Grammar:
Note: Mr. Eddy's remarks will be in italics during the entirety of this response.
Mr. Eddy says:
The standard propaganda line, reproduced faithfully in [TYE 1], is that "... instead of the usual maze of rules [of grammar and syntax] ... we have only sixteen short rules, which may be written comfortably on one sheet of notepaper". Nobody has ever explained how a language with that little structure could be anything remotely resembling usable; indeed, the other 185 pages of TYE by their very existence clearly demonstrate that there's a great deal more.
[Update: The proof of the pudding again! I'm informed that the plena analiza gramatiko de esperanto is 600 pages long - that's about the same size as Thurneysen's Grammar of Old Irish, a classic work on a notoriously complicated language. Apparently it even has an apology, in its foreword, for its length; even my Latin grammar is only 450 pages long. So much for "one sheet of notepaper"!]
Nobody really believes (or ever has) that those 16 rules are the entirety of Esperanto Grammar. They're more like a barebones outline. Howver, for what it's worth, four of those rules cover the same ground in Esperanto that needs many, many rules in Spanish to cover the same material. E.g. In "A Spanish Grammar for Beginners" by M. A. DeVitis (1915), 4 pages are given to the present tense of verbs. Here's the entirety of the present tense in Esperanto:
"Remove the -i from the infinitive and add -as."
Yeah, that's it. The whole kit and kaboodle. 9 big, bad words.
And as to "the other 185 pages of Teach Yourself Esperanto" one should realize that grammar explanations make up a small percentage of those 185 pages. There are at least two dozen pages of introduction of the language, table of contents, instructions on how to use the book, and pages advertising other volumes of the TY series; more of glossaries (let's be conservative and say 10 pages total) and the index (two pages if I remember correctly...I don't have a copy of the textbook with me). Of the remaining pages, probably 75% of them are made of vocabulary lists, dialogs, reading selections, pictures, and exercises. That leaves about 37 pages for grammar. True that's more than the "one sheet of notebook paper" but hardly 600!
Mr. Eddy further: Here's a short list (it could easily be twice as long) of some things Zamenhof either didn't know or tacitly ignored.
Or maybe he figured that considering his audience (French, Russian, German, Polish, English, and (I suspect) just because he could, Hebrew) he didn't need to touch on these since in the languages of his audience, the rules were similar. (In the following section, each of the 16 rules will be in bold, Mr. Eddy's comment regarding the things Zamenhof "either didn't know or tacitly ignored" are in italics, and my reponse in regular font. )
Rule 1: There is no indefinite ARTICLE [English a, an]; there is only a definite article la, alike for all genders, cases and numbers [English the].
Articles are actually pretty rare in the world's languages; to name but a few, Finnish, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, and most Slavic languages all do without. Millidge's dictionary claims that "the use of the article is the same as in the other languages", which is complete nonsense since the uses of articles differ from language to language. How many languages say the equivalent of la kvar "the four" when telling the time?
All the Romance languages have them.........in at least 3-4 different forms. German has them also, and in about 12 different forms! Finnish has other (more complex) ways to denote the definite article. The Polynesian languages have them, even! And to answer his last question: At least one: In Spanish you say "They are the four" (with the article in the feminine plural no less!)
Also I'm not going to waste anymore time or bandwidth reiterating how unfair it is to hold someone's words ABOUT Esperanto against the language itself, agreed?
Rule 2: NOUNS have the ending -o. To form the plural, add the ending -j. There are only two cases: nominative and accusative; the latter can be obtained from the nominative by adding the ending -n. The other cases are expressed with the aid of prepositions (genitive by de [English of], dative by al [English to], ablative by per [English by means of] or other prepositions, according to meaning).
What are "the other cases" referred to in rule 2, how are they used, and why are they important enough to deserve a mention? The usual answers ("the genitive is expressed with de", etc.) betray what seems to have been a nineteenth-century assumption that classical grammar is a constant of nature, rather than a fluid and more or less accidental convention; grammatical case is no more necessary than grammatical gender. The kazo akuzativo is examined in detail later on; and surely there are better plural endings than the unsightly and awkward -j? (See the introduction for where this comes from).
Any other cases that happen to be present the languages of his audience. For the plural, -j isn't any worse than -s or -i/-e, or the other myriad ways of making plurals that don't involve endings (think: man/men), all of which are found in other languages. Pluralizing nouns (and adjectives in the languages that require such) takes up many rules, and much time to learn in all langauges that show plural. And in most, there are the oh-so-familiar-but-hated list(s) of exceptions. In Esperanto there's one rule: Add a -j (pronounced like a 'y'). This applies to all nouns and all adjectives.
Rule 3: ADJECTIVES end in -a. Cases and numbers are as for nouns. The comparative is made with the word pli [English more], the superlative with plej [English most]; for the comparative the conjunction ol [English than] is used.
No less an authority than Zamenhof himself is on record as conceding that agreement between the adjective and noun is unnecessary ("superfluous ballast", in his own words in 1894), and indeed there's no good reason why you should have to say grandaj hundoj "big dogs", la hundoj estas grandaj "the dogs are big", and mi vidas la grandajn hundojn "I see the big dogs".
Well this is a moot point, since Zamenhof made it part of the language. I hope I don't need to point out that even including the rule(s) about agreement, the entire system is still much less complex and complicated and exception-ridden than in other languages.
Rule 4: The basic NUMERALS (not declined) are: unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok, naŭ, dek, cent, mil [English one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, hundred, thousand]. Tens and hundreds are formed by simple juxtaposition of the numerals. To show ordinal numbers we add the adjective ending; for multiples, the suffix -obl; for fractions [actually, reciprocals], -on; for collectives, -op; for divisionals, the word [particle] po. Noun and adverb numerals can also be used.
Point 4a: Note the oddity that the word for "one" has two syllables while the rest have just one;
Please be kidding, Mr. Eddy. As my Yiddish-speaking friends would say: By you this is a problem??
point 4b: and which part of speech do numbers belong to, exactly?
um.........."numbers"? (Yes, Mr. Eddy, I know that's not a part of speech in English but Esperanto isn't English, is it? and before you object, Russian also classifies numbers as a separate part of speech).
Rule 5: Personal PRONOUNS: mi, vi, li, ŝi, ĝi (for an object or animal), si, ni, vi, ili, oni [English I, you, he, she, it, oneself, we, you, they, they-one-people]; the possessive pronouns are formed by addition of the adjective ending. Declension is as for nouns.
point 5: Why is the pronoun system nothing more than a copy of the English one, when something else would surely have been more useful? Why, for example, is there no pronoun meaning "he or she", and why is gender only differentiated in the third person singular?
A copy of the English one? Not really. It could be just as well a "copy" of the Russian one......right down to the "gender only differentiated in the third person singular." Is this really a fault? Oh, and by the way, Esperanto does have a gender neutral pronoun: ri (very little used)
Rule 6: The VERB does not change for person or number. Forms of the verb: present time takes the ending -as; past time, -is; future time, -os; conditional mood, -us; command mood, -u; infinitive mood, -i. Participles (with adjectival or adverbial meaning): present active, -ant; past active, -int; future active, -ont; present passive, -at; past passive, -it; future passive, -ot. All forms of the passive are formed with the aid of the corresponding form of the verb esti [English to be] and the passive participle of the required verb; the preposition with the passive is de [English by].
point 6a: The verbal system may look straightforward, but the grammar doesn't mention that you can form no less than 36 compound tenses with the various tenses of esti "to be" and the participles. This is far too many, and many of them are likely to confuse speakers of (for example) many Asian languages, which manage well enough with something much simpler.
And what Mr. Eddy neglects to mention (to be fair, maybe he's simply unaware of the following fact since he by his own admission doesn't even speak the language) is that those 36 compound tenses are really nothing more elaborate than a "to be + a predicate adjective" type of construction. And besides, probably no more than 4of these "36 tenses" are in general use, anyway.
point 6b: And if subjunctives, future tenses and participles are really necessary, why are there no "subjunctive participles" like vidunta? And is it a subjunctive mood, a conditional tense, or something else?
Who says there aren't? Can you show us a rule that says those constructions are not allowed? (Note to readers: No, he can't, because there isn't one). And it's both.
Rule 7: ADVERBS end in -e; comparison is as for adjectives.
point 7: Dutch and German get along fine without worrying about the distinction between adjectives and adverbs: what else could "love me slow and tender" possibly mean?
I don't mean to sound flip, but so what? Esperanto isn't Dutch or German. For the record, many other languages (like Swahili, if I remember correctly) DO make a distinction.
Point #8 is dealt with below in the section on the accusative case.
Point #9 (that the one-letter-one-sound has been dealt with earlier and has nothing to do with grammar or syntax) is true..........but how is this a criticism??
Rule 10: The ACCENT always falls on the next-to-last syllable [vowel].
Point 10: This rule, which is curiously the same as in Polish, has nothing to do with grammar or syntax either. The rigidity of the stress causes some distortions: why should words like nacio "nation" stress on the I, instead of on the first A as in every other language which contains the word? And do long words have any other secondary stresses?
Yes, it's the same as Polish..........and the first half of the stress rules in Spanish and Occitan. So? And regarding "nacio" the word is NOT stressed on the A in "every other language which contains the word" In the Romance langauges it's on the O. So much for linguistic awareness/honesty on Mr. Eddy's part.......again. Regarding secondary stress, there's no rule one way or another.
Rule and Point 11 is dealt with, as Mr. Eddy does, in the Vocabulary reponse.
Rule 12: When another NEGATIVE word is present, the word NE [English no, not] is omitted.
point 12: This rule is pointless and makes no practical difference to the language: multiple negatives are common in many languages, for example "I don't know nothing" in colloquial English.
Not really pointless: without it, a multiple negative may result and this is not what Zamenhof wanted. Though I suppose he's not going to rise from his grave in Frumasarah fashion if some Spaniard somewhere uses a double negative while speaking Esperanto. And for the record, "I don't know nothing" is not colloquial English; it's bad English.
Rule 13 is dealt with in the "accusative case" section.
Rule 14: Every preposition has a definite and permanent meaning, but if we have to use a preposition and the direct meaning doesn't tell us what preposition we should take, then we use the preposition JE, which has no independent meaning. Instead of je the accusative without a preposition may be used.
point 14:
Counterexample: [TYE 176] provides six meanings for de, and helpfully points out that la amo de Dio "the love of God" is ambiguous: is it "God's love" or "some entity's love of God"? Note too malamikoj de la urbo: is this "enemies of the city" or "enemies from the city"?
Well, "de" indicates origin (which fits with every use of it in the above paragraph, except for "some entity's love of God" which may well be a problem with English), but I'll concede the point anyway; however, as they say: Context, context, context.
Rules 15 and 16 (dealing with adaptation of foreign words to Esperanto's phonology (15) and elision of the final -o or -a for reasons of euphony (16) Well, what can one say? This is as good a place as any to deal with it........even if only partially.
Mr. Eddy's "More General Comments" seem to be of the niggling, or else the "I just don't like the way it looks" type rather than anything constructive. But, hey, that's just me. You can judge for yourself: http://web.archive.org/web/20030811165117/http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/esp.html#grammar scroll down a bit till you see the section heading.
The Accusative Case:
One use of the accusative that Mr. Eddy fails to mention (again, probably because he isn't aware of it, since (as he readily admits) he doesn't even speak the language) is removing an ambiguity (the existance of which in Esperanto Mr. Eddy seems to have a particular problem with). To whit:
In the English sentence "Faithful or not, he loved her" who is "faithful or not"? "he" or "her"? There are ways to make it clear but not with out adding more words. In esperanto you just put the -n ending on the adjective "faithful" if it's referring to 'her' or leave it off if it refers to 'he." "Fidelan au ne, li amis shin" (Whether she was faithful or not, he loved her.) versus "Fidela au ne, li amis shin" (Whether he was faithful or not, he loved her.) Another (better and a little more humerous than the above) version can be seen here: http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/rules.html (scroll all the way down to the end; it's the last section entitled "Desambiguation (sic) with -N"
According to one of my correspondents, who seemed very sure of the point, the accusative case can only replace je; somebody is fibbing somewhere!
Your correspondent is wrong...........as you yourself proved at the end of the next paragraph, Mr. Eddy. Any preposition is replaceable by the accusative case....in theory. In practice, it's rarely done precisely because of your point in the rest of this paragraph (I've only seen it done where there was no other accusative in the sentence):
The confusion between the accusative case and je, which is officially blessed in rule 14, gives rise to a curious ambiguity. A commonly mentioned example of the use of je is veti je chevaloj "to bet on horses", which can also be veti chevalojn. So, since veti monon is correct for "to bet money", veti monon chevalojn is quite reasonably both "to bet money on horses" and "to bet horses on money"!
Rules 8 and 13 of the grammar mean that en la domon "into the house" and en la domo "in the house" differ in the meaning of the preposition, but express this difference by changing the noun. This distinction does not extend to any other types of motion; thus el la domo "out of the house"; and if compound prepositions like de sur "off" (i.e. "from on") are permitted [TYE 50], what's wrong with the entirely unambiguous al en la domo?
Nothing is wrong with "al en la domo" at all! Some people do say this instead of "en la domon." However, I agree; this rule is a direct influence from Zamenhof's European language background but it's easily taken care of as shown above.
Zamenhof's unnamed part of speech
The ending -aw appears on - to the best of my knowledge - a mere 21 words, suggesting that Zamenhof once tried to create a new part of speech of unidentified function but gave up without tidying up the mess. Many of the words are both conjunctions and prepositions (malgraw "despite", antaw "before", anstataw "instead of"), but some are one or the other (aw "or", cirkaw "around"), a few are bona fide adverbs and should thus end in -e (baldaw "soon", apenaw "hardly"), and a couple are neither (adiaw "goodbye", naw "nine").
OK, I'll concede the point. However, what we actually have here (regardless of any alleged failed-part-of-speech-that-left-traces) is simply the word shape of 21 vocabulary items. I do have one correction, though: malgraw, antaw, and anstataw are prepositions. The conjunction function is arrived at by adding 'ol' between the preposition and the clause it's "conjuncting." (Yes, I'm aware that's not a real word; that's why it's in quotation marks.)
OK, two corrections: the -e ending is for derived adverbs. What exactly is the adjective from which "soon" is derived? but you do have a point: "balde" COULD mean "soon" and "balda" would be the adjective version............but, how would it be translated?
The correlatives (the "why, when" words and related ones)
The first thing Mr. Eddy does in this section is take pains to say that they're not mentioned in the grammar. Well, of course not: they're vocabulary.
...45 "correlative" words which are formed by joining together one of 5 prefixes to one of 9 terminations; thus i-o "something", neni-u "nobody", chi-a "all kinds of", ti-el "thus". This is superficially one of Zamenhof's best ideas, and it looks clever enough to have persuaded some Esperantists that it's some sort of an indication of genius; but simple and transparently obvious phrases like de tiu "that one's", tia ejo "that place", and so on would be far better than arbitrary words which have nothing to do with the rest of the language.
And yet Mr. Eddy has to use two of the "arbitrary" words to make those "transparently obvious phrases"...............
In any case, Zamenhof entirely typically contrived to make a mess of it, turning a potential silk purse into yet another sow's ear:
Hmm.........I don't remember "ad hominem against Zamenhof" being part of Mr. Eddy's original reasons for writing this essay.
There's no prefix for "this", so you have to put chi before "that" to get the horribly contrived chi ti-. Yet the important word "now", which should thus be the awkward chi tiam, is actually the entirely arbitrary nun.
Horribly contrived? Whatever. The ti- series is for "demonstratives"....would Mr. Eddy rather Esperanto work like French and have the same word mean both "that" AND "this"? (Actually it sometimes does: tie kaj tie would translate "here and there"). I suppose if Zamenhof had made the ti- series mean "this" and used, e.g. "lu," to denote "that," Mr. Eddy would have complained just as loudly.....which makes me wonder just why he is doing his complaining............(more on this question at the end). Damned if we do, damned if we don't it seems.
The system of grammatical endings insisted upon in the grammar is, for no obvious reason, completely ignored; for example the adverbial ending is now -el (ki-el "how?"), while -e (ki-e "where?") signifies place.
Is expressing place not an adverbial semantic footprint? -e can't signify ALL adverbial footprints; why, that would be so ambiguous! (he complains more about Esperanto's "ambiguities" later on, so the natural question here is why is he complaining about a device that removes ambiguity??)
Possession is indicated by -es; thus ki-es "whose" is distinct in form from de "of" (used with nouns) and -a (used with pronouns). That's three different, non-interchangeable, ways of expressing the same grammatical relation - precisely the sort of difficulty Esperanto is supposed to have eliminated!
Yeah: 'de' is used with NOUNS, -a with PRONOUNS (this one is debatable: what other meaning would the adjectival form of a personal pronoun have if not the possessive??), and -es with the CORRELATIVES. Three different parts of speech, three (or maybe just two) different methods.
For the record, though, I do tend to wish for a separate genitive case. *"vires hundo" (the man's dog) would be more concise than "la hundo de la viro" 2 words as opposed to 5, 4 syllables as opposed to 7.....as Mr. Eddy pointed out ealier in his critique.
The rather pointless distinction between the endings -u and -o doesn't apply elsewhere.
Pointless? Hmm......and without such a distinction would Mr. Eddy then have complained about the lack of a difference between "who" and "what"?? Again, it seems we can't please Mr. Eddy no matter what we do.
It would be nice to differentiate question words from relative pronouns, rather than lumping them together under k- and creating ambiguity in sentences like mi diris al la homo kiu parlis "I told the man, who spoke (?)".
Why? I doubt anyone is going to confuse the two uses: context, context, context. But, I'll concede: he does have a point; however, I feel compelled to point out two things: 1. Russian also uses one word for both meanings (kotory: "which (one)?" and also the relative pronoun). 2. the relative clause can be taken care of by using a participle construction (Mi diris al la parolinta viro; "I told the having-spoken man" or the way we usually say it "I told the man who spoke.)
Are the correlatives which end in consonants immune from inflection? Are you, for example, really supposed to say mi havas neniomn for "I have none"?
No, we aren't. For what it's worth, the accusative ending required on direct object nouns and pronouns (not correlatives) is to preclude ambiguity as to who/what is doing an action to whom/what.......... the lack of the 'n' on 'mi' means that it is the subject so what else could 'neniom' be but the object?
Some strange words result from inflecting certain correlatives, such as iujn, neniejn; and of course, you have to say kiuj estas ili, with plural correlative, for "who are they?".
Strange? They don't seem strange to me......or other esperantists, I'm sure. Oh, and Spanish says "Quienes (that's plural) son ellos?" for what it's worth.
Bizarrely, you need to use the correlatives in comparisons of equality: mi estas tiel inteligenta kiel vi "I am as intelligent as you", rather than something analogous to mi estas pli inteligenta ol vi "I am more intelligent than you", which would surely be clearer and more obvious.
Bizarre? Not unless you think Spanish is bizarre (Yeah, Spanish does the same thing: tan inteligente como usted....the bolded words are the Spanish equivalent of the Esperanto correlatives).
Next up: Vocabulary.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Responding to a critique of Esperanto, part 1.
There’s a webpage out there titled "Why Esperanto is not my favorite Artificial Language" by one Geoff Eddy of the United Kingdom (Morningside, Edinburgh, Scotland to be exact…at least as of 14 July 2003).
The first thing I want to make note of is that in the second paragraph of the second section (Contacting the Author) Mr. Eddy readily states that "Emails in Esperanto will also be ignored; I simply can't speak the language well enough to unravel its complexities." One may well wonder if a person cannot speak a language well enough to unravel its complexities, how, then, can that person be able to critique it honestly and effectively?
While he does have some valid points about Esperanto’s flaws (a few of which I agree with wholeheartedly), in general, a larger collection of straw men and red herrings concerning Esperanto you would be hard pressed to find. A particularly annoying tendency in the critique is the author’s seeming inability to decide whether he likes a point about Esperanto or dislikes it. For example, at one point, he criticizes "Azio" (the esperanto word for Asia, stress on the "i") as being "mutilated." Apparently "Asia" (pronounced "Ay-zhuh") should be good enough for an international language since, according to Mr. Eddy, it is "recognised the world over and stressed on its first /a/." Then, when Zamenhof does choose the "recognized the world over" version of a place (Siberia) Mr. Eddy then complains that the Esperanto version (root+ending: Siberi+o) makes for a confusion of the "rules" for place naming…….which is true; however, the point is that it’s apparent that as far as Mr. Eddy’s complaints go, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Not to mention the fact that his praise of the word "Asia" is not entirely true: In both French and Greek, the "i" is stressed, not the first "a" and the English pronunciation is nothing like the Spanish version ("AH-syah"), the Polish version ("AH-zyah"), or even the French version ("ah-ZEE"). It seems "Ay-zhuh" isn’t so "recognizable the world over" after all.
There are other incidents of his "damned if you do and damned if you don’t" incongruity throughout, which I will point out as they come up (I’ll be going thru the critique paragraph by paragraph).
Introduction:
He starts out telling his readers that his page was written as a critique of Esperanto (fair enough) and a rebuttal of pro-Esperanto propaganda (not really the language’s fault, is it, what people choose to say about it?). He starts with rebutting four (supposedly) popular myths about the language (one of which I’ve never heard or read in the 31 years I’ve been studying and using the language). These four myths are not about Esperanto itself but what people say about it, and as I said above, it’s not really the language’s fault what people say about it, is it?
In his introductory overview of why reform is necessary Mr. Eddy says "as the vocabulary in particular bears out, it's a composite of several European languages clumsily mixed together with some of Zamenhof's own fetishes, but with little focus or guiding principles. In parts, such as the ridiculous spelling system…" Well, except for the "some of Zamenhof’s own fetishes" part, his complaint fits English just as well, or, considering the spelling system, even more so! I’d like to know what is so ridiculous about a "one phoneme per letter and one letter per phoneme" spelling system. I daresay most language learners would prefer such a system.
Later he says "Esperanto's phoneme inventory, as [JBR] shows, merely consists of the 34 phonemes which are apparent from the orthography of his native Polish dialect." First of all, it must be noted that it is a mystery where he gets 34 phonemes; Esperanto's alphabet is only 28 letters long and with a "one letter, one sound" policy that adds up to 6 phonemes that are without letters..............
Ok, the phonemic inventory could be said to be based on Polish. I suppose Mr. Eddy would rather it be based on English? Regardless, whatever phonemic inventory chosen would have been based on some language, and if the inventory had been chosen at random (like that of Klingon) I’m sure Mr. Eddy would have moaned at how unnatural the inventory was.
"This overlarge sound-system compromises the otherwise sensible decision to represent each phoneme consistently by its own letter;"
Forgive me but does it really matter how large the inventory is if each phoneme is represented consistently by its own letter? And who’s to say that 29 consonant phonemes is "overlarge" (he seems to have fewer complaints about the vowel system; see below)? Well, sure, compared to Hawaiian (7 consonant phonemes) 29 seems quite large. But compared with Abkhaz (56, 58, or 65 depending on the dialect) it seems quite reasonable.
Now, later on, Mr. Eddy concedes "The vowels of Esperanto - the /i e a o u/ common to many languages - make up the only part of the sound-system which comes close to being sensibly designed;" but then flips and complains: "unfortunately, even this good point is compromised by an over-reliance on vowel groups and diphthongs." (Technically there are no diphthongs in Esperanto since a diphthong is defined as a combination of two vowels pronounced as one; however I will concede that practically speaking, (in Esperanto they are spelled with a vowel plus a consonant) there are only 7, four of which are rather rare). Then he says, "My confidence in Teach Yourself Esperanto is not increased by its claim on the first page that "most national languages have twenty or more" vowel sounds - in fact, the global average is somewhere between 5 and 7. Even by the criteria of Esperanto, English has at most fourteen, and some languages (Arabic and Quechua come to mind) have as few as three." Not to belabor a point but it is unfair to hold what people say about Esperanto against the language itself.
Concerning the consonants, Mr. Eddy tells us "As is typical of much of Esperanto, the consonant system is clearly a compromise between various European languages rather than something sensible, and the spelling system is similarly a clumsy mixture of several European orthographic traditions." Hm…a compromise in a language proposed as an international language is not sensible? As to his complaint about the spelling system, this is rather a superficial complaint: I’ve seen Esperanto written in Tengwar, Cyrillic and even the Hebrew alphabet.
Anyway, by "clumsy mixture" I can only think he is referring to the consonants p,b,t,k,f,v,s,z,m,n,l, and r (pretty much standard in most languages (European and non) that use the latin alphabet either officially or as transliteration) against c (admittedly probably a Slavicism), g (it’s being always hard, again probably a slavicism), j (as in latin alphabet slavic languages and also German and Dutch). As to accented c, g, s, j, h (all with a circumflex: ^) and u (with the short mark), they are unique to Esperanto.
He then lays out the phonemes in chart form well known to students of linguistics. This is the foundation for his claim in the next paragraph regarding "gaps" in the inventory. In other words for each combination of location and manner of articulation (e.g. labial stops are ‘p’ and ‘b’) there some slots that don’t have a phoneme to fill it…..wait, wasn’t he complaining in the last section how 29 consonants was too many, and now he’s complaining that there aren’t enough? Seems we can’t please Mr. Eddy no matter what we do). Before I address his gap objection, allow me to take note of something: He claims that the chart is "using the Esperanto spellings." This is a blatent falsehood: for the consonants that in English spelling are rendered "ch","sh","j", "zh", and "kh" he uses not the spellings Esperanto uses but conventions allowed to people who may find themselves without the proper fonts to render the proper Esperanto consonants. True, this may have been a mistake, but making a mistake that is so easily avoided, casts some doubt on the validity of his objectivity or even his honesty.
In the next paragraph he seems to be confusing "orthography" with "phonology" but let’s be kind and assume he does so out of an unfamiliarity with linguistic terminology…..but that itself raises a question: if he is that unfamiliar with linguistics that he confuses such basic terms, why is he purporting to write a linguistics-based critique of the language??
So back to his gaps: He seems to have a concern that Esperanto has a voiceless dental affricate ("ts") but no voiced version "dz", and a voiceless velar fricative ("kh") but not a voiced one (the Dutch ‘g’; sounds like a dry gargle) as if this made Esperanto bad. Well, if that is so then Spanish is just as bad if not worse: it has an "f" but not a "v" (upper teeth on lower lip), a bilabial (two lips) v-type phoneme but not a bilabial f-type phoneme, a ‘kh’ phoneme but not a ‘Dutch g’ phoneme, an ‘s’ but not a ‘z’ (phonemes, not letters), and a ‘ch-as-in-church" phoneme but not a "j-as-in-judge" phoneme. Arabic doesn’t have a ‘p’ sound (but does have a ‘b’). Hawaiian has ‘p’ and ‘k’ but no ‘t’ (most languages that have any one or two of those have all three). Then he says that the fact Esperanto has both ‘h’ and ‘kh’ phonemes is "one of the least defensible features of the consonant system." Assuming this is a valid complaint on the face of it (I’m not so sure: they are different sounds, after all, with two different points of articulation), he does have a point that most languages have only one of these, not both. My beef is that he then justfies this by saying "almost all of the Slavic languages treat them as the same consonant, and only Spanish of the Romance languages has either." However, Gascon has ‘h’ and Romanian has ‘kh." I can forgive his ignorance of Gascon but Romanian? A romance language with more than 10 million speakers, which is official in 2 nations? Again, his linguistic ignorance (in the literal meaning of the word) makes one wonder about his qualifications to linguistically critique Esperanto at all.
Concerning Esperanto’s "one letter, one sound" principle, he says "principle is ignored by the single letters C Ĉ, Ĝ, which represent compound sounds better represented by (English) TS TSH DJH;" This is again wrong. C, Ĉ, Ĝ, are all single sounds according to phonetics. According to acoustics (a branch of physics dealing with sound), on the other hand, they are not, but then neither are most phonemes in most languages (English ‘t’ for example is actually a combination of ‘t’ and ‘h’). Again, his ignorance of linguistics casts doubt on his ability to critique any language, much less Esperanto.
He then gives a list of word pairs (each member of the pair with different meaning) that supposedly sound the same (they actually don’t according to Esperanto phonology. Of course, what people do to them in speech is often a different story, but that’s not the language’s fault is it?) and then proceeds to complain about the identical sounds creating homonyms (this technique is known as a "straw man argument"). One pair is "arĉata/artŝata" ("arched/appreciative of art")
As part of a proposed spelling reform, he says: "There really isn't much point in an accent which is used on only one letter; why not spell the accented U (which comes from Belorussian) as W?"
On this, I agree wholeheartedly.
He then complains about consonant clusters and vowel sequences. As to consonant clusters, he has a point; however, practice makes perfect, and in the case of compound words (words consisting of two roots together as opposed to roots with prefixes and/or suffixes attached) can be separated by an ‘a’ or ‘o’ (since most such combos involve an adjective or a noun in one of the slots). If he dislikes Esperanto’s clusters I hope he never tries learning Georgian (post-soviet, not American South) or any of the Salish Indian languages of Washington state. The most nightmarish cluster in Esperanto he could find would seem like a piece of cake compared to typical words in Georgian (The language contains some formidable consonant clusters, as may be seen in words like gvprtskvni ("You peel us") and mtsvrtneli ("trainer")) or Salish. (the Nuxálk word xłpxłtłpłłskc meaning 'he had had a bunchberry plant' has 13 consonants in a row with no vowels.) Yikes!
His next observation is on ends of words:
As far as I can ascertain, here are the words in my dictionary which end in specific consonants, ignoring the inflectional endings -n, -s and -j.
-aw: 21 (mostly prepositions/adverbs/conjunctions)
-l: 14 (al el mil ol plus 10 correlatives)
-m: 13 (jam krom mem plus 10 correlatives)
-r: 9 (kvar plus 8 prepositions)
-s: 9 (des ghis jhus ses plus 5 correlatives)
-n: 5 (ajn en kun nun sen)
-k: 3 (dek nek ok)
-p -b -ch -d: 1 each (sep sub ech apud)
Hm…if he’s going to ignore –n, and –s as inflectional endings he should ignore ANY instance of –n or –s since the supposed difficulty isn’t mitigated by its use in an inflectional ending as opposed to otherwise, so the 9 other words ending in –s and the 5 others ending in –n should not be listed. So his "75 uninflected words end haphazardly in consonants " should only be 61, and since he just one paragraph later describes –aw as a diphthong (by definition a sequence of two vowels) those 21 words shouldn’t be listed either. So now we’re down to 40. Is 40 words really such a burden?
The rest of his section on phonology and orthography (at least as it impressed this blogger) smacks mainly of the "Let’s find the most niggling, petty things possible, because afterall, the more the better!" type of objection.
Next time: Grammar.
The first thing I want to make note of is that in the second paragraph of the second section (Contacting the Author) Mr. Eddy readily states that "Emails in Esperanto will also be ignored; I simply can't speak the language well enough to unravel its complexities." One may well wonder if a person cannot speak a language well enough to unravel its complexities, how, then, can that person be able to critique it honestly and effectively?
While he does have some valid points about Esperanto’s flaws (a few of which I agree with wholeheartedly), in general, a larger collection of straw men and red herrings concerning Esperanto you would be hard pressed to find. A particularly annoying tendency in the critique is the author’s seeming inability to decide whether he likes a point about Esperanto or dislikes it. For example, at one point, he criticizes "Azio" (the esperanto word for Asia, stress on the "i") as being "mutilated." Apparently "Asia" (pronounced "Ay-zhuh") should be good enough for an international language since, according to Mr. Eddy, it is "recognised the world over and stressed on its first /a/." Then, when Zamenhof does choose the "recognized the world over" version of a place (Siberia) Mr. Eddy then complains that the Esperanto version (root+ending: Siberi+o) makes for a confusion of the "rules" for place naming…….which is true; however, the point is that it’s apparent that as far as Mr. Eddy’s complaints go, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Not to mention the fact that his praise of the word "Asia" is not entirely true: In both French and Greek, the "i" is stressed, not the first "a" and the English pronunciation is nothing like the Spanish version ("AH-syah"), the Polish version ("AH-zyah"), or even the French version ("ah-ZEE"). It seems "Ay-zhuh" isn’t so "recognizable the world over" after all.
There are other incidents of his "damned if you do and damned if you don’t" incongruity throughout, which I will point out as they come up (I’ll be going thru the critique paragraph by paragraph).
Introduction:
He starts out telling his readers that his page was written as a critique of Esperanto (fair enough) and a rebuttal of pro-Esperanto propaganda (not really the language’s fault, is it, what people choose to say about it?). He starts with rebutting four (supposedly) popular myths about the language (one of which I’ve never heard or read in the 31 years I’ve been studying and using the language). These four myths are not about Esperanto itself but what people say about it, and as I said above, it’s not really the language’s fault what people say about it, is it?
In his introductory overview of why reform is necessary Mr. Eddy says "as the vocabulary in particular bears out, it's a composite of several European languages clumsily mixed together with some of Zamenhof's own fetishes, but with little focus or guiding principles. In parts, such as the ridiculous spelling system…" Well, except for the "some of Zamenhof’s own fetishes" part, his complaint fits English just as well, or, considering the spelling system, even more so! I’d like to know what is so ridiculous about a "one phoneme per letter and one letter per phoneme" spelling system. I daresay most language learners would prefer such a system.
Later he says "Esperanto's phoneme inventory, as [JBR] shows, merely consists of the 34 phonemes which are apparent from the orthography of his native Polish dialect." First of all, it must be noted that it is a mystery where he gets 34 phonemes; Esperanto's alphabet is only 28 letters long and with a "one letter, one sound" policy that adds up to 6 phonemes that are without letters..............
Ok, the phonemic inventory could be said to be based on Polish. I suppose Mr. Eddy would rather it be based on English? Regardless, whatever phonemic inventory chosen would have been based on some language, and if the inventory had been chosen at random (like that of Klingon) I’m sure Mr. Eddy would have moaned at how unnatural the inventory was.
"This overlarge sound-system compromises the otherwise sensible decision to represent each phoneme consistently by its own letter;"
Forgive me but does it really matter how large the inventory is if each phoneme is represented consistently by its own letter? And who’s to say that 29 consonant phonemes is "overlarge" (he seems to have fewer complaints about the vowel system; see below)? Well, sure, compared to Hawaiian (7 consonant phonemes) 29 seems quite large. But compared with Abkhaz (56, 58, or 65 depending on the dialect) it seems quite reasonable.
Now, later on, Mr. Eddy concedes "The vowels of Esperanto - the /i e a o u/ common to many languages - make up the only part of the sound-system which comes close to being sensibly designed;" but then flips and complains: "unfortunately, even this good point is compromised by an over-reliance on vowel groups and diphthongs." (Technically there are no diphthongs in Esperanto since a diphthong is defined as a combination of two vowels pronounced as one; however I will concede that practically speaking, (in Esperanto they are spelled with a vowel plus a consonant) there are only 7, four of which are rather rare). Then he says, "My confidence in Teach Yourself Esperanto is not increased by its claim on the first page that "most national languages have twenty or more" vowel sounds - in fact, the global average is somewhere between 5 and 7. Even by the criteria of Esperanto, English has at most fourteen, and some languages (Arabic and Quechua come to mind) have as few as three." Not to belabor a point but it is unfair to hold what people say about Esperanto against the language itself.
Concerning the consonants, Mr. Eddy tells us "As is typical of much of Esperanto, the consonant system is clearly a compromise between various European languages rather than something sensible, and the spelling system is similarly a clumsy mixture of several European orthographic traditions." Hm…a compromise in a language proposed as an international language is not sensible? As to his complaint about the spelling system, this is rather a superficial complaint: I’ve seen Esperanto written in Tengwar, Cyrillic and even the Hebrew alphabet.
Anyway, by "clumsy mixture" I can only think he is referring to the consonants p,b,t,k,f,v,s,z,m,n,l, and r (pretty much standard in most languages (European and non) that use the latin alphabet either officially or as transliteration) against c (admittedly probably a Slavicism), g (it’s being always hard, again probably a slavicism), j (as in latin alphabet slavic languages and also German and Dutch). As to accented c, g, s, j, h (all with a circumflex: ^) and u (with the short mark), they are unique to Esperanto.
He then lays out the phonemes in chart form well known to students of linguistics. This is the foundation for his claim in the next paragraph regarding "gaps" in the inventory. In other words for each combination of location and manner of articulation (e.g. labial stops are ‘p’ and ‘b’) there some slots that don’t have a phoneme to fill it…..wait, wasn’t he complaining in the last section how 29 consonants was too many, and now he’s complaining that there aren’t enough? Seems we can’t please Mr. Eddy no matter what we do). Before I address his gap objection, allow me to take note of something: He claims that the chart is "using the Esperanto spellings." This is a blatent falsehood: for the consonants that in English spelling are rendered "ch","sh","j", "zh", and "kh" he uses not the spellings Esperanto uses but conventions allowed to people who may find themselves without the proper fonts to render the proper Esperanto consonants. True, this may have been a mistake, but making a mistake that is so easily avoided, casts some doubt on the validity of his objectivity or even his honesty.
In the next paragraph he seems to be confusing "orthography" with "phonology" but let’s be kind and assume he does so out of an unfamiliarity with linguistic terminology…..but that itself raises a question: if he is that unfamiliar with linguistics that he confuses such basic terms, why is he purporting to write a linguistics-based critique of the language??
So back to his gaps: He seems to have a concern that Esperanto has a voiceless dental affricate ("ts") but no voiced version "dz", and a voiceless velar fricative ("kh") but not a voiced one (the Dutch ‘g’; sounds like a dry gargle) as if this made Esperanto bad. Well, if that is so then Spanish is just as bad if not worse: it has an "f" but not a "v" (upper teeth on lower lip), a bilabial (two lips) v-type phoneme but not a bilabial f-type phoneme, a ‘kh’ phoneme but not a ‘Dutch g’ phoneme, an ‘s’ but not a ‘z’ (phonemes, not letters), and a ‘ch-as-in-church" phoneme but not a "j-as-in-judge" phoneme. Arabic doesn’t have a ‘p’ sound (but does have a ‘b’). Hawaiian has ‘p’ and ‘k’ but no ‘t’ (most languages that have any one or two of those have all three). Then he says that the fact Esperanto has both ‘h’ and ‘kh’ phonemes is "one of the least defensible features of the consonant system." Assuming this is a valid complaint on the face of it (I’m not so sure: they are different sounds, after all, with two different points of articulation), he does have a point that most languages have only one of these, not both. My beef is that he then justfies this by saying "almost all of the Slavic languages treat them as the same consonant, and only Spanish of the Romance languages has either." However, Gascon has ‘h’ and Romanian has ‘kh." I can forgive his ignorance of Gascon but Romanian? A romance language with more than 10 million speakers, which is official in 2 nations? Again, his linguistic ignorance (in the literal meaning of the word) makes one wonder about his qualifications to linguistically critique Esperanto at all.
Concerning Esperanto’s "one letter, one sound" principle, he says "principle is ignored by the single letters C Ĉ, Ĝ, which represent compound sounds better represented by (English) TS TSH DJH;" This is again wrong. C, Ĉ, Ĝ, are all single sounds according to phonetics. According to acoustics (a branch of physics dealing with sound), on the other hand, they are not, but then neither are most phonemes in most languages (English ‘t’ for example is actually a combination of ‘t’ and ‘h’). Again, his ignorance of linguistics casts doubt on his ability to critique any language, much less Esperanto.
He then gives a list of word pairs (each member of the pair with different meaning) that supposedly sound the same (they actually don’t according to Esperanto phonology. Of course, what people do to them in speech is often a different story, but that’s not the language’s fault is it?) and then proceeds to complain about the identical sounds creating homonyms (this technique is known as a "straw man argument"). One pair is "arĉata/artŝata" ("arched/appreciative of art")
As part of a proposed spelling reform, he says: "There really isn't much point in an accent which is used on only one letter; why not spell the accented U (which comes from Belorussian) as W?"
On this, I agree wholeheartedly.
He then complains about consonant clusters and vowel sequences. As to consonant clusters, he has a point; however, practice makes perfect, and in the case of compound words (words consisting of two roots together as opposed to roots with prefixes and/or suffixes attached) can be separated by an ‘a’ or ‘o’ (since most such combos involve an adjective or a noun in one of the slots). If he dislikes Esperanto’s clusters I hope he never tries learning Georgian (post-soviet, not American South) or any of the Salish Indian languages of Washington state. The most nightmarish cluster in Esperanto he could find would seem like a piece of cake compared to typical words in Georgian (The language contains some formidable consonant clusters, as may be seen in words like gvprtskvni ("You peel us") and mtsvrtneli ("trainer")) or Salish. (the Nuxálk word xłpxłtłpłłskc meaning 'he had had a bunchberry plant' has 13 consonants in a row with no vowels.) Yikes!
His next observation is on ends of words:
As far as I can ascertain, here are the words in my dictionary which end in specific consonants, ignoring the inflectional endings -n, -s and -j.
-aw: 21 (mostly prepositions/adverbs/conjunctions)
-l: 14 (al el mil ol plus 10 correlatives)
-m: 13 (jam krom mem plus 10 correlatives)
-r: 9 (kvar plus 8 prepositions)
-s: 9 (des ghis jhus ses plus 5 correlatives)
-n: 5 (ajn en kun nun sen)
-k: 3 (dek nek ok)
-p -b -ch -d: 1 each (sep sub ech apud)
Hm…if he’s going to ignore –n, and –s as inflectional endings he should ignore ANY instance of –n or –s since the supposed difficulty isn’t mitigated by its use in an inflectional ending as opposed to otherwise, so the 9 other words ending in –s and the 5 others ending in –n should not be listed. So his "75 uninflected words end haphazardly in consonants " should only be 61, and since he just one paragraph later describes –aw as a diphthong (by definition a sequence of two vowels) those 21 words shouldn’t be listed either. So now we’re down to 40. Is 40 words really such a burden?
The rest of his section on phonology and orthography (at least as it impressed this blogger) smacks mainly of the "Let’s find the most niggling, petty things possible, because afterall, the more the better!" type of objection.
Next time: Grammar.
First of all
Before I start in, I suppose I should introduce myself and this Blog.
I'm Douglas Dmitri Ralph (that's pronounced "Rafe" as in Ralph Fiennes or Ralph Vaughn Williams, by the way. No, it's not what my parents had in mind, but I like it better and it's the cheapest way to change your name: just pronounce it differently) Mosier (sorry about that tangent I just went on!) and I'm an Esperantist.
You just went "Henh?", didn't you? Heh heh..........
OK. An Esperantist is a person who speaks (preferably) or otherwise supports the idea and use of Esperanto.
If you're the average American you just went "henh?" again, right? (do'h!....sorry: I'm being snarky)
For those of you who didn't click the link above, Esperanto is, in short, a language. But not your "normal" run-of-the-mill language. It was specifically constructed (during a period of about 10 years culminating in its publication in July {probably the 27th} of 1887) ostensibly for the purpose of being the world-wide international language. Ok, we did fall short of that goal, but we do have a world-wide community of Esperantists who use it every day. It's main claim to fame is that it's pretty streamlined as to morphology. For example, there are a grand total of 6 different verb endings that cover the same ground as 58 different endings in Spanish (and 58 is the conservative opinion! Some would say 76 endings) and that's just the so-called "simple tenses" (ones which consist of just one word); for the compound tenses (think: "I have spoken")you would use 6 more endings in Esperanto totalling 12 for the entire system of verb morphology (Spanish adds just two more, totalling 60/78.....still a bargain). Oh, wait....did I mention the irregular verbs? Ya know; the ones that don't follow the basic rules? There's a lot of those (not nearly so many as in English, but still...) and to make it even more fun, you can't tell just by looking at the verb which ones are regular and which ones aren't. You just have to know which is which. (Did I mention Esperanto has a completely regular set of morphology rules? No irregular verbs....nope, not even the bane of every foreign language learner's existance: to be!)
Esperanto has one method of making plurals as opposed to Spanish's three methods, complete with rules to tell you which method to use when......and then there are the exceptions (again not nearly as many as English, but compared to none in Esperanto, well.........).
OK, by now you're probably asking yourself "Why the heck is he harping on Spanish?? It's a wonderful language!" and you're right, it is a wonderful language. It's just that Spanish is the language I speak best after English (yes, even better than Esperanto, but I'm working on evening the scoreboard), and it's usually considered the easiest foreign language for native English speakers to learn. So if Spanish is easy to learn (so to speak), Esperanto must be a piece of cake, right? Well, it's not quite that simple, but Spanish does have a much more complex morphology than Esperanto (remember those 60 as opposed to 12 verb endings?)
Hmmm......talk about tangents............If you want a brief introduction to Esperanto just go here.
OK, this blog is going to chronicle the rest of my journey through "Esperantujo" (pronounced something like "ehs-peh-ron-TOO-yo"; trill the "r"). I say "the rest of my journey" because it started back in the middle 1970s when I saw the entry for "Esperanto" while I was reading the Encyclopedia Americana (yeah, I'm one of those), and I was fascinated. It was the summer after 8th grade and I'd just bought a Spanish dictionary in preparation for starting Spanish class the next fall, and I had found out about those 60 verb endings. Ugh. Then the "Esperanto" article and I thought "Oh, how cool!!" and after much arduous searching (remember this was in the day before home computers and Amazon.com!) finally found a textbook (amusingly titled "Esperanto in Fifty Lessons" {but the book actually does come through}) and an Esperanto-English dictionary (I still have the dictionary....it's pretty dilapidated! I'm trying to find another copy).
I did what I could for 6 years. In September 1981, I joined the Air Force and due to the job I had, international contacts (especially ones "behind the iron curtain" {where most of the [to me, anyway] really interesting people lived}) were out of the question (hmmm...Penpal with courtmartial or no penpal and an uneventful stint in the military?) so I had to drop Esperanto for the time being. By the time I got out of the Air Force (6 1/2 years later) my interest in Esperanto had gone dormant. I don't remember exactly how it got fired back up, but it obviously did. I've now got quite a few volumes of literature (some originally in Esperanto and others translated from other languages), magazine issues, and an entire internet community to delve into!
I've bored you enough for one day, so I'll let you go for now.
dimo (Pronounced "DEE-moh......a Ukranian diminutive form of Dmitri. Remind me to tell the story sometime if you're interested).
Gĝ
I'm Douglas Dmitri Ralph (that's pronounced "Rafe" as in Ralph Fiennes or Ralph Vaughn Williams, by the way. No, it's not what my parents had in mind, but I like it better and it's the cheapest way to change your name: just pronounce it differently) Mosier (sorry about that tangent I just went on!) and I'm an Esperantist.
You just went "Henh?", didn't you? Heh heh..........
OK. An Esperantist is a person who speaks (preferably) or otherwise supports the idea and use of Esperanto.
If you're the average American you just went "henh?" again, right? (do'h!....sorry: I'm being snarky)
For those of you who didn't click the link above, Esperanto is, in short, a language. But not your "normal" run-of-the-mill language. It was specifically constructed (during a period of about 10 years culminating in its publication in July {probably the 27th} of 1887) ostensibly for the purpose of being the world-wide international language. Ok, we did fall short of that goal, but we do have a world-wide community of Esperantists who use it every day. It's main claim to fame is that it's pretty streamlined as to morphology. For example, there are a grand total of 6 different verb endings that cover the same ground as 58 different endings in Spanish (and 58 is the conservative opinion! Some would say 76 endings) and that's just the so-called "simple tenses" (ones which consist of just one word); for the compound tenses (think: "I have spoken")you would use 6 more endings in Esperanto totalling 12 for the entire system of verb morphology (Spanish adds just two more, totalling 60/78.....still a bargain). Oh, wait....did I mention the irregular verbs? Ya know; the ones that don't follow the basic rules? There's a lot of those (not nearly so many as in English, but still...) and to make it even more fun, you can't tell just by looking at the verb which ones are regular and which ones aren't. You just have to know which is which. (Did I mention Esperanto has a completely regular set of morphology rules? No irregular verbs....nope, not even the bane of every foreign language learner's existance: to be!)
Esperanto has one method of making plurals as opposed to Spanish's three methods, complete with rules to tell you which method to use when......and then there are the exceptions (again not nearly as many as English, but compared to none in Esperanto, well.........).
OK, by now you're probably asking yourself "Why the heck is he harping on Spanish?? It's a wonderful language!" and you're right, it is a wonderful language. It's just that Spanish is the language I speak best after English (yes, even better than Esperanto, but I'm working on evening the scoreboard), and it's usually considered the easiest foreign language for native English speakers to learn. So if Spanish is easy to learn (so to speak), Esperanto must be a piece of cake, right? Well, it's not quite that simple, but Spanish does have a much more complex morphology than Esperanto (remember those 60 as opposed to 12 verb endings?)
Hmmm......talk about tangents............If you want a brief introduction to Esperanto just go here.
OK, this blog is going to chronicle the rest of my journey through "Esperantujo" (pronounced something like "ehs-peh-ron-TOO-yo"; trill the "r"). I say "the rest of my journey" because it started back in the middle 1970s when I saw the entry for "Esperanto" while I was reading the Encyclopedia Americana (yeah, I'm one of those), and I was fascinated. It was the summer after 8th grade and I'd just bought a Spanish dictionary in preparation for starting Spanish class the next fall, and I had found out about those 60 verb endings. Ugh. Then the "Esperanto" article and I thought "Oh, how cool!!" and after much arduous searching (remember this was in the day before home computers and Amazon.com!) finally found a textbook (amusingly titled "Esperanto in Fifty Lessons" {but the book actually does come through}) and an Esperanto-English dictionary (I still have the dictionary....it's pretty dilapidated! I'm trying to find another copy).
I did what I could for 6 years. In September 1981, I joined the Air Force and due to the job I had, international contacts (especially ones "behind the iron curtain" {where most of the [to me, anyway] really interesting people lived}) were out of the question (hmmm...Penpal with courtmartial or no penpal and an uneventful stint in the military?) so I had to drop Esperanto for the time being. By the time I got out of the Air Force (6 1/2 years later) my interest in Esperanto had gone dormant. I don't remember exactly how it got fired back up, but it obviously did. I've now got quite a few volumes of literature (some originally in Esperanto and others translated from other languages), magazine issues, and an entire internet community to delve into!
I've bored you enough for one day, so I'll let you go for now.
dimo (Pronounced "DEE-moh......a Ukranian diminutive form of Dmitri. Remind me to tell the story sometime if you're interested).
Gĝ
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