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.