thanks for the translation, kunar...
as i'm one of the persons concerned (and maybe even the only one) by that
I have read some negative opinions about Esperanto in this forum.
i really appreciated your efforts...
i'm sorry saying that it is hard to find something less "natural" than esperanto is not a negative opinion though. It is not even an opinion but a simple historical fact. you can't deny than esperanto is born and still is developping in a very artificial way and it is an unique case in history. even modern hebrew (i've seen a post in german more or less about that above) is not so artificial as it has been an artificial choice or more exactly a contractual choice betwwen different evolutions of a language that was existant...
as a matter of fact i didn't deny that esperanto is a natural language in the sense of philosophy of language as like i have said above it is certainly not a formal language. but it was not what was at strike in the other thread, i think.
it is true i also said that esperanto was not even a true language (yet in another thread). I think that is not in the way things can be expressed with this language (i agree with you kunar, here, but i don't think it's enough). What is making that a language is a language as a phaenomen is also his involment in the world. And because of its artificial and also its recent (to the scale of a language, 120 years is recent) creation esperanto is a bit deficient there, that it may have native speakers (and i don't doubt it... as a matter of fact i had just forgotten that...sorry <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shame.gif" alt="" />) is not really changing this thing... even so native esperanto s^peakers are more usually native bilingual speakers i think...
But the pronounciation is very similar to several slavic languages (Polish, Slovak, Croatian - just to name a few)
vocabulary is vocabulary... pronounciation is pronounciation. if you pronounce latin romanic roots with a slavic pronounciation it still is romanic rooted.
Regarding "universality", you obviously misunderstood the idea behind it. I'd never claim that Esperanto is absolutely neutral or includes elements of all known languages. Try to interpret "universal" as an opposite to "limited". Esperanto was meant to be (and is) a language capable of expressing everything.
am i? is that so obvious? i don't think so. I'm sorry but trying to interpret "universal" as opposite to "limited" is a bit absurd. why?
1) in this case all language is "universal" and it is forget than esperanto was explicitly defined as a proper universal language
2) that's not what the founders'texts say as there is an explicit trying to find a kind of pre-babel myth.
please consider also that criticizing a language especially a language that has so many particularities than esperanto is never the same than criticizing who speak this language.
MG
