this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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By "poorly designed" I'm conveying "full of sub-optimal decisions that introduce unnecessary complexity and unintended consequences". Justin B. Rye has a full rant on that; I'd like to pick specifically the following issues:
In special, Esperanto as defined in the 16 rules is full of assumptions on how a language works that boil down to "you should know it, because it works like in European sprachbund languages". And sometimes those assumptions break even for those European languages.
Later auxiliary constructed languages show a lot of improvements in this regard. And while they do focus often on one or another aspect, as you hinted, often the result is cleaner.
The source of the internationalisms is often a disputed point on itself. It relies for example a lot on Romance and Latin vocab, even when it doesn't make much sense (e.g. "sango" comes to my mind).
When someone starts with Justin B. Rye as an argument, then I stop listening. This pile of junk he put together just to utterly "destroy" a language and its community is something which should not be paid any credibility as if I listen to someone who spends hours and hours of writing up why vaccines are a bad thing. He is an individual who had bad experiences with Esperanto speakers, had the privilege of having time at his hands and seemingly a degree in linguistics (which I can't verify) to write his "ranto" up. A piece of junk which is solely intended to piss off and frustrates anyone who did look into Esperanto or even dared to learn it and who happens to be able to read English.
He would not be the first or the last linguist who shits on Esperanto full length without any actual facts behind the criticism.
That's not "poorly designed", that's a misnomer for "not perfect enough". Perfectionism is the enemy of good. And Esperanto is a working language which is in itself more or less consistent. One could argument that its inventor did not want to create the perfect language, but a working one which is the template for the actual language, which he knew would evolve out of it. Today's Esperanto is already a different one than the one published in 1887.
And? What is that for an argument? It has 16 rules, which are still 16 rules, which are rooted in how other languages do their thing. Then the rest of the booklet which the inventor of the language published was full of exercises to show the implicit rules. It can be argued that the original booklet was a result of brevity and to reduce printing costs, it's 42 pages damn it. Also some marketing which he used at the time of writing. Still, these rules are useable and give people enough to learn the language.
One could even argue that the 16 rules are not just 16 of the kind, even when reading them they have sub-parts, are longer than just say "-o marks nouns" or something. Criticizing Esperanto because of them is just an act of ill will. "Look ma! They are not just 16 rules ... looolz!" no shit Sherlock!
TL;DR: I'm calling the claim "poorly designed" as nonsense and ANY re-iteration of it as trolling or dishonest attempt to derail any rational investigation of Esperanto as a language.
I'll speak first as a moderator of this community. Please refrain from:
I'd also like to encourage you [and everyone else in this comm] to be extremely careful with arguments relying on "who" said something or their "credibility", as in your first paragraph. It's simply more conductive to analyse what is said than who is said it.
*NOTE: I'm cutting you some slack on this because you're discussing with me, and I personally don't mind this too much. But do not act like this against other users of this community, OK?
Ah now the authority is speaking. As if it was me who started to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about Esperanto. By just welcoming the blessed opinions of JBR.
It's not out of nowhere, people who use the same tactics in argumentation are grouped together. And even when you don't like it. Then don't like the opinion I have about your argumentation style. As you already noted about my style of argumentation.
When an argument goes in a certain direction, then there is little left of what the person really is intending. Experience counts more than uncertainty.
In general I would agree with you there. But in the end let's face it, the arguments of an architect regarding the construction of buildings weighs more than the arguments of Joe the neighbour regarding house building. In the end you only have logic and "argumentation style" to prove or disprove what you are saying. This in turn means that arguments are forced to follow a certain direction inevitably because of "logic", which leads to the same conclusions, which leads to echo chambers of people who follow these conclusions.
If for example you approach road design by seeing that all the cars are blocking them, so you by the force of logic you widen the road, the problem still exist, you widen the road more. Based on the experience of people who did research into road construction, infrastructure building you would have known that using trains, bike lanes, smaller roads and more clever design of cities would really solve the problem. Sheer basic logic does not solve shit.
And so it is in attempting with disproving or proving JBR.
Cute, I'm only in normal conditions and this is already considered "excessive snark". Adopting a defensive tone is what I did, because I think you are spreading FUD about Esperanto.
TL;DR: I still call your claim that Esperanto is poorly designed "nonsense".