Single European Language
Logical Language Group
debate. I think the experience of the much smaller, but thereby better
quantifiable Lojban community can help identify a few truths. And my
personal, if perhaps peculiar, net experience may shed light on Jon
Livesey's questions.
liv...@solntze.engr.sgi.com (Jon Livesey):
>In article <3rqgpv$o...@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>, et...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) writes:
>|> > This is your favourite debating tactic, isn't it? Addressing a straw
>|> > man argument. I didn't say it "proved" anything. I asked why, if
>|> > Esperanto really does facilitate communication, so few people use it
>|> > on the net?
>|>
>|> The number of Esperanto speakers "on the net" is about 500-1000.
Lojban has recruited most of its new people through the net. Evidence
of this is that our snail mailing list is around 1200 people, 150 of
whom I have solid and continuing interest.
The number of subscribers to Lojban List the last year has been 90 +/-
10. But we have averaged at least 2 adds and 2 drops per week or more
throughout that year. So there have been 200-300 people subscribing at
least part of the time.
Of them, approximately 10 have posted significant texts in Lojban, and
another 10 have discussed technical aspects of the language revealing
enough knowledge of the language that they COULD post significant texts
in Lojban if they had something they wanted to say. Another 10, I know
from private email, or personal meeting to have commensurate knowledge
of the language. I know of at least 10 people who are on the net who
have demonstrated Lojban skill but are not subscribing to Lojban List.
And conveniently, I know of at least 10 people who have no net access at
all, but have demonstrated skill in the language. These are all
conservative numbers.
I can thus say that the world population of skilled Lojban users is
about 50. The number of net-based Lojbanists is around 40, yet I only
see 10 names doing all the posting in the language.
Lojban List comes via email, in volumes ranging from 0 to 30 messages a
day. Virtually all of the material in those messages is fairly
technical, or is written in the language itself. We don't have much
fluff on the list. It is thus reasonable to say that almost anyone who
stays on the list for a month or more either spends a lot of effort
filtering traffic, or they actually read some of the traffic. By this
standard, we have 90 current plus maybe another 100 people who have
stayed on the list for a month or more, or 200 net-based Lojbanists.
Most of the rest, when queried, say that they don't have time to read
the volume of postings, or they are using a work or school account and
cannot justify receiving that volume of traffic on a non-work-related
list.
So now we have a 20 to 1 ratio between theoretical Lojbanists on the net
and those actually appearing in the list.
As another data point, again from a list, Linguist List has over 4000
members, presumably most working in linguistics in some way. But only
around 5000 messages (suitably bundled) seem to get posted a year, and
most of those are brief queries. Actual substantive linguistics
discussion probably counts for only 500-1000 messages, and the number of
posters who actually write those 1000 message is more like 50-100.
Newsgroups have even more spotty readership. With the sole exception of
sci.lang, I pretty much drop any newsgroup that numbers more than 30
messages a day, because I cannot read the group enough to seriously
follow threads, much less contribute. I am a fairly active poster, who
spends a lot of time on the net doing news and email, much more than
most people who have day jobs can afford to spend (indeed more than I
can afford to spend). But while I read virtually every sci.lang posting,
I doubt that I post more than a dozen times a year.
>The net has been around for a lot time now, and it would be an ideal
>meadium within which to prove the claims that Esperanto actually *does*
>facilitate communication between people of different cultures, rather
>than simply being *claimed* to do so.
The Usenet is massively dominated by English speakers, albeit some from
many other countries. (The figures for Esperantists in the major
English-native countries is only a few thousand; the most generous
number I have seen for the US is 50,000, active members of Esperanto
groups in the US are probably under 2000. Don Harlow?) If 10% of the
US is on the net, and a smaller percentage in other English-native
countries, the odds are that there are only 200 likely to 5000 maximum
POSSIBLE US Esperanto speakers who could participate if they made s.c.e
a priority. Small wonder there are only 500-1000 worldwide on the
English-speaking portion of the net.
If someone is reading Usenet, they probably know English. They might be
more comfortable in some other language, including Esperanto, but except
on s.c.e, most are unlikely to presume to post in that language. Given
the cost of net access to people in most countries, I would suspect that
they have to control their access to mail and netnews much more
restrictively than I do, even if they do have time or interest.
For all the desire people might have to communicate in Esperanto or any
other language, for most people, the net is still an expensive luxury.
One does not become actively involced in it very lightly.
Some more data to support this. I have occasionally sampled
soc.culture.soviet and now soc.culture.russian. In those groups, a
substantial portion of the traffic is in Romanized Russian. But almost
all of the posters are Russian emigres - there are almost no posters
from Russian-speaking countries. And it isn't because there are no
Russian speakers there %^), nor is it that they aren't on the net, since
relcom.* supports a few hundred newsgroups or more, and thousands of
postings. But they aprrarently don't much read or post to the Big 7
Usenet groups, and most especially don't read or post to
soc.culture.russia
Since most estimates of active Esperanto users has them predominantly in
central and eastern Europe, and in China
>In other words, it would be an existence proof. But if, after all these
>years, there are only 500-1000 Esperanto speakers on the net, that
>leaves me feeling that Esperanto is still at the enthusiast stage, and
>that the claims to be able to do something useful for the world simply
>have not panned out.
I'm confused. You expect that a lot of people who are not enthusiasts
are going to learn a foreign language and try to use it (excluding money
or grades as alternate incentives)? Especially in English speaking
countries, where foreign language education is anathema? If Esperanto
has 10 million speakers, almost all of them will still be enthusiasts,
unless someone adopts Esperanto for some official purpose.
>|> > After all, isn't the net a primo communication medium for Esperanto,
>|> > if there really is anyone out there to use it?
>|>
>|> The international news magazine in Esperanto, MONATO, makes heavy use
>|> of the net for communication with editors and proofreaders.
>
>But they are just more enthusiasts, aren't they? It's just more proof,
>as if we needed any, that there is a small hord core of Esperanto
>enthusiasts keeping the ball rolling. We know that already.
So now people who work with the language in their daily lives, and
produce a publication possibly for income, in the language, are only
"enthusiasts"?
What would constitute in your eyes a NON-enthusiast usage level of
Esperanto?
Indeed to get back to s.c.e, is there ANY traffic that is likely to
appear in a soc.* group that could conceivably be non-"enthusiast", no
matter what the volume?
>|> > What kind of communication does Esperanto really facilitate? Thirty
>|> > messages a day really doesn't seem like much.
>|>
>|> Pass.
>
>Um, I don't think you *can* pass on this one. The net might have been
>designed deliberately for Esperanto, it's so convenient. It's hard for
>me to think of a more convenient medium for Esperanto speakers, so is it
>that they choose not to use it? Or is it that they don't really exist,
>except in very small numbers?
>
>Or is there another reason that I'm missing?
I've given a few of them above: nothing to say, spending too much time
reading to contribute, the natural tendency of most netters to lurk, and
Esperanto being a low priority for people with limited time to spend on
the net. Need any more?
>|> > A claimed readership of fifty *thousand* only produces a tiny number
>|> > of messages a day? Why?
>|>
>|> I have never quite believed that figure of 50 000,
>
>That's fine by me. It's not my figure. I've never believed the
>published numbers for most groups.
I can believe them, since my understanding is that they include people
who subscribed to, received, and read at least one message on the group
during thhe month. Only a small fraction necessarily read every
message.
It would be interesting to see numbers for how many different people
actually post on Usenet during the year, as a fraction of the total net
population, and how many post more than once in any one newsgroup.
>|> > I'm beginning to wonder if Esperanto isn't a kind of Potemkin Village:
>|> > a facade concealing nothing.
By your standard, most Netnews groups are Potemkin villages. Maybe the
EC is a Potemkin village, since this international topic of discussion
in alt.politics.ec isn't attracting many comments from the bulk of the
EC %^)
>Why do I have to *go* anywhere? We've had the net for years. If there
>really are Esperanto speakers out there, why don't they use it?
Why should they?
>Some days there are about as many messages in sci.classics as there are
>in soc.culture.esperanto.
Lotta people study Latin and Greek, I guess.
But I'll bet that you find that most newsgroups intended for daily
reading of a substantial fraction of the traffic have between 20 and 60
messages per day. Any more, and they start to lose people until
equilibrium is reached. Some may have 100, but you start to lose a
sense of community. And how could Esperanto's goals be met in a
newsgroup that was so voluminous that people didn't feel they knew each
other? I don't go shouting in a crowded public square looking for
friends to talk to, nor to noisy discos.
>Sorry, but that's nonsense. I've read both talk.religion.misc and
>alt.atheism in the past, and there are *many* Christian posters. Old
>ones come back, but there is a constant supply of new ones, and there
>are many more than twenty postings a day.
And how many people read even a fraction of them? As for me, I've never
even subscribed, but I'm a netter who likes to talk about religion.
Perhaps unlike you, I'm not on the net just to "talk".
From another post, Jon writes:
>But what are you going to do when they point out how few people
>ever seem to have learned Esperanto without political encouragement?
In the US, it is safe to say that few English-native speakers would have
learned ANY foreign language without political encouragement in the form
of the occasional arbitrary foreign language school requirement.
Spanish is just now starting to get a following without overt political
requirement, because in some states "se habla espan~ol" is needed to get
a job. But in schools, most people take Spanish when given a choice
because it is reputed to be the easiest among the ones offered. If
Esperanto were offered as often as Spanish, we would have zillions of
nominal Esperanto speakers.
And it is even plausible that they might keep using the language, unlike
most Spanish students because the amount of Esperanto you can probably
master in the 1 or 2 years most kids take actually might give you a
useful level of skill in the language. 4 years of elementary school
Spanish didn't do squat for me, and I understand Spanish today no better
than I do Esperanto.
----
lojbab loj...@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
For the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, see ftp.cs.yale.edu /pub/lojban
or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/"
Logical Language Group
debate (and one which may even be relevant to sci.lang) is that one
major purpose of an 'official language' (especially with regard to laws,
specs. etc.) is for its use as a legal language.
The profession of law to a considerable extent relies on precedent,
which often more than anything else consistents of definitions of what
words mean in a legal context. Those definitions are considerably
constrained, if not totally different, from colloquial meanings of
words.
I believe that legal language tends to be considerably more conservative
than colloquial language. (Any studies on whether this is indeed true?)
This is because word meanings get fixed by prior court decisions and
legal practices, and at the very least lag behind the changes that occur
in collquial use.
Sometimes the words acquire flavors of their own that I am not sure have
any particular basis in past colloquial usage. As an example, US
government specs use "shall" to indicate inflexible requirements,
independent of person and number, "will" to indicate intent that need
not be a firm requirement (again independent of person and number), and
"may" to indicate option for which no preference exists on the part of
the government (or at least the specification writer %^). This
certainly didn't match my colloquial dialect, nor what I was taught
about usage in school.
This type of phenomenon speaks poorly for the adoption of a constructed
official language (such as Esperanto), where there is little or no
historical/legal basis or precedent as to what words mean.
I cited "libertarian" as one example, and Don Harlow cited "democracy"
as another, of common words in a political arena (at least in the US)
that are difficult to define in ways that foreigners can understand, and
in some considerable sense are untranslatable.
But one can go into more common words, like "morning", which has
different definitions in different cultures. If someone used the
Esperanto word for "morning" in a legal document, what would be the time
boundaries implied by that usage?
Part of the issue may be that Esperanto HAS one word for "morning", one
word for "democracy", etc. when there are many often only slightly
related concepts involved. Most conlang proposals similar have single
word correspondences from one or more natural languages to the conlang,
making them at best a code for the natural language with perhaps a
somewhat non-standard grammar.
Lest I be thought to be criticizing Esperanto, I have to say that the
long-time existence of an Esperanto "culture" has resulted in MANY words
having an Esperanto-specific meaning, and to some extent the
morphological compounding scheme of Esperanto encourages the development
of a non-code vocabulary. Likewise, Lojban, which even more depends on
affix-agglutination than Esperanto, has had to deal with establishing
Lojban specific meanings that are inherently distinct from any natural
language.
The Eurolang proposal, on the other hand, seems to have totally ignored
the issue of semantics and meaning in the interest of "recognizable"
words, forgetting the fact that high-recognition cognates are often
false friends that severely mislead in subtleties of meaning. Likewise
Glosa, and most other Euroclone languages that seem to think that all
that is necessary to a language is eliminating irregularities and
trusting to some universal common sense (that isn't all that universal)
to delineate what a word or sentence means.
But even Esperanto, so far as I know, does not have a legal language.
And a move to Esperanto as an official language, the language of law,
will no doubt result in a multitude of international court cases as
people try to figure out what the words of a law or contract written in
Esperanto are supposed to *legally* mean. For example, I have gathered
from examples posted, that Esperanto's application of affixes is
somewhat more irregular in dermining meaning than is Lojban's.
I'm going to way overstretch my minimal knowledge of Esperanto to pose
some problems that clarify the issue. To cite some cases, the word for
"computer" is based on the word for "compute" and the affix for "tool".
How then does a "computer" differ from an "abacus" or a "slide rule"?
And does that affix work the same way with all roots? "patrilo" =
artificial insemination machine??? %^) "vinilo" a machine that gets you
drunk? (or might it be used for the more loosely-derived "wine-making
machine"? Do the feminine and masculine suffixes only work with words
for gendered species, or might someone use them to distinguish a
male-oriented vs. female-oriented object of use? e.g. distinguishing
between the words for "panties" and "jockstrap", or between "blouse" and
"shirt", using the masculine and feminine suffix? I am sure real
Esperantists can give bona fide examples of the problem, and I defer to
them.
In most countries adopting a constructed or semi-constructed language, I
suspect this kind of problem has been avoided only because the country
has a rather limited sense of "government by law", or because the
language is derived from a dominant dialect with pretty well-defined
semantics. Modern Hebrew, on the other hand, had a history based on
earlier forms of Hebrew, forms that were used extensively in law.
History has shown us that the fine points of wording multilingual
treaties and communiques has often seriously delayed or even confounded
efforts at intenrational agreement. Any discussion of adopting a common
official language needs to take into account the implications of
"officialness" in law and other aspects of life where the language will
be used.
Alexander Z. Shlyafer
<3srtra$a...@access1.digex.net>:
> Do the feminine and masculine suffixes only work with words
>for gendered species, or might someone use them to distinguish a
>male-oriented vs. female-oriented object of use? e.g. distinguishing
>between the words for "panties" and "jockstrap", or between "blouse" and
>"shirt", using the masculine and feminine suffix? I am sure real
>Esperantists can give bona fide examples of the problem, and I defer to
>them.
Just a trivial but nice example of female suffix usage:
shraubo povas esti enigita en shraubingon, sed ankau en ... shraubinon.
(Just consult PIV if you don't believe.) This is an idiomatic form, but that
sort of
immediately comprehensible idioms are abundant in Esperanto and add
some spice, internationally flavored, and more logical metaphors as opposed
to zillion arbitrary idioms in English (like "give in", "give up", "forgive"
that
definitely lost any semantic link with 'give' - other than mistical :-).
>History has shown us that the fine points of wording multilingual
>treaties and communiques has often seriously delayed or even confounded
>efforts at intenrational agreement. Any discussion of adopting a common
>official language needs to take into account the implications of
>"officialness" in law and other aspects of life where the language will
>be used.
Your previous reasoning implies that the reason was different notions,
rather than different languages, thus it is more a matter of unification
of legal semantics than language. IMHO language comes first - you
need common language to unify, clearly distinguish or at least discuss
the differences; and it would benefit each party, if this language is
a) rich and flexible, b) culturally neutral, c) live. The only language
I know that meets these criteria is Esperanto.
Alex Shlyafer,
cosmopolite
Don HARLOW
>loj...@access1.digex.net (Logical Language Group) wrote in
><3srtra$a...@access1.digex.net>:
>
>> Do the feminine and masculine suffixes only work with words
>>for gendered species, or might someone use them to distinguish a
>>male-oriented vs. female-oriented object of use? e.g. distinguishing
>>between the words for "panties" and "jockstrap", or between "blouse" and
>>"shirt", using the masculine and feminine suffix? I am sure real
>>Esperantists can give bona fide examples of the problem, and I defer to
>>them.
>
>Just a trivial but nice example of female suffix usage:
> shraubo povas esti enigita en shraubingon, sed ankau en ... shraubinon.
>(Just consult PIV if you don't believe.) This is an idiomatic form, but that
>sort of
>immediately comprehensible idioms are abundant in Esperanto and add
>some spice, internationally flavored, and more logical metaphors as opposed
>to zillion arbitrary idioms in English (like "give in", "give up", "forgive"
>that
>definitely lost any semantic link with 'give' - other than mistical :-).
>
fetish for ... _kalsoninoj_. ("kalson'" = "smallclothes"; the name of
the character is also part of the joke)
--
Don HARLOW do...@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A. el...@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elna/elna.html Esperanto
http://www.webcom.com/~donh
Edmund Grimley-Evans
> official language (such as Esperanto), where there is little or no
> historical/legal basis or precedent as to what words mean.
I don't see that this has anything to do with "constructed" languages
in particular. Yes, it certainly takes a lot of effort to change the
language used in law. That's why French was the language of English law
for a long time after French ceased to be used for other purposes in
this country. (I also seem to remember reading that Latin was the
language of Hungarian law until relatively recently ...)
For the same reason French will probably remain the language of
European law for quite some time to come.
> But one can go into more common words, like "morning", which has
> different definitions in different cultures. If someone used the
> Esperanto word for "morning" in a legal document, what would be the time
> boundaries implied by that usage?
I don't understand how this example is relevant to legal terminology.
As far as I know the word has no special legal significance in
English either. A lawyer would almost certainly write "between the
hours of X and Y". (And I don't know what would happen if it ceased
to be the case that almost everyone agrees on which time zone we're
in! I suspect local astronomical time would have the strongest claim
to validity since the legal tradition is older than the railways and
telegraph that forced us to abandon local astronomical time in the
first place ...)
> But even Esperanto, so far as I know, does not have a legal language.
There is some work on legal terminology, for example:
Esperanta-cxehxa jura vortaro - Karel Traxler
Praha: CxEA 1986, ISBN 8090001483, 164p 21cm 18,00NLG
10 000 kapvortoj kaj esprimoj
Jura terminaro, Cxerpita el P.I.V - R.E.C. Thom
1989dikita: Kardo 1989, 45p 21cm 3,90NLG
Anglalingvaj ekvivalentoj por milo da Esperantaj vortoj
Juraj terminologiaj problemoj - Ivo Lapenna
Kopenhago: IEAJ 1987, ISBN 8798243020, 38p 25cm 24,00NLG
Kun aparta konsidero pri la Esperanta terminaro
Juraj vortoj kaj esprimoj, Red. Tom Arbo Ho/eg
Oslo: 1990, ISBN 8270001619, 118p 24cm 43,20NLG
Alfabeta listo de kapvortoj kun multaj ekzemploj de praktika
uzo kaj precizaj fontindikoj
> And a move to Esperanto as an official language, the language of law,
> will no doubt result in a multitude of international court cases as
> people try to figure out what the words of a law or contract written in
> Esperanto are supposed to *legally* mean.
You have exactly the same problem in any other language when the
contract is not written by lawyers. Obviously you do not apply
specific legal interpretations to words and phrases in a written
contract if neither the writer of the document nor any of the
parties to the contract had such knowledge of legal terminology.
That's when you might have to call in linguists as expert
witnesses ...
Incidently, TEJO (world Esperanto youth organisation) makes a contract
every year with the national organisation organising its annual
congress. This contract is written in Esperanto, of course, though
the contract made with for the congress in Quebec apparently started
with a single sentence in French explaining that the rest of the
document was in Esperanto because the all the parties preferred it
to be.