Re: Eventuale vi emus iel reagi...


alaskano skribis:
... al la anglalingva retartikolo cxe
<http://www.spot-on.com/archives/martinelli/2006/08/esperanto_lost_in_translation.html>.
Temas pri la cxi-jara UK k pri E-o gxenerale. supozeble oni pobus
reagi aux anglalingve aux itallingve al la verkist(in)o, kiu logxas en
milano.

Jen mia respondo. Cxu iu konas sxian retposxtan adreson ?
Dankon.

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Dear Nicole Martinelli:
You alternate between facts and opinion - opinions based IMHO on
imagination.

"Fans of the Esperanto language are in Florence for their 91st World
Congress."
Fact.

"You've got to hand it to them for persistence"
Fact.

"in the face of failure."
What failure?

"The idea of an artificial international language is a good one, but
the concept is part of the problem: it's artificial."
Do you mean you don't wear synthetic fibres? Do you mean you don't
eat food containing artificial sweeteners, artificial colours,
artificial flavours, artificial preservatives, grown with artificial
fertilizers? Why would artificiality be wrong? Oscar Wilde said,
"Art is artificial". Is art a problem???

"Most of us learn language fluently from our family, early schooling
or perhaps, later, lovers, not out of some earnest belief in world
unity."
Most of us are average joes. 4% have an IQ of at least 120. 1,6% have
an IQ of at least 140. Is there anything wrong in not being part of
the "most of us" - Stendhal (who had the following epitaph
engraven on his tombstone: "Qui giasce Arrigo Bayle, nato in Francia
e morto in Italia.") spoke fondly of "us" as "the happy few"
(in English in the text). So you're not one of "the happy
few"...

"Still, there are said to be 1,000 "native" speakers of Esperanto and
you have to wonder what the parents were thinking."
Had you taken the trouble of enquiring beforehand (before saying
anything that comes off the cuff), you might know what at least some of
the parents were thinking.
Just so you know, none of the native speakers of Esperanto grew up
unilingual, which I was until age 9 (French is my only native tongue)
when I first studied English.

" Teach them Klingon? It's a better party trick at least."
You have to be desperate to resort to that. At least Esperanto is a
worldwide passport to friendship (and occasionally to love, as
Esperanto was soon dubbed "Edzperanto" - marriage broker).
Unless you're on the sadomasochistic side, you wouldn't consider
Klingon for lovemaking. Esperanto is frequently used in such pleasant
circumstances in the Esperanto language community.

"The Esperanto pow-wow, attended by about 2,000 people if last year's
figure holds, has been snubbed so far by English-language media.
Italian news agency ANSA picked up just one small item about a study
the Esperantists commissioned."
After such a long snubbing, you'd expect it would have not lasted
unless there actually were something to it.

"The finding?
English, the default lingua franca, costs the EU government ?17
billion (about $22 billion) a year. That's a lot of money lost in
translation, to be sure. These costs could be cut out entirely, the
study says, if there were a common European language. (Italians, for
one, have a notoriously hard time communicating in English)."
Yeay! Your IQ might be at least 120 after all.

"I want to support Esperanto, I really do. Invented in 1887 with the
goal of creating a universal second language that would foster peace
and understanding so what's not to like?
Trouble is, they just don't seem to have much of a grasp on reality. To
be fair the six-line news item (in Italian, at that) didn't elaborate
on whether there was a plan of action"
Just take your press card and videocam and interview Osmo Buller or
other official UEA representative, and they will give you as many
details about the plan of action as you can stand. The whole plan to
study in bed for a while, if you wish.

"or any other details on the study."
I'm not sure exactly what study you want to know about, but you can
read CED's numerous documents, resulting from studies.

"But how much time and money would it take to train everyone involved
in the EU to communicate fluently in Esperanto? And how would you
overcome the resistance to learn another language that could only be
used for work?"
The resistance would probably be the main problem, based on ingrained
prejudice and fear of losing privileges gained from the knowledge of
complicated languages.
Any effort spent in learning Esperanto is rewarded by 5 to 20
(depending on linguistic background) times the capacity for
communication gained by the same effort applied to any national
language. Guaranteed.

"The bickering over official languages, with Globish as a common
language, will no doubt continue."
I don't have time to waste in this bickering. I have been _using_
Esperanto to broaden my horizons for the last 24 years, especially
widening my knowledge of world literature.

"I'd love to know from an Esperantist -- and there are said to be
between 100,000 and two million speakers out there -- why they took it
up. And how they plan to bring it forward."
I took it up because I was deeply disappointed with the study of
foreign languages to broaden my literary horizons. I happened to read
an article about Esperanto in a popular weekend magazine, in which we
were told there were literary translations from over 60 languages. I
was awed. I took the challenge, and by now have had occasion to read
literary translations from over 100 languages. I've met people from
many countries who visited Ottawa, even me, opening for me the vistas
of true worldwide cultural exchange.

I am deeply thankful to Dr Zamenhof and his wife Klara Zilbernik for
the international language the world owes them.

Manuel
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