"Like speakers of other languages, their Esperanto may be good, average, or bad." Now, what would mean for a native speaker of Esperanto to have a good, average or bad Esperanto? It certainly means something different than saying the same about someone who has learned the language through the Internet. In the answer to this question, there lies a difference between artificial and natural languages. One can say that we have an artificial and a natural Esperanto. The natural one will certainly become more and more different from the original, artificial, one, as Nadeem pointed out in a previous post. Perhaps some of these natural changes may be what made you classify the varieties of natural Esperanto you have heard as good, average, or bad. It would be nice to see studies on native speakers of Esperanto, to see to what extent their language has departed from the artificial one - something that has happened lots of times with other natural languages originated from artificial ones.

Linguistics - Posted By Emanuel - Karma received: 0

Porto Alegre, RS

Brazil - Posted By Emanuel - Karma received: 0

@Isomorph It was no intended to differentiate between popular and not so popular SECONDARY languages. It was intended to differentiate between natural and artificial languages. Within the group of natural languages, you can have popular and not-so-popular languages: the difference between then will be mainly geopolitical and will not have anything to do with easiness to learn or richness of vocabulary (something that every language has). Your argument of richness of vocabulary is not good in that Esperanto would still not be as popular as English if we enriched its vocabulary - something that is certainly done by those children who learn Esperanto as a native language. -------- And Isomorph is right when he says that there are children who learned Esperanto as their native language. But I wouldn't say it is the same as the artificial Esperanto you can learn through the Internet. When a child learns a constructed language, they impose the natural structure of human language (something which is called "The Language Faculty" in linguistics) upon it. The result is that it loses the characteristics of an artificial language and gains characteristics of natural language. It happens all the time with artificial sign languages which become natural and very different from the constructed systems which originated them. It happens as well with pidgins which become creoles... If a great and influent community of Esperanto native speakers existed, this language could be running for the leadership (although it would doubtlessly become very different from the Esperanto you know)

Linguistics - Posted By Emanuel - Karma received: 3

That would be nice. Any suggestions?

Linguistics - Posted By Emanuel - Karma received: 0

Isomorph, I'm sorry, but I couldn't really understand what you wanted to say about my quote. This can be used to show something: You say that you are expected to know English in Denmark in order to read textbooks. That could happen with Esperanto and people would have to learn it to the point that they could read a textbook. But that is not the same thing as "learning" your native language, as you showed by your post, which was not very well written in English, although you have enough grasp of it to read a textbook written in this language (no offense, I hope). Since you are Danish, and have not been exposed to English since your early childhood, that is the expected outcome. The point is: you may be extremely smart and you may study English for decades henceforward; still, you will not know English as well as you know Danish (I suppose you speak Danish...) In the same way, nobody will have a perfect grasp of Esperanto, no matter how much they study it. In the other hand, any healthy native speaker has a perfect grasp of the language in which he was raised. This is but one of the things differentiating natural from artificial languages. English, Danish, Portuguese are all natural languages. Esperanto and Ido are artificial languages. That should be enough to settle the problem.

Linguistics - Posted By Emanuel - Karma received: 3

@Diogo Melo A bit late to answer, but an answer to why Esperanto has failed to be an international language may be that it is not really a natural language. When you have a natural language like English, it gets acquired by children with no effort, and they will have this language for the rest of their lives with no effort as well - there will be no need to keep studying it. When you have an artificial language like Esperanto, which you learn during your adulthood, or at school, you do not learn it in the natural way, as you learn your native language. You have to spend your whole life internalizing rules of grammar, memorizing vocabulary and so on. And you will have to be continuously practising, since forgetting it for some months will make it necessary to start studying it over. It is just unpractical. Although it is kind of easy to learn, there is no country where children learn and get to use it in normal social activity. A language cannot "rule them all" in this way.

Linguistics - Posted By Emanuel - Karma received: 3