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A Thorough Critique! Posted by on Jul 22, 2009 in Esperanto Language

If you’re up for a long, thoughtful critique of Esperanto, Justin Rye has compiled a massive and thorough examination of all the things he finds inadequate about the language.

I’ve only had the time to unearth this article today, much less study it! However, if you have an opinion regarding this essay (or thesis, given its size!), then please share! I’ll post again soon, with commentary.

For the time being, I’d like to point out that Section E5, concerning the elegance of Esperanto, seems to confuse the Esperanto meaning of “mal-” with the phonetically identical English prefix. Mi povas vidi unu problemon!

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Comments:

  1. Nicolas Maia:

    He uses a confusing logic. Hitler and Stalin persecuted speakers, THEREFORE it is not a neutral language?

    How about the fact that the Esperantist moviment contradicted their nationalist policies? Or maybe they just didn’t know Esperanto that well.

    He just sounds like an English speaker that doesn’t want to see his language being weakened in the internacional scene by Esperanto.

    He also makes a crucial flaw other critics have made before: Esperanto, or certain aspects of it, have failed… I suppose he has a crystal ball to look into the future, then.

  2. John:

    Ugh, I know that retpaĝaraĉo! The biggest mistake he makes is double-standard. Here’s my summary:

    Since many languages distinguish between “you” singular and “you” plural, Esperanto ought to; but Chinese doesn’t distinguish between “he”, “she” and “it”, so Esperanto oughtn’t. Many languages don’t have articles, so Esperanto shouldn’t. Chinese don’t have plurals so Esperanto musn’t. But some languages have aspect markers, so why doesn’t Esperanto have better than -ad- and compound tenses? But why does the language need tenses at all? Chinese doesn’t!

    As far as orthography, all I can say is that his reform is pretty bad—worse than the original.

  3. Hoss:

    The author clearly has an axe to grind, and although his criticisms are ostensibly based on objective linguistic criteria, most are just his own arbitrary stylistic preferences dressed up in pseudo-linguistic garb.

    His “rant” (the author’s description, not mine!) is actually quite old, and it was addressed quite thoughtfully a number of years ago by Claude Piron, a former UN translator who worked with western european, slavic, and asian languages in addition to Esperanto. He was also well known and loved as a prolific Esperanto author.

    You might find his replies useful: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm