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Of lightbulbs, geeks and samideanoj

I see that my fame as a pioneer of Esperanto on the Internet has been cited in la kara lingvo itself! The author gives me the Esperanto name "Prentis Ridlo" which makes me feel like I'm being prepared for enshrinement in the PIV. I don't think he read my post very carefully, though, or he'd have seen that it was a followup to at least one preceding message. My recollection is that I already knew a small community of Esperantist Usenetters before I brought up the lightbulb jokes.

He also translates "awfully geeky distinction" as ege moda distingo (very fashionable distinction), which couldn't be further off. But how on earth would one say "geek" in Esperanto? Fanatikulo or fervorulo of a particular subject, maybe (e.g., teknologifanatiko, sciencfikcifervorulo) but that kind of over-specific term doesn't evoke the cloud of obsessions common to geeks.

One of the problems of translation in general but especially of a would-be "universal" language is terms for specific subcultures and memes. An American beat, English punk, Japanese otaku or Parisian apache can't be translated and so is most often expressed by a loanword. But Esperanto resists loanwords and only accepts them when a cultural wave becomes irresistible. My data are 20 years old, but when I was active there was no Esperanto word for punk or even hippie, although there was one for gay ("gejo") as distinct from homosexual ("samseksulo").

P.S. For the ultimate geek experience, see the Vikipedio entry for Star Trek! The Vikipedio calls Trekkies Trekŝatantoj.

That's "Trek^satantoj" in our old 20th-century online Esperanto orthography. Why the Unicode stuff works on the Esperantists' pages but not when I paste it into mine is beyond me. Maybe you have to be a true samideano.

I guess geek should be "giko"..I don't see why loanwords should be such a menace. If somebody is offended they should come up with a better word, etc..And having more than one word for the same thing is not so bad, is it?

:)

The reason why creating neologisms through loanwords is seen as a menace in Esperanto is that they would cause the language to grow into unusability or even to fragment into mutually unintelligible camps.

One of the design features of Esperanto is that it is based on a (relatively) limited number of roots which are then compounded to make a full vocabulary. A student of Esperanto thus has to learn a lot fewer roots to make sense of Esperanto than in any "natural" language. Esperanto takes this so far as to avoid redundant roots for many binary or oppositional concepts. Thus cold is malvarma, "anti-hot", rather than having its own distinct root.

The roots are supposed to be "universal" in the admittedly eurocentric view of Esperanto's founders (mostly romance with a good number from Greek, English and German, a handful of slavic roots and a tiny number from other languages). Thus a speaker of a European language should recognize many of them. Although this universality is often overstated, it still makes Esperanto more accessible to the majority of the world's population who do speak some European language, as a second tongue if not their first.

If people freely add loanwords from their native languages, not only does the number of roots grow out of control but people of different language backgrounds would use different, mutually unintelligible terms. To pull an example out of thin air, if English speakers say hangovero, German speakers say katero and Spanish speakers say krudo, none of them will be able to understand each other, whereas with the word ebria (drunk) in their common bag of roots, everyone should be able to understand postebrio. Or to name a real example, when the need for a word for "computer" came along, there was a struggle between varous terms including komputero, komputoro, etc. The preferred term ended up being komputilo, a compound of the existing roots komput- and -il- (tool).

That works for dry and functional terminology, but less well for words with strong culture-specific associations. Hence the problem with "geek".

Prentiss, do you have a good reading knowledge of Esperanto? How long does it take to ramp up? I somewhat expected to be able to parse the site you linked to, but, to my language-impaired eyes, it just looked like an odd combination of Spanish and Serbo-Croatian, which I guess is by design. I've studied Spanish, French, and German, but the only foreign languages I would even try to speak would be German and Theory.

It's a myth (not one the Esperantists are really guilty for) that Esperanto is understandable at first glance. There's about half a page of "grammar" in the traditional sense to learn: some very simple verb endings, plurals and (hardest thing for me when all I knew was English and Spanish) an accusative case. Then there's a short list of essential vocabulary that everything else depends on -- some pronouns, prefixes, suffixes, conjunctions and the like. After that, you can figure out most of it from cognates with the European languages you know.

Back in the day, I got my start from a free 10-lesson correspondence course which I see is now available by e-mail. Here's a rather overly compact grammatical summary; there must be better ones.

Saluton! Your Esperanto letter didn't work because your webpage doesn't specify a charset, so probably Latin-1 is being assumed. UTF-8 is the best way to permit any and all Unicode characters to appear on a webpage, e.g. using the magic incantation:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
This might help:
http://russcon.org/esperanto/links.html#unikodo

Russ: Thanks for the Unicode tip! I should have known that. And it only took me eight months to implement it...

Don´t believe that nonsense about the grammar of Esperanto fitting on a single page. The most complete current grammar (available on the internet or purchasable as a text) runs to nearly 700 pages. I have one that is a little over 500 pages. Of course, these are complete, highly detailed descriptions of the language as it has become after 120 years of growth and evolution. Esperanto today is a major language, as complete and fully developed as any major language of Europe. Zamenhof´s genius did not lie in the idea that he could create a language all by himself but that he realized he couldn´t so he produced a bare-bones framework that others could build upon. The hard part (as Zamenhof himself pointed out) was knowing what to leave out. It took approximately 50 years for Esperanto to grow from its earliest beginnings in a teenager´s notebooks to the point it became a fully developed and complete living language. Esperanto exists on many levels, but it was deliberately designed to be highly usable on a very basic level. You can learn to read the language effectively in a week (assuming you don´t mind frequent recourse to a dictionary), but to comfortably converse in the language takes around 60 to 100 hours of study and most people need around 3 to 6 months to accomplish this with casual study, though as little as ten days with really intensive study. I have again and again read on the internet from people experienced at language learning that 1 month of Esperanto study correlates to 1 year study of a regular language and this from Orientals as well as Euros. To achieve high-level native speaker like fluency takes 500 to 1000 hours of practice and study and requires 2 or 3 years but the result is comparable to 10 or 15 years of study of a regular language. Those who speak several languages nearly always say that Esperanto is their strongest language even if they have studied it a lot less than any of the others. There is a full range in the language from a sophisticated and difficult high literary language to rough street slang and vivid and pungent profanity.
There is, nonetheless, a lot of stuff written in ¨Basic Esperanto¨ for beginners. To understant 95% of ordinary conversation in Esperanto, you need to be familiar with about 500 word roots. To achieve the same level in English, you need to know about 15,000. This should give you an idea why Esperanto is learned so much faster. Genuine colloquial Esperanto is very unlike English and requires a significant amount of effort on the part of English speakers to acquire, but dedicated study brings fast results. Although most of the vocabulary is Romance based, much of the structure and syntax of the language reflects the heavy influence of the Slavic languages. Zamenhof regarded this as of great importance and asked that any official body deciding on linguistic questions for Esperanto should include Eastern Europeans to give a truly pan-European perspective.

The result is a language as easy for Russians and Poles to learn as English or French speakers. But like I said, this gives the language a subtly exotic quality you don´t really sense if you study a language like Italian.

There is a very large literature on the linguistics of Esperanto and every detail has been analysed and discussed at great length, but nearly all of this is in the language itself. (Check out the stuff from the ¨Esperantic Studies Foundation¨ for information in English.)

Anyway, there is an awful lot more to be said on this subject, but.....
Sufiche Jam Diritas! *Nuff Said!¨

JerryBear

Jerry, of course you're right, I should have made myself clearer regarding the page of "grammar". What I meant was that the notion of "grammar" that would be explicitly taught over a year or two in a high school language class (i.e., a lot of memorization of verb forms and the like) can fit on a page. But that relies on the student learning a lot more implicitly; a full grammar as linguists understand it is much more involved, in Esperanto as in any language.