one irregular verb, which can be a blessing or a pain for example), so an easier language I can agree would be less imperialistic.
I'm not convinced that the fact that Esperanto is used in both Koreas or China shows that it's anti-imperialist, rather that it reflects European influence, (even if that's true it doesn't make Esperanto imperialist, of course). but more to the point:
Compare that to languages that brought people together by including all the languages of the people involved. For example, Esperanto was introduced to China by Russians (and some Japanese activists), but Chinese people speaking Esperanto do not see any Chinese words in Esparanto. On the other hand all of the people touched by Swahili or Urdu see some aspect of their own language in their unifying language. This, along with the organic growth of the 2 languages (through being a language of mass social experience), may account for why there are millions of first-language speakers of the other two languages rather than thousands.
My point is not that Esperanto is imperialist or bad, but that it's problematic to see it as unifying people outside of Europe because it's made up of European languages, whereas other unifiying languages truly did include all the other groups they meant to reach.
I support the learning or teaching of Esperanto, but am critical of the idea that it should be used for an international indymedia or international unification, and point to examples like Swahili and Urdu for ideas on languages that bring people together on a mass scale. this was meant for the context of the original post, not an attempt to criticize anyone trying to use Esperanto to further global solidarity - we need to try everything we have for that!
Europeanness of Esperanto
by Adam
Sunday, Jul. 27, 2003 at 8:32 AM
araizen@newmail.net
It's true that the vocabulary of Esperanto is mostly taken from European languages, however that's just a matter of maximizing its learnability. Asian languages (for example) aren't related to each other, so if a language based its vocabulary on Chinese, it would be much easier for the Chinese to learn, but it wouldn't provide much of a benefit to Japanese speakers, and it would be very difficult for speakers of European languages, with little benefit. It's a bit easier for speakers of European languages to learn Esperanto than for speakers of non-European languages, but it's still far easier for them to learn Esperanto than to learn any national language. You could use arbitrary vocabulary, but that would just have the effect of making the language harder for some people without making it easier for anyone else.
In any case, the advantages that Esperanto may give to speakers of European languages is entirely different from the advatages that English (for example) gives to its native speakers. A native speaker of English will always have an advantage over almost all non-native speakers, no matter how long non-native speakers study English. On the other hand, an American may learn Esperanto a bit faster than a Korean, because some of the vocabulary is already familiar, but once the Korean learns Esperanto, he/she is a full-fledged speaker who can use the language just as well as any other speaker.
As far as the grammar goes, the Europeanness of Esperanto is even less true. Esperanto's grammar is a bit like a regular version of European languages, but it also has aspects which are not found in any European language, such as its completely regular agglutination, which is similar to Turkish (or so they tell me, I don't speak Turkish).
relative accessibility
by Saleh
Monday, Jul. 28, 2003 at 5:38 AM
salehw@yahoo.com
I appreciate the point about relative access, but I would say that again there's a persistant bias here. It's odd to say that Asian languages aren't related to each other, and I assume you're saying European languages are. Estonian or other Finno-Ugric European languages aren't related to indo-European languages. Even with Indo-European languages, Indo-European langauges are spoken by over 1.5 billion Asians & are in the same family as the European languages that make up Esperanto, yet there's a bias towards the European side of the Indo-European family (in Esperanto). the only way Asian langauges are less related to each other than European languages is because Asia is bigger, which doesn't make Esperanto any less biased in access (i.e. it's doesn't follow that Asian languages are less related therefore Esperanto is a language of the most related peoples therefore it's the most accessible).
I think this Euro bias continues in the assumptions being made about learnability. Learnability is still a totally open question, empirically one can say English is the hardest to learn and there's some merit to saying an equally accessible language should be different from English. It doesn't follow that a mix of selected European languages would be well-accessible. The examples I gave of Urdu and Swahili show the narrowness of the approach of thinking it's Esperanto or a national language, as Urdu and Swahili were not pre-existing national languages but rather languages that intentionally reached across the range of languages of their speakers and grew organically by the mass social experience of these peoples. This model is more promising (as a model) for a world-wide language than one based on a mix of European langauges, considering that Urdu and Swahili are spoken by hundreds of millions of people each and millions of people as a first language.
I don't think anyone ever suggested that Esperanto had European grammer, but rather (unavoidably) Euro-centric vocabulary. My point on grammer was that, as with the issue of accessibility, it doesn't follow that increasingly regular grammer means it's easier to learn. I can reiterate my example of post-Attaturk Anatolian Turkish, having just 1 irregal verb, can be difficult for language-learners who use subjectivity and intuition. the reason English is difficult to learn, from my experience, is not because its grammer is irregular (which it is - the most irregular of major languages), but because the irregularities are often non-sensical, which again is not surprising if you look at the social history of how English evolved (again, the importance of seeing language as a mass social phenomena vs something for individuals). This point of has-Euro-characteristics-and-non-Euro-characteristics doesn't follow logically from the issues raised, rather it's a stretch.
So I would agree that Esperanto can be a language for Europeans to talk to each other in an egalitarian way, but not one that has equal access for the whole world if that's the purpose of using it to replace English on worldwide indymedia. It might be an improvement but is still Euro-centric, which is fine if it's just Europeans talking to Europeans but not if it's a world-wide indymedia. Doesn't mean anyone (Euro or non) should not learn Esperanto, does mean think-a-little-harder if you propose Esperanto as something to replace English for activists world-wide.
English perhaps isn't that hard
by Andrew Jackson
Tuesday, Sep. 16, 2003 at 9:10 AM
A couple of people in this conversation have mentioned the complexity involved in English. Although I admit that English has a spelling system that is far from easy, and a number of irregular verbs, English also has many advantages over other languages that make it probably closer to Esperanto than almost any other living European language. Consider:
1. No noun genders. These are common in all major European languages, and, although predictable in some languages, in others seem almost random. Most European languages have 2-3 possible genders for each and every noun. In terms of understanding the language, these rarely serve any use (note that I said *rarely*, not *never* - I know that there are situations where two words are separated in meaning through gender).
2. Almost universal regularity of plurals. Ever tried learning German?
3. No accordance of adjectives - this is tied to noun genders and again is something that rarely helps to make a language more understandable.
4. Hardly any verb conjugations. OK, so there are some, but consider the basic paradigm of the simple present tense - English verbs have 2 forms (either the infinitive, or the infinitive + (e)s), regular French verbs have in general 5 separate forms for this same range (je/on, tu, nous, vous, ils) (if you think English orthography is hard, try the French one). Apart from the verbs "have" and "be", no English verb is irregular in the present tense. Future tense is formed completely without conjugations, compound past tenses use only one auxiliary verb. Imperatives are simply the infinitive. Some tenses in English are easier to form than in Esperanto!
5. No cases, no case endings, no differing forms of the definite article - nothing!
6. Only one form of address (no familiar/unfamiliar/plural/double/plural familiar/plural unfamiliar, etc., etc.)
7. Although English cannot create new words by fusing them in the way that Esperanto and Germanic languages can, English allows an almost free use of nouns in the place of adjectives, thus achieving almost the same effect. Consider: The factory door. "factory" is a noun used here as a pseudo-adjective.
8. No double negation.
This said, I accept that English spelling is often infuriating (but perhaps no more so than French or Danish for example), that comparatives (more + adj, or adj + "er") are also hard to follow (if you listen carefully, many native speakers don't worry about this too much though anyway), and that the distinction between adjectives and adverbs is also a problem (where most adverbs are the adjective + "ly", but some adjectives end in "ly" themselves. Once again, listen to some varieties of English and this problem is often solved by simply using adjectives as adverbs without change).
None of this is to say that Esperanto is without merit, nor do I believe that the superior role of English in the world today is due to anything but political and economic power, but simply to make the point that it is easy to complain about English without considering that the language is actually structurally a lot simpler than we may think.
difficulty of acquiring English
by saleh
Tuesday, Sep. 16, 2003 at 1:22 PM
salehw@yahoo.com
I think there was a pt raised earlier about how difficult a language is to acquire depends on how one learns it. If one learns it by flat means such as regularity/predictability, then language like Anatolian Turkish might be the easiest, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps people learn it by developing an intuition - in a Baysian way. That's how I think I learn languages anyway, and that's what I came across when I was tutoring non-native-English speaking grad students in English (altho I once had a stats grad students who came up with a classical-stats way of learning English, but that's another story). English is pretty difficult to learn in a Baysian way because it's got an agglomoration of different traditions, which is no surprise if you approach language from the perspective of a mass social phenomena rather than as something individualistic - i.e. if you see the development of English as part of a historical process, rather than just by its content (e.g. rules, genders, etc. by themselves).
Bartsow
by Jay Farrar
Tuesday, Sep. 16, 2003 at 2:25 PM
"Anyone caught speaking Esperanto, is thought carzy or headed for jail..."
From the album, 'Sebastopol'
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