1. What
is Esperanto?
"Esperanto" was the pseudonym with which the
creator of the
Lingvo Internacia or International Language (that is how
he
called it) signed its first grammar in 1887. With time, the language
itself was known like Dr. Esperanto's language, or simply
Esperanto. In this language the word means he who is hoping,
and it is not an adjective -like English, French or Spanish-, but a
proper noun, like Sanskrit or Swahili.
Esperanto came up as a neutral and international
language to
overcome linguistic barriers, and it has only 16 grammar rules
with no exception whatsoever. Its writing is fully phonetic, though
there are six letters which computers can't still reproduce due to
the lack of skill or will from the programmers who design operating
systems, though some of them -like Windows- are able to figure them
out.
Esperanto Spain ~ Back
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2. If Esperanto is so
marvelous, why hasn't it been adopted all over
the world?
Because of economical, cultural, political and
ethical reasons,
but fundamentally because of the deliberate misinformation it is the
victim of since it was born.
- a) Economical: the language which is inforced upon to
the rest of the world (yesterday French, today English,
tomorrow perhaps German or Japanese) always makes a lot of
money for its native country as a consequence of copyrights for
film exhibition, books publication and even translation, etc.
- b) Culture: leans on language, and even rides on its
back, and the English-American culture has been imposed in
the rest of the world after the last Great War, as we can
see in our television channels, where the problems of
Californians or New-Yorkers are more common than those of
the natives of Kyoto, Katmandu, Addis Abbeba or Tijoco de
Abajo.
- c) Politics: both official and unofficial
information channels transmit their flow in just one direction:
top-down. Fashion, likes ways of thinking always come from
the angle-saxon world, except for marginal things. Information is
Power, and he who controls information can manipulate the general
opinion and the paths of thinking of whole nations. It would be
very highly dangerous that I can talk in a language with the same
easy as I do in Spanish with an Korean -for example- who can use
that very same language with the same easiness as Korean for
those who are afraid of truth, since I would be closer to his
culture and I would rethink many official "truths", and
the supposedly superiority of the Western way of living
-and thinking- might adopt to my eyes a different, less desirable
way than that usually considered of. That some of us have access
to this is nothing to worry about for the living forces in the
West, since we are just a few lunatics who are away from
the flock. If everybody did so, they would have to redesign
a lot of political procedures -above all those related to the
Third World-, since when official lies collide with people's
real lives, they bounce against the ones who uttered them.
- d) Ethical: the Law of the Strongest doesn't
tolerate that the others have a deciding power. If all the peoples
on the earth were listened, there would not be such a
difference between North and South. In the UNO every country can
be heard, but only in any of the seven powerful languages,
which discriminate the other TWENTY TWO HUNDRED AND
NINETY-THREE languages. You can express exactly what you want to
say in your own language much better than in any other one, and if
you have to argue or struggle for a proposal or amendement, you
will do it much better in your own language than in a foreign,
strange one. This is the UNO's fatal flaw, and what they want to
avoid at the European Community with their chimeric
poli-linguistic plan, which eats the 75% of their budge. When
their Euro-honors finish talking, they have little money to do all
the things they have just said they are going to do... :-(
Actually, the exclusive use of English in international
relationships has caused the undesirable effect that
everything non-English is not good, like the use of chaddor by
Muslim women or the turban by Indian men, which are habits so
honest as Christian marital faithfulness or charity. If all
this could be discussed in a basis of equality and comradeship by
people from different cultures, many mental structures would
collapse, since information would no longer be filtered by
translators and news agencies which censor -consciously or
unconsciously- the news they transmit according to a series of
created interests, among which it is not certainly the least
important maintaining their own intermediary status.
That's why no country invest even a dollar in
supporting an easy,
trustworthy and democratic language, which respects the people's
right to talk as they want. That it has lasted a century and it is
spoken all over the world is the proof that it is, indeed,
marvelous.
Esperanto Spain ~ Back to the questions. ~ Reread ~
Next question.
"Null" means "zero". Zero is probably the best
finding in
mathematics and maybe of humankind: it has put negative and positive
numbers in their place, and thanks to it the Arab numbers -which
contain zero- are used all over the world instead of the Roman ones
-which have no zero-. Before they were used, calculations could be
done only by mathematicians (XC+XIV=CIV), but now they can be done
by taxi drivers, housewives and even small children (that is to say:
the people: 90+14=104). If we think that it took the Arab numbers
three hundred years to be adopted in all the world, and that we now
can't understand how in other times there was such an argument
between using them or the Roman numbers, we are happy to know we
have still two hundred years to go -at least- before "all the world"
adopt Esperanto... :-)
Also, zero is NEUTRAL, not positive or negative, and
Esperanto is
NEUTRAL: it is not a Latin, nor Slav, nor Western, nor Eastern, nor
Amerindian, nor African language. Nobody would have advantages on
the others when it is used in international forums. In no other way
Esperanto is null. But if such a dogmatic
anti-assertion were nuanced, this answer could be explained better.
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~
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If the creator of Esperanto was born in Poland
(Europe) it does
not mean that his work is European too, above all because his mother
tongue was Hebrew, which is not European or Western. However,
Zamenhoff -who could speak several languages both from the East and
West- designed it so that its structure and words were familiar for
everybody. The copulative conjunction "and" is "kaj" (pronounced
k + I), as in Greek. The adversative conjunction "or" is "aů"
(pronounced as the vowels in "found"), as in Arab. But the most
characteristic feature in Esperanto, its total absence of
exceptions, makes it similar to Chinese, as in this language there
are no exceptions either.
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Of course it is! Nobody found it at the bottom of a
mine, in the
river bed, nor it is the fruit of a tree. It is artificial, as well
as every other single language. As well as television, rockets or cars.
On the other hand, since children start attending
school they are
continuously corrected against their natural tendency to what
psychologists call "generalizing assimilation" -a tendency natural in
everybody and which agrees with human thought-, and because of an
absurd tradition -our elders' language- they are forced into saying
"wasn't" instead of "didn't be", "made" instead of "maked", and a
horrible lot of other arbitrary irregularities which cannot be
justified
by communication nor -probably- by linguistics itself, but just
history. This happens in all Western languages, except in Esperanto,
which -because it follows this natural tendency for generalizing
assimilation- is not only easier to learn, but also when you have
spoken it for years, it has permeated into the deepest zones in your
mind, and the problem you could have is how to say in your native
language that idea you are thinking in Esperanto... }:-)
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Rather than a question, this is a dogmatic assertion
which has
nothing to do with reality. Esperanto came out in a country where
there was a very strong racial, national and linguistic intolerance,
in a Polish region which then belonged to Russia. The language
appeared with a clear democratic, popular and tolerant vocation. It
came out of a man's mind -as well as every one of the words every
single language consists of-, and it is also neutral, which are not
the so called "natural languages": however, it works perfectly, as
it is proven by the international congresses which are celebrated
every year all over the world in this language (congresses which are
the only one, by the way, which are held without headsets, since the
translation -in case it is ever used- occurs only in the brain of
the listener). Any way, this answer makes clear which is the culture
of Esperanto; or does it not?
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Esperanto was born with the vocation for being a
vehicle for
information and communication between heterogeneous communities. It
is an ambition which a "funny little code" could not have. If it is
simple, it does not imply it is not efficient. The computer inner
code has just two elements (0 and 1) and you could make wonderful
things with it.
"Ĉu esti aŭ ne
esti, -tiel staras
Nun la demando: ĉu pli noble estas
Elporti ĉiujn
De la kolera sorto, aŭ sin armi
Kontraŭ la tuta maro da mizeroj
Kaj per la kontraŭstaro ilin fini?
Formorti -dormi kaj neniu plu!
This is the famous fragment from Hamlet,
by William Shakespeare To Be or not to Be translated into
Esperanto. Certainly you would not find this Esperanto
translation less "warm" than the English original -which neither of
them is, by the way-. You can also find all the other works by William
Shakespeare and all the other great writers of universal literature
translated into Esperanto. Many books which are available in
Esperanto are not so in Spanish or English, and there is also a vast
original literature in Esperanto. This language can support a vast
literature. The difference is that this literature is independent
from the whims of the great publishing companies which decide
arbitrarily which kind of literature is to be translated and which
is not. And another important difference is that the translator is
always a native in the original language, which is the other way round
to translations into other languages.
Regarding "vast culture", Esperanto culture is the
international
culture, which is the vastest of them all.
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If we understand change for evolve,
this is partly right. If
a language changes for the sake of changing, it forces its users to
study continuously just to be able to go on saying the same
things... But Esperanto evolves constantly to incorporate new
concepts, ideas and words which are inserted into the language, just
as it happens in the rest of languages. The thing is that in
Esperanto this happens in an ordered and regulated way, avoiding
servile copying and lack of logics. Unlike what happens in English
and like in French and Spanish, Esperanto has an Académie of the
language.
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9. If Esperanto evolves,
different
dialects will be formed, and so after a few years there will be several
different languages and the linguistic barrier will stand up again
Esperanto speakers do not live together in the same
country, but
we are all scattered all over the world. Every one of us uses his
vernacular language in his daily life, and comes to Esperanto only
in his linguistic intercourses with people with a different native
tongue. Can Spaniards reform English? Can the English change
Russian? And the Hawaiian can change the French?
Esperanto has
NEVER pretended - nor ever will- take the place of any natural -or
ethnic- language, and if some day this was tried, esperantists all
over the world would abandon it.
Esperanto Spain ~ Back to the questions. ~ Reread ~
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10. Esperanto is a language
without culture.
The culture of a national language is national. The
culture of
an international language is international. We esperantists
cultivate tolerance, altruism, international relationships among
equals, literature and art. With such cultures Mankind Culture is
generated.
Thus, Esperanto is a language with a culture.
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