arthra

You may be interested in the follwoing article on the Baha'i Esperanto League:

Bahá'í Esperanto-League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and

Bahaa Esperanto-Ligo (BEL)

At some point or other in my uhh busy bizy life I may start learning the language again. MAy be easier the second time a-round.

kavaliro

Latin is neat. Western languages have absorbed much of it, so it's just brimming with cognates (words that share a similar spelling and/or pronunciation and also have the same meaning.) Certainly the scientific community loves Latin.

A few years ago I had the good pleasure of meeting a student of linguistics who was a Latin major. He is one of the few individuals in the world who actually speaks Latin, fluently! This was a real treat for me. Latin sounds beautiful. We were able to hold a conversation, with him speaking Latin and me speaking Esperanto, because the languages are so similar. I'd say we missed perhaps 20% of each other's words, but were able to effectively communicate. We were both surprised. I had often heard Esperanto referred to as "a simplified version of Latin," but that day I learned how accurate the description is.

It makes sense, considering how and why Esperanto words were chosen: the most common morpheme (root word) across all of the languages Zamenhof knew of was chosen as the Esperanto morpheme for a concept. The idea was to maximize the number of cognates across all these languages to increase the ease of learning the vocabulary. It's very effective, because so many European languages have Latin as their ancestor, and the other languages have absorbed it (as part of their scientific vocabulary, in the case of English.)

The rules of Latin differ from Esperanto, however. For instance, Latin is a fusional language, where Esperanto is agglutinative. To put that in easier terms, Latin has a tendency for one suffix to add gender, numerical value, etc. all in one lump: these concepts get fused together. Esperanto instead assigns one meaning to each morpheme, so to get a word which combines several concepts, you simply "glue" them together. Esperanto's agglutinative nature makes it easier for Eastern learners to grasp, because Eastern languages tend to be agglutinative. (Japanese particularly comes to mind.)

Here's what I think about the international auxiliary language. This is just applying common sense to the problem. One of three things will happen.

First, one existing culture's language could "win." This has happened in the past, so there is precedent. However, this was done by force. A war on the kind of scale it would take to cause a single language to dominate over the others would break the world. So while that could happen, it won't happen as part of the establishing of world unity, but rather world domination. There's really not a remotely probable exception to this, because if it comes to a vote, no culture is going to allow another to have linguistic dominance.

Second, an existing neutral language could be chosen. By this, I really mean Esperanto, because it's the only true candidate, for a variety of reasons. It has a culture all it's own, which does not overshadow national cultures. It is established: there already exist sufficient learning materials and teachers, should it be chosen. It's proven. We know it works because it is already in worldwide use, daily. Furthermore, Esperanto has, as one of it's fundamental rules, a stipulation that the rules of the language can undergo a one-time adjustment at the time it gets chosen as a world auxiliary language. At that time, the few outstanding issues could be fixed. (primarily that would be officially removing gender bias, though there are a few other points that would be tweaked.)

Third, a language could be created. There are some brilliant linguists out there, and a language could be created which outperforms Esperanto both technically and artistically. However, the fact is, Esperanto uses many concepts that the new language would also necessarily use. In effect, this language would be so similar to Esperanto that it would be considered a derivative of it. There's really no way to get around it and still have a universally easy-to-learn language. Perhaps far into the future, when we know more about linguistics, but for now, it would not be possible to create a universal language that didn't closely resemble Esperanto. Plus, there's no way to conceive that any committee wouldn't capitalize on Esperanto as it's starting point. Otherwise, you're starting from scratch with something utterly unproven, and that's just extremely improbable.

So it will most likely be Esperanto or a version of Esperanto, option 2, and this is highly likely. It could be a completely new language, option 3, and this is possible but unlikely, and it would be extremely unlikely for it not to be a derivative of Esperanto in some significant way. I think option 1 is ruled out, utterly, from a Baha'i standpoint. It's technically possible, but it would take some new factor (World War III) to get us to that point. It's safe to say we want to avoid all of the circumstances that could possibly lead to option 1.

That's pretty much how I see it. But then, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we have any universal auxiliary language. Esperanto is pretty, but if another language came along, and it was adopted worldwide, I'd learn it joyously. My heart would be singing as I did.

cire perdue

"the most common morpheme (root word) across all of the languages Zamenhof knew of was chosen as the Esperanto morpheme for a concept. The idea was to maximize the number of cognates across all these languages to increase the ease of learning the vocabulary. It's very effective, because so many European languages have Latin as their ancestor, and the other languages have absorbed it (as part of their scientific vocabulary, in the case of English)."

Could you explain this in English please? (pun intended, but question is serious however) :-)>


I am finding people from other countries yet immersed in the culture that still do not get nuances and exceptions of English. This is VERY important to me. I am totally deaf in one ear, and wear a hearing aid in the other. I am literally analyzing speech to figure out what I don't hear. I am dependent on people knowing how to use English appropriately. When they cannot do that, I tend to feel like I am being ignored, possibly tricked or cheated. Not a great reaction, but I am literally dependent on verb tenses and proper use of pronouns and more. My audiologist says very few people do this. Fortunately or un, I am from a family background where English usuage is highly literate. This is not necessarily a realistic hearing compensation, but hey when it works, it helps keep people from repeating everything they said, when I only missed a little, and i don't want to hear the whole thing again, just what I missed!!! So! Esperanto that! How can Esperanto be used to help the hearing impaired? Could it be easier to lip read?

kavaliro

As Zamenhof was creating the vocabulary for Esperanto, he took a look at the words with the same meaning from all of the languages he knew. He spoke several languages: Russian, Yiddish, Polish, English, German, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and French. Plus there were several other languages He was interested in but didn't speak. So for any idea, he chose the word which was common in the most languages.

For instance, let's take the idea conveyed by the english word, "good." A great many of the romance languages convey that idea with some form of "bon." Bon in French, bonus in Latin (actually, bonus in English, too), bene (I think) in Italian, bien in Spanish, etc. So for Esperanto, he chose "bon" as the root word for the idea, "good." Because the word sounds the same in each of those languages to "bon," they are called cognates. (I believe the etymology of "cognate" would literally translate as, "something you know.") Cognates make learning a language much, much easier. So easy learning was literally built into Esperanto by design.

Esperanto uses another concept which makes it easy to learn. It's part of what makes it "agglutinative." The idea is this: people get used to putting words into a certain order because of their mother tongue. For instance, in Spanish, we put the adjective after the noun. So to allow everyone to use the word order they feel most comfortable with, yet still convey the correct message, tags are used to give a root word it's part-of-speech. If it is a noun, it always ends in -o. An adjective always ends in -a. And to make something plural, we add -j, so a plural noun ends in -oj, etc.
so we can make several words out of the one root word, "bon."

bono (added the noun suffix -o) means "a good thing"
bona (added the adjective suffix -a) means "good" as in the English
bone (added the adverb suffix) means the same as "well"
bonas (added the present-tense verb suffix) means "is good"
etc.

Another cognate is ĉanc- which means "chance" and is pronounced similarly, but more precisely like "chants."

using Esperanto's agglutinative ability:

bon (good)+ ĉanc (chance)+ e (adverb) = bonĉance: "fortunately"
That's pronounced, "bone-chahn-seh."

Which brings up another point which should interest you, given your hearing difficulties: each letter in Esperanto has exactly one sound that it makes. There are no silent letters, and there are no times when vowels make a "long" or "short" sound. Pronunciation is perfectly regular, no exceptions. This makes it a lot easier to understand audibly AND visually.

cire perdue

So? bon is a morpheme?

kavaliro

Yes. A morpheme is like a linguistic atom. It's the smallest piece of a word that has separate meaning.

In English, "good" is a morpheme meaning, essentially, "the desirable quality," and "-ness" is a morpheme meaning, "having the properties of"
Literally explained, "goodness" means "having the desirable properties or traits."

Bonĉance then, could literally be "full of good chance" or something similar. In other words, "fortunately." bon is a morpheme because it has a separate meaning, ĉanc also is a morpheme because it has separate meaning, and actually -e has meaning because it conveys the idea that the word is an adverb, so it, too is a morpheme.