Learn Not Not to Speak Esperanto

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~vbuaraujo misc/ Kontraranto: Learn Not Not to Speak Esperanto

Learn Not Not to Speak Esperanto

Critique of a critique of Esperanto

Written on 2013-07-06.

Preface

Whenever I am reminded of Justin B. Rye's Learn Notto Speak Esperanto (a.k.a. Ranto), I feellike writing a rebuttal to each and every pointless criticism in that text. Surprisingly, it seems thatin the last seven years since I have first come across that text no one has done that yet, and sinceI need something to do to procrastinate writing my graduation monography, I think this is anappropriate moment to finish this task.

First, a little bit of context about myself. I became an Esperantist around 2004 (when I was 13),and first met the Ranto around 2006. I subsequently mostly abandoned the Esperantistmovement around 2008, due to lack of faith in the success of the cause (and in mankind ingeneral, but I digress), but I still admire the idea of an international constructued language, andEsperanto in particular.

I don't think Esperanto is perfect and uncriticizable; for instance, I will be the first to agree thatEsperanto's gender asymmetry is a problem of the language (though not an unsurmountableone). Nor am I one of those people who treat Esperanto as Most Serious Stuff and cannot standeven a joke, let alone criticism, about it (Rye's Nosferanto does not fail to amuse me, for instance(even though it has one bit of inaccurate information: "malmalviva" is notthe only way (not even

the best way) of saying "undead" in Esperanto; "malmortinto" would be better, in my opinion)).But the Ranto is full of meaningless criticism among a few good points, which makes it a veryirritating read for an Esperantist and possibly a misleading read for a non-Esperantist. For thesake of making justice to the language, and to get this annoyance out of my organism, I amwriting this.

As a matter of convenience, this work is presented as interlinear commentary to original text ofthe Ranto, and includes the full text of the original. This in principle makes it a derivative work ofthe Ranto, and therefore it is distributed under the same license as the Ranto, namely, CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (as I gather from the line in the source code of Rye's page as of 2013-07-06). Commentary is written [in a

different color, in brackets] (so you can look for just the comments by searching for[ in thedocument). If you have anything to say about my commentary, please send me mail (you can findmy e-mail adress at my home page). If you have something to say about the original text, pleasecontact the original author.

SECTION A: OVERVIEW

A1: Contents

SECTIONS: APPENDICES:

A:OVERVIEW N:FAQ

B:PHONEMES O:SEXISM
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C:ORTHOGRAPHY P:VOCABULARY

D:PHONOTACTICS Q:PASSIVES

E:DERIVATION R:CASE

F:LEXICON S:POLITICS

G:CONSTITUENCY T:GROUNDPLANS*

H:VERBS U:ROOT-CLASSES

I:NOUNS V:GOOFOMETER

J:PRONOUNS W:MISSHAPES

K:ADJECTIVES X:COMPARABLES

L:ADVERBS Y:FUNDAMENTO

M:SYNTAX Z:MAILBOX

A2: Background

Esperanto was invented in 1887 by an oculist from Biaystok, Dr Ludwig L Zamenhof (AKA

"Doctor Hopeful", hence the name). Even its proponents estimate there to be barely a millionEsperanto speakers in the world (largely Central/Eastern Europe); compare Albanian with abouteight million, Mandarin Chinese with 1000 million, and English with (depending how you count)500 to 1800 mill ion. Even Klingon appears to be outselling Esperanto round here. [For aconstructed language, that's quite a success. Think about it: speakers of Esperanto currentlyhave little economical motivation to learn the language. It has started with a single speaker, L. L.Zamenhof. And yet it has managed to achive the mark of one mill ion speakers in more than ahundred countries. It seems that the idea of an international constructed language has quite a bitof appeal to a lot of people.]

Most people I know despise Esperanto, but largely for daft reasons "Everyone speaks English

nowadays anyway" [go to Brazil or France and try to get by speaking English to everyone], "Itsounds a bit foreign" [anything that isn't your native tongue does], "It has no cultural identity of itsown" [1. This would not be a defect; 2. Even though Esperanto has no "national" culture, it doeshave a universal culture which evolved around it during the last one hundred years or so (theEsperantist movement)], etc. I, on the other hand, dislike it for being:

Just goodenough to inspire anti-revisionist fanaticism!Just badenough to strike the general public as risible!Easily improvable enough to inspire constant half-baked "reforms" whose inventors argueamongst themselves!

[Well, this is partially true.] So the result of Zamenhof's labours is that it's inconceivable that anyartificial "Interlang", however good, could succeed. [Nah. Anyone proposing a new auxlang willmeet with the fury of lots of Esperantists, but this does not mean it would have no chance to beadopted. Esperantists are not the majority of people, as the Ranto likes to remind us every nowand then. Just stay away from making a new "reform" of Esperanto; this path will meet with evenmore Esperantist fury and the result will seem even more unjustified given the existence of a verysimilar already established language with a large community and quite a bit of literature.]

A3: Scoring Criteria

An optimally designed world auxiliary language would be

1. Clear i.e. all its rules would be explicitly established, so users can filter out an utterance'sungrammatical parsings.

2. Simple involving a minimum of grammatical complexity (e.g. irregular forms, fancy
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inflections, or arbitrary categories like "feminine").3. International as learnable for Tamils, Koreans, or Zulus as for the Europeans who

already have so many advantages.4. Elegant designed to strike potential speakers as painless and natural to use.

My contention is that Esperanto contrariwise is

1. Obscure full of assumed rules and unadvertised usages.

2. Complex with cases, adjectival concord, subjunctives etc.3. Parochial designed to appeal primarily to Europeans.4. Clumsy full of hard sounds, odd letters, and absurd words.

It looks like some sort of wind-up-toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's one part of this worldthat doesn'tneed a local pidgin, it's Europe, which not only has (at a guess) the world's highestconcentration of professional polyglots, but is also the home of the current de facto global linguafranca: English [English doesn't even have that many native speakers in Europe. And my guessis not everyone in Europe is content with English as the lingua franca (why is it that the EuropeanUnion does not work exclusively in English?)].

If Esperanto vanished from existence, nothing of value would be lost; the world shows no sign ofwanting to learn a constructed international auxiliary language [Except for one million people.But I grant this number does not seem to be growing a lot.]. Maybe someday that'll change butif it does, we'll have no shortage of candidates to choose from, since Esperanto has any numberof better designed but less well known competitors. (They may have fewer existing speakers, butthe difference is dwarfed by the billions they'd need to gain to be accounted a success.) Or theUN could hire a linguist or two and get a language purpose-built, the way Hollywood nowroutinely does for fantasy movies!

A4: Notation

I'm following linguistics convention by using and /slant/ brackets to distinguish and /phonemic/ analyses; and I'm now using proper Unicode IPA for phoneticsymbols. Non-linguists can read anything that's unclear as "some strange noise".

Esperanto also uses some unusual characters: circumflexed consonants and a breve-markedvowel (). For example, the Esperanto for (accusative case)"surroundings" is "", pronounced roughly "CHEER-COW-AH-ZHOYN".However, there's an officially accepted way of avoiding these hard-to-type Unicode glyphs, sooutside Section C that's the standard I'll be adopting. [I considered replacing all the digraphs inthe original with the proper accented letters, but I decided to leave the original untouched.]

A5: Disclaimer

My "clarity" criterion strikes some readers as unfair in its apparent assumption that the rotten self-teaching texts I've been exposed to are all the Esperanto grammar there is so just take myrhetorical questions as attempts to hint that there are language-design questions that Zamenhofshowed no sign of recognising, and which his successors prefer not to mention. ModernEsperantists acknowledge no Standards Maintenance Authority [nor does English; and there isthe Akademio de Esperanto, but technically it only issues recommendations]; so on the one handdirected fundamental reforms are impossible, and on the other dialects inevitably confuse the

issue. And please bear in mind that my critique is aimed at Esperanto's pretensions as a globalauxiliary language; if you're a hobbyist polyglot looking for a seventh European language tolearn, feel free to waste your spare time on it.

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SECTION B: PHONEMES (inventory ofsounds used)

B1: Introduction

"Phonemes" are the mutually distinct sound elements which a particular language recognises asfundamental building blocks for word-making. English my dialect, anyway has 19 vowels(mostly diphthongs), and 24 consonants (including the two affricates /d, t/, usually spelt). For more details see my Phonemic Transcription Key page.

English total 43 phonemes:a tidy rather than accurate analysis/ m b p v f w // n d t r // l d t j /

/ g k z s h // i e a u o // ii ei - ai - oi // i e a u o // - - - au uu ou /Esperanto total 34 phonemes:though the diphthongs are arguable![They are; and if you leave them out, you are left with 28 phonemes, one for each letter of theEsperanto alphabet.]/ m b p v f // r d t j h // w - ts z s // l d t // n g k - x // i e a o u // - ei ai oi ui // - eu au - - /

B2: Clarity

Natural languages have rules determining what sounds are accepted as forms of whatphoneme. For instance, in English /t/ may be an aspirated alveolar plosive, a glottal stop, oreven a tap; in Spanish /t/ is usually an unaspirated dental plosive, and the tap is heard as an R-sound. Esperanto speakers show no agreement about whether it even has such rules. (And theones writing to me seem particularly unwilling to agree on whether inter-word glottal stops arecompulsory, optional, or prohibited. [Well, it cannot be compulsory, since such a thing has neverbeen mentioned in the language's rules. It may be either optional or prohibited. In practice, sincethe glottal stop is not phonemic in Esperanto, this does not make much of a difference.])

B3: Simplicity

First, why is the inventory so irregular? There's no single-phoneme /dz/, so why is /ts/necessary? [/ts/ exists mainly so that can be given a distinct sound; more on this below.]Why /oi/ but not /ou/? [/ou/ is hard to distinguish from plain /o/. The same could be argued
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against the /ei/ vs. /e/ distinction, though.] And second, why does it need so manyconsonants? The worldwide average is to have about two dozen consonant phonemes [asopposed to Esperanto, which has 23 oh, wait], and plenty of languages get by with fewer forexample:

Andean Spanish: / m p f n t s l r t j k h /

Japanese: / m b p w n d t r z s j g k h /

Hawaiian: / m p w n l k h /

Rotokas: / p t k /

B4: Internationalism

Compare the Esperanto inventory with the following:

Eastern Polish total 49 phonemes:(parenthesised phonemes) are disguised by the spellings/ m b p v f /

/(m b p v f)// r d t j h // w (dz) ts z s // l (dz ts z s)// - d t // n g k - x //(n g k - - )// i e a o u // - ei ai oi ui // - eu au - - //(- - - )/

The only phonemes Zamenhof left out of Esperanto are the ones that are hard to recognise assuch the "soft" (palatalised) consonants, nasal vowels, and /dz/ [is /dz/ harder to recognize asa phoneme than /ts/?]! And note that I say Eastern Polish; this isn't just his natural Slavonicbias, it's the Biaystok dialect!

B5: Elegance

Complaints about the ugly strings of affricates etcetera are always brushed off as a matter oftaste. But surveys say distinctions like /v/-versus-/w/ [this distinction barely exists in Esperanto;/w/ is mostly restricted to falling diphthongs], /ts/-versus-/t/, /z/-versus-//, /h/-versus-/x/[this distinction is dying a slow death in Esperanto, with most words originally containing /x/being replaced with words with /k/] are statistically rare, so it's the people who find Esperanto'ssounds strange and awkward who are being objective!

B6: Miscellaneous

This crazed inventory is a splendid demonstration of Dr Z's linguistic incompetence; he couldn'tsee past the spelling rules of the first language he learned to write with the Roman alphabet! [Isthere anything to say here?]

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SECTION C: ORTHOGRAPHY (grapheme
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system)

C1: Introduction

A "grapheme" is a contrastive unit in a spelling system. Not surprisingly, Esperanto spelling ismuch better than English (in which is famously unruly see my own Spelling Reform page);

it can even be charted in a strict one-to-one correspondence with its phonemic inventory:

Orthodox spelling system:< m b p v f >< r d t j h >< - c z s >< l >< n g k - >< i e a o u >< - ej aj oj uj>< - e a - - >

But not content with beingphonemic(one phoneme: one grapheme), Esperanto also claims to bephonetic(one sound: one letter), which is (a) pointless and (b) infeasible. [So maybe Esperantistsare just not careful enough with terminology? The Fundamento does not claim anything of thatkind, anyway.]

C2: Clarity

Does Esperanto allow anyvariation in its sounds? Are we to believe that the in ("rope") is acoustically and articulatorily identical to the one in ("finger")? If so,

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On the other hand, Esperanto is not very consistent with its ortographic principles. In some casesit prefers to borrow orthography at the cost of pronunciation, as the Ranto will show below. Inothers, it takes pronunciation and replaces c with k and s with z. I won't try to defend Esperantoon this one, except that it works in practice.

As for vs. , they are both "guttural" consonants and sound similar. This choice of lettersdoes not strike me as odd.]

C4: Internationalism

Writing in preference to, say, is a blatant display of parochialspelling traditions. Most of the world's typewriters have a W key; none have a C with a circumflexaccent. No, not even in Croatia; you're thinking of hooks and acutes! [Dead keys, comrade. Youtype the accent, then the letter. Except for, Esperanto can be easily typed on a Brazilian (orFrench, I guess) typewriter. By the way, typewriter? Is that even relevant today?]

C5: Elegance

The problems with these diacritics were obvious enough to force a concession: we are permittedto resort to the digraphs , plus unadorned hence. Many Esperantists advocate other ASCIIifications such as ,but I'll stick with the less offputting version.

C6: Miscellaneous

Just to show how easy it is, here is an alternative system with no diacritics (all compoundphonemes become compound graphemes):

Heterodox spelling system:< m b p v f >< r d t y h >< w dz ts z s >< l dj tx j x >< n g k - h >< i e a o u >< iy ey ay oy uy >< iw ew aw ow uw >

Thus becomes . [Which, of course, is far more recognizable,huh?](I've heard from a good few independent inventors of schemes like this it's a no-brainer[unless you expect the words to still have some resemblance to the natural language they weretaken from; in which case it is harder to come up with a system that beats Esperanto's officialorthography].) But I could hardly stop there; the nearest half-way sane version is !

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SECTION D: PHONOTACTICS (strings of

sounds)

D1: Introduction
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Phonotactics is the system of rules governing what sequences of sounds are permitted. InEnglish, for instance, /h, vinz, stres/ occur (), while/h, nzvi, stle/ are illegal.

D2: Clarity

The only hints we get about Esperanto phonotactics are bland reassurances about how

euphonious it all is. [and a huge vocabulary from which we can infer the rules, even more so bycomparing the Esperanto word with its natural language original. Yes, there are no officiallystated rules, unfortunately, but this is not a real problem in practice.] There clearly arerestrictions: Esperanto has plenty of words like ("stocking,sonny, hindsight") but none like (cf. English "snows", Arabic "one",Georgian "you tear us to pieces"). The extra /o/ sound in compounds like "bedroom" is "optional", but leaving such issues to Esperantists' native-language prejudicesresults in coinages like , "archaeology". No, I'm not making this up [Well,you can insert the vowel there if you wish. Or you may omit it if you wish. Comprehension is nothindered. Everybody happy?]

D3: Simplicity

In this context, simplicity means learnable rules for building speakable words. A good proportionof the world's population find any syllable more complex than "consonant + vowel" hard topronounce, which limits things unreasonably. [What exactly is the point the author is defendinghere?]

D4: Internationalism

Zamenhof's efforts to disguise Esperanto as Italian by adding final vowels are miserablyinadequate. [Now comes criticism based on the claim (from thin air) that Esperanto is supposedto have Italian phonotactics.] Italian uses closed syllables sparingly (chiefly ending in /r, l,n/); Esperanto loves them. Italian allows few strings of consonants (mainly things like /bl, gr,sp/ and doubled letters); Esperanto permits many. And the rigid penult-stress rule may be likeItalian, but it's even more like Polish. [Or, for instance, Quechua. Regular stress is nice because itis always predictable and helps distinguishing each word in the sentence. What are betteralternatives?]

D5: Elegance

The whole problem is that Zamenhof mistook his own prejudices about "euphony" (seeAppendix Y) for a globally accepted standard of phonotactic elegance. There is no suchstandard; Italian is full of tongue-twisters to Japanese-speakers (, "post-war"), andvice-versa (, "a hundred lines"). Even consonant + vowel languages have wordslike


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SECTION E: DERIVATION (wordbuilding)

E1: Introduction

Zamenhof put a lot of work into creating a range of uniformly applicable prefixes and suffixes,such as "render" (or "cause, arrange to have done") and "become" (or "dointransitively") as in , "whiten (something)/whiten (= go pale)".Nonetheless, his original ideas required several amendments before they were usable, and theystill look rotten to me.

E2: Clarity

These affixes are often baffling. In , "cigarette box", means "(bulk)container". But it also occurs in , "Sweden" (not "Swedish ghetto") and ,"apple tree" (not "apple barrel"). Modern Esperantists just say . [Yes,those original uses of have been largely discarded; they are quirky, but they are out ofmuch use.] Then there's , "transmission" [huh? is something you send; Iguess the closest word in English would be "shipment"], in which is "concrete (?)expression of"; yet this is arbitrarily extended to form , "masterpiece" and, "pork".

E3: Simplicity

Who needs all these special affixes? Isn't the two-word expression "make white" adequate?Don't tell me we need complex affixing rules to produce indefinably subtle poetic shades of

meaning; Chinese has no such rules, but is renowned for its nuanced poetry. Besides, if weneed affixes like ("suddenly"), ("contemptible") and ("ancient"), why arethere none meaning "-ful", "beloved", or "-ward"? [ has pretty much the same meaning of "-ward" in the sense of direction. Okay, the selection of affixes is arbitrary (you could conceivablyhave thousand of affixes for different things), but Zamenhof's selection has proven to be veryversatile.] We can invent new ones, I suppose [and we have; has been added lately to thelanguage, for instance]; but what determines which are prefixes and which are suffixes? [Ingeneral, in Esperanto word composition, what comes before modifies what comes last. So a is a kind of, not of. This general rule normally predicts what is aprefix or a suffix in the language. There are exceptions, though ( being a notableexample).]

E4: Internationalism

Different languages have very different approaches to building words (seeAppendix T onmorphological groundplans). Esperanto's system of chaining together strings of invariableaffixes uses the same pseudo-agglutinative groundplan spearheaded by Volapk (seeAppendix X), which is at least more straightforward than alternatives like the Hebrew/Arabicsystem of triliteral roots. If there's a problem, it's that Dr Zamenhof seems strangely biassedagainstany of the range of possible affix forms spread across the globe by the "classical"languages. Compare the prevalence of the abstract noun endings with

Esperanto's use of. Those words Esperanto does condescend to admit have tohide their family resemblance; thus , "region" but , "nation".

E5: Elegance
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Clockwork morphology can produce some amusing quirks [the alternative being haphazardmorphology?]:

accidental freaks , "ubiquitous (pl.)"; , "master-writer";, "to age"false resemblances , "absent"; , "a spade"; , "piercing"overfussy distinctions all mean "to marry".

And then there are ambiguities such as = "catarrh" versus = "herd of cats" there are so many of these I've given them their own appendix.

Strangest of all, though, is the prefix , a meaning-reverser like Newspeak "un-". The onlyword for "bad" is ; "cheap" is , "left" is and so on. It's animaginative vocabulary shortcut, but it's inconsistent ("south" should be ), gratinglyartificial (, "not bad"? ["not bad" is ; negation and opposition aredifferent things]) and misleading ( isn't "malodorous")!

E6: Miscellaneous

Esperanto has a special suffix to mark "feminine" (or to be more accurate, female) nouns: (from German; in Romance languages that's a diminutive). But this has no equivalent"masculine" marker being male is just taken to be the default! SeeAppendix O on Sexism. [Ah,don't get me started on this one. This is a problem of Esperanto, one that will have to be solved insome way if the language takes on as tool for universal communication. And for Esperantists whothink this asymmetry is not sexist, experiment for a while with speaking and translating to analternative Esperanto in which the default is feminine and there is a suffix to form themasculine. The problem is not a lost cause, though, as I comment in the appendix.]

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SECTION F: LEXICON (vocabulary sources)

F1: Introduction

Esperanto is notable among auxiliary language schemes for having possessed a well stockeddictionary from the start, made up from words out of an assortment of European languages. Then

again it also had notably warped selection criteria, taking ("rucksack") from Danish; ("certainly") from Russian and so on, to form a peculiarstew of words picked for their familiarity to nineteenth-century Europeans.

F2: Clarity

In this case I'll take "clarity" to mean having an adequate stock of technical, poetic, and everydaywords to be generally usable. Zamenhof was if anything overzealous in this department, stuffinghis "basic" wordlists with trivial distinctions such as "a kiss" versus "a noisykiss", and so on; who asked for these?

F3: Simplicity

This is the inverse problem, overlooked by Zamenhof. Language learners want to be able to start
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communicating with as little rote learning of vocabulary as possible. English is rather good atthis, as it is rich in "metonyms" coverterms like "house" [] or "clothes" [],usable as stand-ins for more specialised terms like "palace" or "sou'wester" as well as in self-explanatory compound words like "treehouse" [] or "nightclothes"[]. "Basic English" cut its essential vocabulary to 850 words [Esperanto'soriginal vocabulary had 900; and Basic English "cheats" by having expressions such as 'makegood' for 'succeed' and not counting them as separate vocabular entries]; any language designedfrom the ground up with lexical efficiency in mind could in principle do much better.

F4: Internationalism

Vocabulary is a relatively superficial, transient aspect of a language compared to things likesyntax (speaking Pig Latin doesn't make you a polyglot); but it's the first and often the last featureof a foreign tongue that people notice, so padding out your Warsaw-centric auxiliary languagewith Romance dictionary entries can be an effective way of making it seem international. Insteadof this random European stew, a real world auxlang would get as much use as possible out of thetwo most truly global word sources:

1. Western Colonial Vocabulary: gathered and/or spread by the European imperial powers []2. International Scientific Vocabulary: words usually built from Latin, Greek, or English roots

for newly classified phenomena .

(It would be even more international to accept globally recognised Chinese or Hindi words too, ifonly there were any Arabic, maybe. Or seeAppendix P for some cases where there werebetter solutions available in Latin and Greek.)

F5: Elegance

Many Esperanto borrowings are clumsily based on spellings: [this makes sense since people areusually more familiar with the spelling of foreign words that the sounds; then again, Esperanto isinconsistent in this respect, as I mentioned before]

"and": Esperanto (roughly "KIE")from Mod. Greek = /ke/ (roughly "KEH", though with a palatalised "K")[no; it's from Ancient Greek , pronounced as in Esperanto]

"ball": Esperanto (roughly "PEEL-COE")from Polish = /'piwka/ (roughly "PEWKA")

"bird": Esperanto (roughly "BEER-DOE")

from English ("BUH(R)D")"boat": Esperanto (roughly "BO-AH-TOE")

from English ("BOTE")"fist": Esperanto (roughly "POOG-NOE")

from Italian = /'puo/ ("POON-NYOE"); cf. Spanish [or perhaps Latin]

"Miss": Esperanto (roughly "FROW-LEE-NO")from (dated) German = /'fr lan/ (roughly "FROYLINE")

"shame": Esperanto (roughly "HONE-TOE")from French = /t/ (roughly "AWNGT")

"thirst": Esperanto (roughly "SO-EE-FOE")from French = /suaf/ (roughly "SWAHF")

Apart from anything else, where would Esperanto be if any of these languages changed theirspelling systems? [Then the Esperanto spellings would remain familiar to a lot of people, and the
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new natlang spellings would not...]

F6: Miscellaneous

Esperantised placenames frequently look as if they've been transliterated into Cyrillic and thenback without regard for pronunciation: Washington becomes , Jamaica becomes, Guinea becomes

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SECTION G: CONSTITUENCY (parts ofspeech)

G1: Introduction

Esperanto goes way over the top in marking what part of speech each word is, via its neat butsomehow risible final vowel system [some verb endings end in vowel + S rather than vowel]:

Ending Class Example Meaning Notes

Adjective alive/vital plus case and number concord

Adverb vitally even some adverbs take [which supplies the needfor "-ward" affix, as mentioned before]

Infinitive to l ive but finite verbs end in Noun (a) life inflecting for case and number

Imperative

live! melodrama exclamationThis grand scheme is based on the idea that every verb has one associated (equally basic)noun, adjective, and so on an idea with an attractive air of symmetry and logic, but one thatturns out to be fatally flawed; seeAppendix U for details of the root-classes fiasco [the fiasco hasbeen solved for about one hundred years].

G2: Clarity

Non-linguists rarely understand that grammatical categories like "Adjective" or "Preposition" are

based not on universal logical principles but on pragmatically constructed conventions in a givenlanguage for instance, where English uses adjectives like , Yoruba relies on verbs like, "be-angry". "Noun" is essentially universal, but Zamenhof can't take its application forgranted; what do the words "event, moth, gravity, day, waterfall, Esperanto" have in commonbesides the "fact" they're "Nouns"? (Ignore the propagandists who still claim that Esperanto"roots" are categoryless semantic primitives; the official grammars from the Academy ofEsperanto disagree.)

G3: Simplicity

There are hordes of unnecessary exceptions and irregularities. Numerals, prepositions,"correlatives", conjunctions, modifiers, articles, and so on are all exempt; pronouns even formtheir own breakaway faction, consistently ending in rather than and inflecting for casebut not for number. [Since these are closed word classes (i.e., words are not usually added tothese classes), there is no strong need for part-of-speech marking on them; there is a finite, small
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number of words to learn here.]

G4: Internationalism

Esperanto's word-classes are based on the traditions of classical Latin and Greek grammars, anda poor fit for many of the languages of Europe, let alone Chinese. Hungarians won't be used toprepositions; Germans have to learn that adverbs aren't the same as plain adjectives; and Slavshave to cope with articles [It's as if they had to learn a new language!]

G5: Elegance

Shoehorning words into this system can mangle them horribly. [I disagree; I think the systemmangles them nicely.]

= "by marriage, bilious, repentant, ancient"

= "divinely, contrariwise, obediently, again"

= "to cry out, mine, try, know"

= "reading, money, plague, arrow"

= "flow! enjoy! shake! teach!"

G6: Miscellaneous

Esperanto is oddly happy to sacrifice recognisability in stem vowels "Asia" becomes ,

"voice" (Latin/Italian ) becomes , "coffee" (near-globally ) becomes, etc. If only there were fewer constituent classes to distinguish, maybe some nouns couldend in or which would also make the rhymes in Esperanto poetry more interesting![Regularity is nice, and once you are used to this, words are pretty recognizable without theiroriginal last vowel.]

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SECTION H: VERBS (tenses, subjunctives

etc.)

H1: Introduction

For details of how Esperanto verbs and participles work, seeAppendix Y; it's designed to lookvaguely latinate, but with its past, present, future, and subjunctive/conditional "tenses" and itsinflecting participles it again most resembles a tidied-up version of schoolbook Polish. [Or, forinstance, Latin, or Proto-Indo-European.]

H2: Clarity

Zamenhof takes categories such as Infinitive, Participle, and Subjunctive on faith as universalconcepts. Note particularly his failure to define the subtle differences between simple tenses ("Isaw", ) and compound forms ("I have seen", more literally "I am
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having-seen") an especially vexing question when passive verbs are always formed ascompounds ("I was/have been seen", ). [What exactly is the complaint here?That Esperanto usually uses the simple past for both things? (Portuguese does too.) Or thatZamenhof did not take the trouble to define these compound tenses (even though their meaningsare compositional)? And technically, "I was seen" would be , providing thedistinction between "I was seen" and "I have been seen", though I guess this distinction is rarelyobserved in practice.]

H3: Simplicity

It should be apparent to Anglophones that special suffixes for infinitives, future tenses, andsubjunctives are a redundant complication. [It should? Which advantage does using auxiliaryverbs as in English provide?] It may be less obvious that English is itself over-complex in someways, with its passive voice ("they are regarded as a foundation", ), vestigial subject-agreement ("we are, it is" wisely dropped in Esperanto), andobligatory tense marking even where the context makes it obvious ("I was born in 1967") ornonsensical ("time is a dimension" cf. my guide to SF Chronophysics). None of this isnecessary; future tense for example can be shown with auxiliary verbs ("will") [see above],

adverbs ("soon") [okay, I buy this one], or if you insist, optionalaffixes.

H4: Internationalism

One feature of verbs is present in almost all human languages, though trivialised in traditionalLatin-based school grammars: aspect, the distinction between Perfective (roughly, the "singleevent or act") and Imperfective ("ongoing state or behaviour"). Esperanto's rules barely allow foraspect marking, relying on an unreliable suffix ( "continual" or"gerund") and arguableapplications of participles (e.g. , which some translate as "is presently closed"and some as "is being closed"). Left with no official system, Esperantists just stuck to their

mothertongue habits, giving most modern dialects a (further) heavy Slavic influence. [Sad buttrue. Even if you consider the -ata/-ita distinction, you still have two meanings to estasfermata: la pordo estas fermata nun ("the door is being closed now") vs. la pordo estasfermata iutage je la 6-a ("the door is closed everyday at six"). Then again, this is exactlythe behavior of the simple present in Esperanto (or, for instance, German), so at least things areconsistent. Well, things couldhave been better defined, but then again, they work in practice.And the meaning is left to context, something the author of the Ranto seems to glorify.]

H5: Elegance

The actual forms of these inflections (? ?) are unconvincing. [What does this evenmean?] Worst of all is , the imperative. Most languages, for obvious reasons, arrange it sothat commands can be given via the most basic verbal "stem" available, not a special, uniquelyinflected form! [Talk about parochialism. Quite a lot of languages (Romance, Japanese, evenMandarin with its particle) use a special form for the imperative.AndEsperanto's imperativeis the same size as the infinitive or present.]

H6: Miscellaneous

Zamenhof also adopts a Slavic approach to tenses in quoted speech: where English reports "we

are!" either directly as "they said `We are!'" or indirectly as "they said that they were",Esperantists and Slavs have to say (in effect) "they said that they are" (tenses direct, everythingelse indirect). [So Esperanto is not English. Shocking, huh? That said, I guess this feature ofSlavic is not very widespread across world languages.] There are some fairly knotty problemsbeing ignored in Esperanto's use of reflexive pronouns and an active/passive distinction, too; for
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more details on this seeAppendix Q. [We shall see.]

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SECTION I: NOUNS (case, number etc.)

I1: IntroductionEsperanto nouns inflect both for number and for case; i.e., more than is considered necessary inmost European languages. Compare the English sentence "yesterday you hit the three whitesheep" (case, tense, and number left to wordorder and context [though quite exceptional in thisrespect, since English marks tense in most verbs; and most Romance languages mark tense andnumber]) with the Esperanto version: (case,tense, and number redundantly expressed by suffixes).

I2: Clarity

Esperantists never attempt to explain what cases or plurals are for. The former is extremelytricky; but even the latter is hardly cut-and-dried. Why are "zero seconds, one point zeroseconds" plural? Indeed, what's the point of pluralising "two seconds"? Why are "rice, wheat"singular, while "nuts, oats" are plural? [You pluralize when you think of the thing as countable,and you don't when not.]

I3: Simplicity

Obligatory inflections are a bad idea. Couldn't Esperanto emulate Japanese, which essentially

does without plurals (one ninja, two ninja), or Tagalog, which marks number only if it seemsrelevant (using a separate regular plural-marker word)? [Well, I won't try to defend obligatorycase and number marking. But the Ranto does not present here any argument for why they are abad idea.]

The same applies to case (if not more so). The Esperanto suffix is not only compulsory onverb objects, but appears on time expressions, directional adverbs, complements, and goals ofmotion hence , "On Monday, ridea horse northward ten miles into London!". And yet some kinds of noun phrase (infinitives,numerals, "many people" = , etc.) can'tbe marked for case, and they seem toget along perfectly happily without.

I4: Internationalism

Languages disagree not only on how to indicate which of a sentence's components is the subject(Russian gives nouns fusional endings, Japanese has particles after noun phrases, Swahili usesverb marking, and Chinese relies on word order), but even on how to define this notion of"Subject"; seeAppendix R. For now I'll point out that the informal English phrase "It's me!" maymake poor Latin, but it's fine Turkish. [So you have to choose one way of marking after all. Andsince the intersection of all possible ways is nil, you will have to settle forsome way of marking,and it willbe different from what some language does. Esperanto chose to use morphological

case marking. It might have used word order as well; or it might not. What gives?]

I5: Elegance
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Why ? [From Ancient Greek, I believe.]It might be recognisable to the Italians (one percent ofthe world's population) who use as a regular plural marker, or even the Slavs (five percent)who use *; but compare , used throughout Central/Western Europe (Spain, Germany,France, the UK) andtheir colonies: forty percent of the human race! Meanwhile, as anobject marker seems to be based on one piece of German morphology [no; from Ancient Greek, Ibelieve]; might have been better. And come to think of it, did Zamenhof ever explicitly forbidthe suffixing order, or is this left to "common sense"?

I6: Miscellaneous

If nouns were formed from participles regularly, the word for "one currently hoping" and for thelanguage would be (though that tense-marking's a century out of date nowanyway). For more on after prepositions, see L2. Incidentally, I get a lot of complaints fromEsperantists who imagine it's inconsistent to want both expressive clarity and grammaticalsimplicity; apparently they can't imagine distinguishing (e.g.) singular from plural without therebeing special extra rules to make number-agreement a compulsory part of the morphologicalsystem

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SECTION J: PRONOUNS (anddemonstratives)

J1: Introduction

SeeAppendix Y for Esperanto's selection of pronouns. The system should be familiar toAnglophones, with its single word for "we" (whether inclusive or exclusive), single word for "you"(whether familiar singular or polite plural), and compulsory distinction in the singular (only)between "he", "she", and "it".

J2: Clarity

Few languages [citation needed] distinguish as we do between "a/some fish" and "the fish", andexplaining the point of this distinction is well nigh impossible. [Is it? It serves as a way to indicate"the fish in topic", as opposed to some other fish. Kind of like a pronoun, but more flexible. There,

explained!] Consider also the unpredictable (to English-speakers) way that Esperanto occurs in "ten past one", [because it's implicitly ];"God bless you", [is this used?]; "bird migration is remarkable", [agreed, but the article is not required in this case; I would evendiscourage its use in this case. But this goes on to show that the rules behind article usage areindeed not clear.].

J3: Simplicity

Couldn't Esperanto do without articles, and treat pronouns and so on as regular nouns? [And

allow them to be modified by adjectives? Pronouns are distinct from nouns.] Or if the pronounsreally need their own system, complete with "possessive adjectives" ("my, his") etc.,why does the interrogative pronoun have to mess things up with = "what sort", ="whose" (a Lithuanian-style genitive)? [Valid criticism. Pre-publication versions of Esperantoused -es as a general genitive marker; this could have been retained for pronouns. Then again,
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this does not make a lot of difference in practice.]

J4: Internationalism

Esperanto's words for "who, what" are , which act both as question words and asrelative pronouns a trademark misfeature of the European languages that's responsible forsuch unnecessary ambiguities as "Did you ask the man who did it?" Compare, say, Hindi, where

question-words begin with

but their relative-clause equivalents have

.

J5: Elegance

Notice that aren't listed among the pronouns; instead they're in a separate irregularsubfamily, the so-called correlatives. These are words for a mixed bag of concepts like "every-thing, what-kind, no-where, some-time, that-many"; they naturally form a table with columns like"every-" (= ) and rows like "-where" (= ), intersecting at "every-where" (= ). Butthe grid has no columns for "else-(where), any-(way)", or "this-(time)", and no rows for "(some)-degree, (how)-often", or "(which)-direction"; such coinages require arbitrary botch-ups, so triplets

like "when, then, now" become . A more open system (where e.g."anything" is simply "any thing") would make the whole table unnecessary.

J6: Miscellaneous

These word-forms may not display much regularity, in the sense of behaving like normal nouns,but they do score highly for uniformity, in the sense of "did you say , , or?"

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SECTION K: ADJECTIVES (and numerals)

K1: Introduction

Esperanto adjectives end in a superficially latinate , then add inflections to agree with thenoun they modify. If there's any logic behind this, wouldn't it imply you need to put similarmarkers on ? That's how things work in the natural languages Zamenhof was copying here:if agreement belongs anywhere, it's on articles.

K2: Clarity

What kinds of word go in this things-ending-in- category? "Third", but not "three"; "many" and"any kind of" [technically, the -a in kia is not the same adjectival -a; but their similarity makessense: adjectives usually indicate qualities, so a correlative with an adjective-like ending relatesto qualities], but not "every"; "his" and "one's", but not "whose" if only Zamenhof had everheard ofdeterminers [had the term existed by his time], a lexical class covering things likearticles, pronouns, and correlatives, maybe the categories wouldn't have ended up such a mess.

K3: Simplicity

Above all, why oh why did Zamenhof give his "simple" international language obligatory case-and-number concord? [Hell, again this one?] The Esperanto for "the houses are new" is


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domoj estas novaj> which is on the fussy end of the scale even by European standards. [MostRomance languages behave exactly this way.] Compare French , where the "plural agreement" is silent [but present; compare also other Romancelanguages, where it is present and spoken]; German [of course, showingconcord in some places but not in others is far better], where the predicate shows no concord; orRussian , which while it does have agreement at least compensates by letting youleave out the verb. Even Volapk didn't get it this wrong !

K4: Internationalism

English may depend on an "Adjective" to say "the new houses", but many languages go aboutthings differently. Arabic uses appositional nominals ("the-new-things the-houses"); Japaneseprefers things that morphosyntacticians analyse as stative verbs ("being-new house"). [Andagain, Esperanto uses adjectives. For the thousandth time, you have to pick up some choice, andwhatever you pick, there will be languages that will do things differently.]

K5: Elegance

The "basic" number-terms ("three, threesome, third") are a crowded jumble,making a mockery of the regular root/noun/adjective pattern they imitate (note for instance thatboth and can occur as either argument or modifier [for the exact same reason, thatEsperanto allows a "null argument" where English would use "one": mi havas tri ("I have threeones"), mi estas la tria ("I am the third one"); this is just like Romance languages]). Knock-oneffects include the baroque selection of number-related suffixes needed for >|

SECTION L: ADVERBS (and prepositions)

L1: Introduction

These categories are less reliable than most people assume. Latin may have had distinct"Adverbs" and "Prepositions", but Vietnamese uses neither (it just needs flexible adjectives andverbs); even many English words ("like", "except") are hard to pigeonhole. Yes, most adverbsare simply verb modifiers like "fast"; but this hardly covers cases like "extremely".

L2: Clarity

Esperanto's ending simply replaces some prepositions, modifies the meanings of others
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[turns prepositions of place into prepositions of movement], and never associates with the rest[the ones that don't indicate place; okay, e is an exception; one usually simply switches to alinstead of using e with the accusative]. Zamenhof didn't just mix these prepositional functionsconfusingly into his case system, he also made them officiallyvague seeAppendix Y!

L3: Simplicity

Esperanto grammar favours a proliferation of adverbs. "Whistling" in "whistling, I left" is notallowed to be a mere adjective describing the subject; no, it's . Worse yet, since Esperanto weather phrases involve no nouns at all, they can't haveadjectives either; "it's warm" becomes ("is, warmly"!). [The rules are simple. If it isnot modifying a noun, or serving as an argument (a special case where the "noun" is null), it is anadverb. Nice, huh?] Or so my old primer claims; modern Esperantists, I'm glad to hear, simply gofor ("is-warm").

L4: Internationalism

Many languages go without the category "Adverb", making do with adjectives and phrasalexpressions ("quickly" = "fast" or "at speed"). What might seem more surprising to Europeans ishow few languages have the category "Preposition". Where Yiddish expresses the phrase "jumponto a box" via a preposition (slightly assisted by casemarking), Vietnamese uses modified verbs("jump-ascend box"); Finnish has hyper-specialised cases ("jump box", with "box" in theallative!); and Panjabi goes forpostpositions ("jump box onto"). [And there we go again. What isthe least common denominator here? You've gotto pick a choice.]

L5: Elegance

These words are a strange mix. Prepositions can end in consonant clusters (like all Esperantoroots, but without the usual disguise of a tacked-on vowel), leading to sequences like , "after Christmas". On the other hand there are twenty-odd random adverbyparticles and things that form a sort of semi-developed word-class with the distinctive ending ( = "both, against, almost").

L6: Miscellaneous

English prepositions are a bit un-European in their willingness to appear with no following"object" noun (cf. our "transitive" verbs:Appendix Q). This blurs the line between "Preposition"

("I walked along the road") and "Adverb" ("I walked along"), and allows English to form phrasesoutlawed by Esperanto grammar (e.g. "that's the road I walked along")! [Nice, English is notEsperanto! And in this particular case, all you have to do to translate the sentence into Esperantois to move the preposition to before the relative pronoun (omitted in English, another oddity of thatlanguage), like basically every non-Germanic European language.]

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SECTION M: SYNTAX (sentence structure)

M1: Introduction

Zamenhof's efforts to explain the rules of Esperanto grammar (seeAppendix Y) focussed almostexclusively on derivational and inflectional morphology (i.e. word-building and word-endings).
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The nearest they get to syntax is implicit word-order rules. Unsurprisingly, Esperanto's phrasestructure rules and so on turn out to be hardly distinguishable from the ones Zamenhof grew upwith they're pretty good simple ones, but it's sheer blind luck [See? Esperanto is so horrible,that even when it's right, it's wrong.]

M2: Clarity

We know sentences are usually Subject-Verb-Object, possessives go Property-Of-Owner andadjective phrases are Adjective-Noun; but that's about all we learn. [And these "rules" are onlywhat most speakers do; they are in no way mandatory.] Esperantists boast of the way the finalvowels make individual nouns readily identifiable; what they fail to mention is that "free wordorder" turns all the higher structure of noun phrases, subclauses, and so on into a matter ofguesswork. [No, they don't, because the word order is not completelyfree. Of course, the Rantowill come around and complain about exactly this afterward.]

M3: Simplicity

Many languages, especially in Europe [such as the Germanic languages, and to some extentFrench], have sets of sentences related via order-shuffling rules ("transformations") such asEnglish question-inversion ("I have; have I?"). That's one Esperanto doesn't share [thankZamenhof] (); which just makes it more baffling that it does insist oncorrelative extraction, moving words like "who, where, why" to the start of their clause, and notpermitting the "Unextracted" column in the following table any more than English does [i.e., itpermits them, just like English]:

No correlative Unextracted ExtractedEsperanto:

English: "I am reading it." "I am reading what?" "whatam I reading?"

M4: Internationalism

Some of Esperanto's word-order conventions are no more than optional defaults; others(although taken for granted in grammars) are unbreakable. "Yesterday you hit the three whitesheep" may legally become , but it's never! Even the dislocation of "only" English allows in"I only ate one" is forbidden for [because the placement ofnur changes meaning: nur miman is unu ("Only I ate one"), mi man is nur unu ("I ate only one"), mi nur man is unu ("I

only ate [did not do anything else to] one").]. The following "obvious" order rules demonstrateclassically European default assumptions:

Articles precede nouns and their adjectives "the new house" is never[because otherwise nova domo la plej belan koloron havas would be ambiguouslyparseable ("a new house has the most beautiful color" vs. "the new house has a mostbeautiful color")]Prepositions precede their noun phrases "on a table" is never [becauseotherwise tablo sur libro would be ambiguous ("table on book" vs. "book on table")]Verbs (even if themselves infinitivised) precede the infinitives they subordinate "to want totry to start" is never [because they mean different things ("to start to

try to want")].

M5: Elegance

Excess inflections such as case might at least lead to extra flexibi lity in word order; and


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Esperantists consider this an aid to stylistic elegance. But wouldn't it be easier as well as moreflexible to use "topic-marker" particles to assign emphasis? Instead, Tibetan-speaking learnersof Esperanto (with no guide to what stylistic effects are produced by what order-shift) have tolearn to treat word order as essentially meaningless.

M6: Miscellaneous

The question-forming particle is a neat idea (though maybe a bit redundant, wheninterrogative intonation or punctuation will do you agree? [I don't; interrogative intonation is notthe same in every language. As a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese, I can attest that thiscan cause confusion even among native speakers of a language that relies only on intonation tomark questions.]). But its form is copied from its source, the Polish (or Ukrainian oreven Belorussian ), rather than resembling the question words like [In an astoundingcoincidence, Quechua uses for that too (though the word has other uses in Quechua too).].

See Contents for list of Appendicesstarting with the FAQ

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Ranto Appendix N

FAQ

[I have few observations to make here; the FAQ is surprisingly sane.]

If you've come here looking for the Mailbox section, that's been moved to the end asAppendix Z.Here to take its place as the first of the Appendices is a new page, the Frequently AskedQuestions list.

i) What makes English so much better than Esperanto, then?Did I say anything about English being good? It has all the unfair advantages of a widelyused natural language, but it also has plenty of annoying features of its own; so if you writewebpages about its shortcomings as an international language (oh, here's one) I'll be morethan happy to link to them.

ii) What's so difficult about inflections like ?

Any grammatical mechanism is going to seem natural and self-evident to you if yourmother-tongue does it. But imagine how disorientating it would be if Esperanto adverbshad obligatory tense-prefixes to show agreement with their verbs, or if there were differentpronouns for referring to people older and younger than yourself. You'd be constantlyhaving to remind yourself to pay attention to people's ages just to be able to producegrammatical sentences. That's what Esperanto's like for the vast majority of us who aren'taccustomed to compulsory number-agreement on predicate adjectives.

iii) Can't we just work around these problems? For instance, you can just ignore anyaspects of Esperanto you think are overcomplicated.

To deal with that second part first: no, that's not an option if I ignore the language's rules,I'm left with no way of parsing sentences. Esperanto needs fixes, not workarounds; but its

fundamental grammatical rules were declared "untouchable" a century ago. You can comeup with your own private-language reform-scheme if you like, but you'd better not use it onan Esperanto newsgroup!

iv) Why do you give examples of features from all those exotic languages, as if it wouldmake sense to combine Cantonese pronouns, Swahili verb-endings, and Thai noun-
http://www.esperanto.qc.ca/html/faq-mensonges-fr.htmhttp://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#zhttp://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#zhttp://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#zhttp://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#mhttp://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#ahttp://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#nhttp://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#a1


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classifiers?If you design your artificial interlanguage with the starting assumption that Cantonese ismore "exotic" than German, you can't expect to produce one suitable for the whole planet.However, the idea isn't that it should "multiply together" all the world's grammars, it's that itshould use only the truly universal "common factors", and you can't find those by surveyingYiddish, Polish, and Latvian. [I have said this ten thousand times by now, but I will repeatthe point: beyond some very basic structure, you will notfind ways of expressing certainconcepts that are common to all languages in the world. You will have to pick some way,

and this will invariably be different from what some language does. Of course you can takepains not to make things more complex than they need to be, and Esperanto arguably didnot do an excellent job in this respect, but the goal of having "only the truly universalcommon factors" in the grammar of a language is unfeasible: the truly common factors arenot enough to build a language, and whatever you add on the top of them will diverge froma bunch of languages.]

v) Why are you so obsessed with Esperanto?Actually, these days I rarely think about invented languages at all unless someone elseraises the topic. You don't need to be a fanatic to recognise Zamenhof's mistakes, andwriting webpages costs nothing. Nor is it some sort of fringe viewpoint on the contrary,the number of people not learning Esperanto is growing every day!

vi) Have you read "Psychological Reactions to Esperanto"?Yes, and I'm impressed by how effective it is at making Esperantism look like Scientology,but I wasn't planning on mentioning it it's Esperanto I object to, not Esperantists. Butsince you insist, here's a link. Happy now?

vii) What about such-and-such an alternative Constructed International AuxiliaryLanguage?

There are half a dozen or so big names, all featuring clear design improvements onEsperanto, and minority candidates to suit any taste. I'm not going to try to summarise myviews on all of them here I'd end up having to turn my whole site into yet anotherconlangopaedia.

viii) But don't you realise that nobody speaks any of those?Well, approximately nobody, but then again by the standards of Hindi approximatelynobody speaks Esperanto, either. The pragmatic solution to communication barriers is topick the language everyone else speaks regardless of its shortcomings; the idealisticsolution is to pick one on the basis of its technical merits. Picking a poorly engineeredartificial language gets you the worst of both worlds.

ix) If other invented auxiliary languages are simpler and more regular than Esperanto, whyhaven't they become globally successful?

It would hardly be the first case of a better product losing out because a rival brand wasfirst-to-market. But the main factors that make a language successful with the general non-hobbyist population have little to do with its grammar (except in that it helps if you already

speak something closely related). The things that matter are how strong the socialpressures are obliging you to acquire it, and whether appropriate teaching materials areconveniently available.

x) Isn't it unfair to expect Zamenhof to have known about modern linguistics?Sure; there was essentially no chance that a nineteenth-century European polyglot wasgoing to design anything worth keeping it's like criticising some Victorian inventor's effortsto build a steam-powered helicopter. Except that I don't know of any organisationsdedicated to promoting gyrolocomotives as the best possible form of transport

xi) Why do your webpages use ASCII substitutes for aitch-circumflex and so on ratherthan displaying them directly in Unicode?

I've gradually switched over to Unicode for things like IPA [], but Esperanto characters

like are at the very bottom of my list of priorities for conversion. After all, the ASCIIversion is already readable, even for visitors using antique software (a surprising number ofwebmail systems still insist on garbling Unicode characters when people start quoting mypages back to me in correspondence). Besides, the official rules (seeAppendix Y)irrevocably license the alternative of spelling it as .
http://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/y.html#r0http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.htmlhttp://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/reactions.htm


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xii) Why isn't there an Esperanto version of your essay?Because it's not aimed at Esperantists; it's a warning to people who might consider learningEsperanto in future. There's no point putting the "Danger do not open" signs on theinside of the door!

xiii) Will you do my homework for me?Glad to just give me your teacher's email address and I'll send it direct.

Ranto Appendix O

SEXISM

Consider the implications of usages such as the following:

"Man is a mammal and suckles his young" the human race is male by default;"Womankind" is a subset of "Mankind"."The reader is entitled to his opinion" if you're female, you have to pretend otherwise toread legal documents.

"Wizard" is praise; "witch" is an insult (abuse is the only field in which there are more wordsto describe women)."The UK's greatest living author" is ambiguous; does it rule out the possibility ofauthoresses who are greater?

This doctrine of Male-As-Default treats women as a negligible subgroup, and femaleness asabnormal but always noteworthy.

Sexism is (in principle) avoidable in English, via words like "human, people, he/she, they", andsex-neutral jobtitles where sex is irrelevant. Things are different in languages with grammaticalgender: e.g. in French, masculine plural is "ils", feminine plural is "elles", but mixed groups (even

of 99 women and one grammatically masculine hornet) are "ils". To the French, Thatcher was"Madame le premier ministre"! So how about Esperanto? Surely a language without arbitrarygender-classes designed by an enlightened liberal humanist will avoid such pitfalls? Well, erno. In fact, as first propagated his brainchild was blatantly and systematically sexist. Allanimatenouns were male by default, unless given the ghettoising suffix . [To make a little justice toZamenhof, he probably did this out of pure ingenuousness, not out of intentional sexism; in the19th century, people were not as sensible to gendered language as we are today.]

"Boy, girl, man, woman" = . In English, by the way, a "virino" isa hypothetical mini-virus. [What has this to do with anything?] Similarly, an Esperanto job advertfor a typist () would be ambiguous (how sexist is the advertiser's dialect?) without "or

typistess" (). "Father, mother" becomes dads areapparently more fundamental than mums. Likewise, "sister" is = "brotheress", and soon with unclesses, sonesses, cousinesses, and fatheresses-in-law (). There iseven a prefix to indicate "both sexes", as in , "parents" (it's still a matter of somedebate whether you can use it in the singular, or to refer to a group of parents who might allhappen to be women). There is only one clearly neutral noun: "person" = (cf. French"homme"), which far from being the default is strangely avoided in coinages such as "dwarf,giant" = . [Nothing bars you from using hometo, homego.]

"Horse" = , "mare" = ; Esperanto also provides for = "female

giraffe", = "cockroachess" ("henroach"?), and so forth, regardless of tradition (Englishgeese, cows, and ducks are female), let alone actual biology (most hornets are sterile females).Farmers may also find handy the Esperanto "pup" suffix as in , "foal", and the"stud" prefix as in , "stallion" but why aren't these affixes extended tohumans to give words like = "humanling, kid" or = "father, sire"? Too


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"dehumanising"?

Then again there are the derogatory affixes, and , demonstrated in "Teach YourselfEsperanto" just as feminists would predict: by forming sex-specific insults. [If anything, this isTeach Yourself Esperanto's fault; these affixes have nothing to do with gender.] is"dirty woman, slut"; is "crone, contemptible female". Why are we never offered themale equivalents, whatever they are? [They are, of course, fiviro and virao.] If you can't seewhat the fuss is about, try imagining an equivalent racistlanguage, with black and white

pronouns, a suffix , and an assumption that the human race is Caucasian ("one white,one vote"). Now imagine the suffix being exemplified with

Time for a few jokes. Is a casino a feminine case? Is a neutrino a female eunuch? [...] And if a is an unmarried woman, is an unmarried man a ? Well, actually, yes; amerry jest from Dr Zamenhof. Ha ha ha (sob). [Again, Esperanto is always wrong, even whenit's right.]

Even if the linguistic discrimination doesn't worry you (like two of my correspondents whoexplicitly supported it because it's misogynistic), this scheme of compulsory lopsided gender-agreement rules is offensive just for its poor design. Look for instance at one of the side-effects of

the rule that any affix can lead an independent life as a word in its own right: , "a female";, "feminine". Generally, Esperanto requires more intricate morphology to refer to womenthan men; but here is an exception. "Teach Yourself Esperanto" translates "feminine intuition" as. So how exactly do you say "masculine intuition"? Candidates for amasculine affix parallel to the feminine have been proposed (), but while few present-day Esperantists may support the original nineteenth-century system, equally few take the obvious step of marking male and female symmetrically.[The most widely known proposal for a male equivalent of-in- is -i-, by analogy with theexisting suffixes -nj- and -j-, which build female and male nicknames. Probably everyEsperantist who has used the language for some time is at least familiar with the proposal, so

people can start using it right now if they wish without much fear of being misunderstood. It willstill take time for it to become standard usage, though (assuming it will ever happen). Thesituation is not hopeless, though.]

Ranto Appendix P

VOCABULARY

Zamenhof couldn't have been expected to predict that words like "telefon, microbiologia,

aroplane" were going to end up in every dictionary on the planet; nonetheless, as a world-widewordlist develops, Esperanto looks more and more perverse in its parochial root choices. Manyopportunities for wide recognisability were sacrificed in favour of lexical tokenism, throwingscraps to all the key local ethnic groups. Of course, radical suggestions like stocking the lexiconwith fragments of technical jargon are invariably decried by Esperantists as obscure; but which isthe average non-European auxlangist more likely to recognise German as in ,or neo-Greek as in "chromatophore", "Kodachrome", etc.? [I won't argue against thisone; I agree with this.]

English Esperanto Source Alternatives

"blood"

(

Romance) haem(at)o"day" (Germanic: cf. "Thursday") die, diurno"dog" (Germanic) Canis (familiaris)"fear" (Latin: not Romance) phobia"finger" (Germanic) digito, daktylo


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"fire" (English/Yiddish) pyro

"football" (French-Polish!)futbol [futbalo is currentlyaccepted]

"gold" (Romance: not Latin) aureo symbol Au"heart" (Romance: not Latin) cardio"horse" (French) Equus (caballus)

"school"

(Germanic "learnery")

scholia, skulo [lernejo at least is

compositional]"sheep" (German) Ovis (aries)"star" (Romance) ast(e)ro"sun" (English) sol, helio"thief" (Germanic "stealer") klepto"Thursday" (French: joveday) fifth day of the week

"time"

(Romance: musical "rate")[no; tempo means "time" inPortuguese and Spanish,

for instance, and comes from Latintempus, tempora]

chrono [not much of animprovement overtempo]

"word" (Germanic) verba, lexico"year" (western Germanic) anno (domini)

Incidentally, the Esperanto for "dictionary" is itself a good example of How Not To Do It:, with the inscrutable literal meaning "word-herd" ["word-collection", actually]. I mean, Iwasn't expecting Zamenhof to see the potential of the Arabic word , which has got intoother languages from Swahili to Urdu to Indonesian (though by a strange coincidence, it'soriginally a loan from Greek!) but how did he manage to overlook the example of all the

Germanic languages that make the compound "wordbook"?

Ranto Appendix Q

PASSIVES

Valency categories are a feature of classical European grammar so basic they're taken forgranted; they regulate the number of noun phrases that can be associated as arguments with agiven verb (or other wordclass, but never mind that for now). [Many languages are even more

strict about valency than Indo-European, but let's go on.]

One argument: "It exists"Two arguments: "I seek the Holy Grail!"Three arguments: "Sam lent me this hat"

(Zero-argument verbs don't occur in English, excluding commands like "stop!" with omittedsubjects; Esperanto behaves like a Slavic language [or like most Romance languages] byexpressing "(it)'s raining" as .)

Compared to the European standard model, English has notably relaxed valency rules, allowing

many verbs to occur with any number of arguments ("give": "please give generously; I gaveearlier; cows give milk; she gave me this"). The grammars warn that no such "illogical"behaviour is tolerated from Esperanto verbs any valency change, no matter how obvious fromthe accompanying noun cases, must also be signalled with the suffixes (E1) [actually, ifall you want to do is omit an argument, like the "give" examples above, you don't need to do
http://inf.ufrgs.br/~vbuaraujo/misc/kontrauranto/#e1


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anything special in Esperanto; you only need affixes when the meaning of each argumentchanges], like this:

"give birth to" what mothers do to babies (marked in the dictionary as an inherentlytransitive verb)

the causative form but rather than meaning "cause to give birth" (a midwife's job), this isused to mean "beget"; that is, what the father did nine months earlier (solo?)

lexicons translate this not as "give birth" (plain intransitive) but as "be born" what babiesdo. [That's because -i - is not meant to merely "intransitivize"; it actually moves theparticipant which was the object to be the subject of the new verb. So, naski i is actually"to make oneself born".]

What was that about logic? [Explained above.] Meanwhile, reflexives such as "they sawthemselves", which you'd think "logically" would get some similar valency-modifying suffix, arehandled instead as normal transitives with a special pronoun. [Because ili vidi is wouldmean "they made themselves visible", or "they became visible". Again, the object ofvidi

becomes the subject ofvidi i.]The subtleties of valency categories wouldn't matter if they weren't critical to passivisation, whichconverts any two-argument verb to a special one-argument form. Converting an active sentencelike "I read the book" (or Esperanto ) involves four steps, in English orEsperanto:

1. Simple tenses become compounds: 2. Active participles become passive: 3. The subject is demoted to a "by-phrase": 4. The object is promoted in its place:

So "the book was read by me" = (note however that can also mean "out of me" or "of me" i.e. "my book").

English as usual allows extra possibilities to mislead Anglophone Esperantists. Some Englishverbs mean essentially the same thing whether active or passive ("they burned" vs. "they wereburned"; compare "they stabbed" vs. "they were stabbed"). Then there are the three-argumentverbs, which have a choice of promotable objects when passivised (direct or indirect); "Sam lentme this hat" becomes either"this hat was lent to me by Sam" or"I was lent this hat by Sam". Thebehaviour of Esperanto indirect objects is similar, but nothing like that latter "passive form" isallowed in Esperanto.

All these complex passivisation rules are so unnecessary, too! Traditional grammarbooks dotheir best to pretend it's some sort of semantic universal ("When the subject of the verb does notperform the action, it is said to be passive" drivel! What action are the subjects of such non-passive verbs as "resemble, enjoy, miss, overhear" performing?) But its only function is to givecentre stage to the "Patient" of a situation rather than the "Agent". Even most modern Europeanlanguages avoid the passive where possible, and Esperanto shouldn't need the construction atall when it's (potentially) got:

Topicalising reshuffles Special vague pronouns

Unspecific subjects Zero subjects [this can't stand by itself as a sentence]Resultatives

[And that's why you almost never see a passive in Esperanto. All you have to do is not use it. And


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apart from the use ofde to indicate the agent, passives in Esperanto are really just a logical useof participles, so you don't need to consider the passive as a fundamental feature of thelanguage.]

Ranto Appendix R

CASEA good polyglot learns to take the rules of any given target language for granted as natural laws;a good linguist on the other hand learns that there are many different ways of doing things.Esperantists (who tend to be hobbyist Euro-polyglots) often trumpet the language's case-markingsystem as an indispensable guide to the fundamental "argument structure" of a sentence. Buteven disregarding the way Esperanto mixes "indirect objects" in with its "direct objects"[clarification needed], there's nothing logically necessary about subjects and objects. Indeed, theterms are only meaningful once you've defined them for a specific language in terms of the moreuniversal concepts of:

Agent = "Subject" of a transitive verb ("we saw Sam")Experiencer= Argument of an intransitive verb ("we waited")Patient = "Object" of a transitive verb ("Sam saw us")

Different languages group these according to various schemes.

A) the pedant's solution (known from one Australian language). Clearly more complicated thanthere's any call for.Agent distinguished as Ergative caseExperiencer distinguished as Intransitive case

Patient distinguished as Accusative case

B) the clairvoyant's option (less rare; much use of context): cases not distinguished even bywordorder rules.Agent ExperiencerPatient all treated alike (i.e. no cases)

C) the monster raving loony candidate (some Iranian sightings); combines all the drawbacks of(A) and (B).Agent Patient treated alike as Transitive caseExperiencer distinguished as Intransitive case

D) the orthodox Indo-European approach; two cases, Nominative (= Nonpatient) versusAccusative (= Patient).Agent Experiencer treated alike as Nominative casePatient distinguished as Accusative case(In English, for instance, Nominatives go before the verb and Accusatives after.)

E) looking glass logic the rather widespread opposite of (D); Agent vs Nonagent.Agent distinguished as Ergative case

ExperiencerPatient treated alike as Absolutive case(This often strikes Europeans as "passive": sentences "hinge" on the Absolutive oftenmeaning the Patient not the Ergative; cf. "Sam was seen by us".)

F) a compromise solution part (D), part (E). Also common.


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Agent (voluntary) Experiencer handled as Nominative casePatient (involuntary) Experiencer handled as Absolutive case(So "I" in "I slid on the ice" may be Nominative if it was deliberate skating or Absolutive if it wasan accident.)

What's more, many languages mixthe above systems! For more detail, and further examples ofexotic possibilities Zamenhof never considered, see Language Universals And LinguisticTypologyby Bernard Comrie. [So what is the point here again? To show that Esperanto couldhave chosen some other morphosytactical alignment, even though any choice might work? Andin actuality, nominative-accusative is the more common system.]

Ranto Appendix - S

POLITICS

Many Esperantists have a weird model of "political neutrality". English is considered an

unacceptably partisan choice as International Auxiliary Language because it's closelyassociated with (if not original to) the USA, while Esperanto is considered neutral because it isn'ta "national language" (that is, the principal language of a nation-state), it's the language of aharmonious and open community. That sounds sensible enough until you compare it to otherworld-wide standards such as S.I. units, which became international by becoming "national" formore than one nation; the "neutrality" Esperantists value so highly (just like its small-townfriendliness) is the mark of a failure. After all, if the EEC had adopted Esperanto as its linguafranca in the seventies, Belgium would by now be full of eurocrats claiming it as their nativelanguage; wouldn't that make Esperanto just as politically unacceptable as English for an Asianinterlinguist?

Besides, Kurdish isn't a "national language" either, but that wouldn't make it a politically neutralchoice as a global auxlang. Nations aren't the relevant question; what matters is the power-balance between existing speakers and new learners, and that's mostly dependent on how thelearners are organised. There are obvious reasons why people might be wary of adopting thetongue of the current coca-colonial superpower, but that isn't the only option here in the UK wehave our own independent standard dialect, and India and Ireland have versions with quitedifferent geopolitical associations. None of these countries maintain Language Academies full ofGrammar Police, and even if they did you'd be at liberty to set up a new standard dialect of yourown.

(Please note: using English to point out the holes in Esperantist propaganda is not the same

thing as advocating World English if I knew all my readers spoke Spanish, I'd choose differentexamples)

How would it be possible for a global social-engineering project like Esperantism to be politicallyneutral, anyway? Stalin and Hitler didn't think it was; they saw international communication as adangerous thing and interlang organisations as conspiracies of dissent. What, you disagree withthe policies of Stalin and/or Hitler? Fine, but that means you're abandoning any claim to politicalneutrality

As a further illustration, consider one of the irregularities in Esperanto's word-building system.The names of nations such as Austria or Belgium are formed from the word for an inhabitant,

using the "container for" suffix:

"Austria" from "an Austrian", "Belgium" from "a Belgian".


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But most countries outside Europe are handled the other way round, using the "memberof" suffix:

"Australia" gives "an Australian" "Tunisia" gives "a Tunisian".

The situation is obscured by rampant irregularity e.g. is inhabited by ,whereas is inhabited by ; and to top it all off is normally replaced

by in modern Esperanto. But ignoring all that: why the big split between countries likeAustria and countries like Australia? Wouldn't a single system have worked everywhere, so thatAustrians are (say) ? [This too is an actual problem of Esperanto, but you can solveit right now by never using astro and friends, and using instead the (perfectly correct) astrianoand the like.] Zamenhof's insistence on going the long way round shows the influence of thepolitical worldview in which races are elementary units and nation-states are natural homelandsfor single ethnic groups (each with its own unique culture and language) a doctrine that was allthe rage in pre-WW1 Eastern Europe, or indeed apartheid-era South Africa [but which we caneasily abandon right now without changing a single rule of the language].

Ranto Appendix T

GROUNDPLANS

Faced with the charge that the design of Esperanto's grammar is parochial, the nearest thingZamenhof's apologists have to counter-evidence is the fact that Esperanto's morphology wasavowedly influenced by "agglutinative" languages such as Turkish rather than the "fusional"model dominant in Europe. What this means is that where Italian verbs have endings such as , which signals past-tense-first-person-singular in one indivisible blob, the Turkish equivalent

is , where the marks the tense and the carries the person agreement. It wasrecognised well before Zamenhof came along that this makes a better groundplan for themorphology of a constructed international auxiliary language, since it avoids the need tomemorise combinatorial tables of grammatical endings. In Zamenhof's neighbourhood thisgroundplan was represented by Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian all predominantlyagglutinative, though they look very europeanised when put alongside other examples such asKorean, Luganda, or Quechua.

Zamenhof eagerly adopted the concept of discrete invariable building-blocks; but there are twokinds of block "derivational", used to build new vocabulary items, and "inflectional", used tosignpost syntactic features. It's mostly the derivational affixes that Esperanto links together in

long but regular chains, as in the compound noun "tea-pot-cosy collectors' club-house". The inflectional ones never get much beyond "exiles" and even there the is designed to merge into a single unit. In effectEsperanto is like a version of German with its affixes de-fused, not like a paradigmaticallyagglutinative language. A whole-heartedly Turkish-style auxlang would handle all the variousmodal, reflexive, conditional, or aspectual forms of verbs by stacking verb-endings, so that (forinstance) "I won't have been seen", , would instead use perfective,passive, future, and negative suffixes to form something like, say, . [Not allagglutinative languages are made equal. Esperanto is less prone to agglutination forgrammatical purposes so what?]

The third major option (which has influenced Esperanto's verbal system there) is the "isolating"groundplan, which consists of eliminating affixes ("re-straight-en-ed") in favour of multiwordphrases ("did make straight again"). It turns out that a case can easily be made for thoroughlyisolating solutions being more convenient for more people:


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They have better extensibility that is, they can be taken from sparse simplicity to richsubtlety just by learning more vocabulary.They accommodate different agreement-marking instincts well you can include or omit orrelocate (e.g.) aspect-marking words depending on your mother-tongue habits (and there'snothing to stop you using "did-make-straight-again" as if it was a single agglutinated word).Affixing grammars are basically alien to speakers of languages with no affixing features; butthe barrier is one-way, because there are no languages entirely lacking in isolatingfeatures.

Isolating languages are by no means obscure they dominate East Asia from China toVietnam to Indonesia, and English is itself largely isolating; that already adds up tosomething like 40% of the human race (and climbing)!*

[Very good points. And I confess I have a soft spot for Glosa. But in isolating languages, youusually have to put elements in compounds in a fixed order, so that the resulting blocks can betreated as single words, and then you're back to something quite close to agglutination. It is worthnoting that in Esperanto, most affixes can be used as independent words (with the proper word-class ending), bringing it even closer to isolating languages in terms of morpheme usage.]

The natural equivalent of the artificial auxiliary language is the "creole" (which i

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Learn Not Not to Speak Esperanto