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Why do people hate Esperanto? | ||
Tags: Cultural Identity | Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5133 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 9 of 72 01 May 2010 at 11:18am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Really? I found at least 8.
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| Mafouz Diglot Groupie Spain Joined 5122 days ago 56 posts - 64 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: German, Japanese, French | Message 10 of 72 01 May 2010 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I find 1, the silly uncyclopedia page. Other 3 or 4 are discussions of arguments or grounded attacks.
I dont really know, but I have the sensation that the critics come from defenders and proposers of other auxlangs. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5133 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 11 of 72 01 May 2010 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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One of the sites said that Klingon had more speakers than Esperanto. Clearly false.
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| mrhenrik Triglot Moderator Norway Joined 5876 days ago 482 posts - 658 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 72 01 May 2010 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hating is an extremely strong term used way too lightly. I did the search and can't
find any hate at all. There's one guy who, tongue-in-cheek, goes through the whole language explaining why he doesn't like it. Isn't calling that "hate" a bit overreacting? Uncyclopedia - they don't hate anything, they ridicule everything. Try to find anything there that's been positively portrayed. There's been heated arguements here on the forum about Esperanto, but the one I participated in was not heated because of contempt against Esperanto - it would rather seem that the majority of "Esperanto haters" there simply did not appreciate the preaching style of the first post (which was not intentional). I think this is a bit like fighting windmills. Me - I just don't care about Esperanto, just like I don't care about a very large amount of the world's languages. Oh, and about the Klingon vs. Esperanto thing - false accusations about Esperanto does not equal hate, it simply equals false accusations. Edited by mrhenrik on 01 May 2010 at 1:19pm 12 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6236 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 72 06 May 2010 at 3:04am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Esperanto has a fairly large body of literature. William Auld was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature 3 times for his work in it. Esperanto literature doesn't compare to the largest and oldest world traditions - but it compares favorably to the output of some smaller nations. Esperanto also has mythology of a sort. Three religions are strongly linked to Esperanto, and Zamenhof also promoted some views he developed ('homaranismo'), though that didn't catch on. If there is a distinctive Esperanto cuisine, I'm unaware of it. Vegetarians are over-represented among Esperanto speakers, but aren't a majority. Esperanto does have a distinctive culture of its own. It's also served as a bridge into German, UK, and Hungarian culture for me, as well as Persian poetry, Hungarian literature, and South America. I'm currently reading about Switzerland in Esperanto - and learning new things, despite nearly 12 years of residence and having read quite a bit about it in English and Italian. As for personal significance, Esperanto has meant and means a lot to me... I've had some amazing experiences and met some wonderful people through it.
The vocabulary is; the grammar is much less so.
This has been written about at length by others. In terms of common root words, you're correct; in terms of other elements of the language, it's less clear-cut. That said, this criticism is pretty much always leveled by native speakers of Indo-European languages who don't speak Esperanto, while I'm yet to hear it from a non-European Esperanto speaker.
What politics do you see bundled in? Why do you consider it Romance-centric, other than word roots? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6236 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 72 06 May 2010 at 3:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Not caring about Esperanto, or any other language, is perfectly fine. That, and intentional silliness, are certainly not hatred, and the word is indeed bandied about too lightly. That said, I have seen things which I would qualify as hatred. Refusal to acknowledge that a language has a culture or literary tradition, despite people repeatedly pointing out evidence to the contrary, strikes me as qualifying - and I've seen that both on this forum and elsewhere, with a variety of languages. Disparaging people for speaking or learning a specific language also often wanders into the territory of hatred, in my opinion. Saying something incorrect out of ignorance isn't hatred. Clinging to disparaging views in the face of clear contrary evidence can be. I know multiple Esperanto speaking forum members have been extremely frustrated by some anti-Esperanto comments in threads in the past, to the point of decreasing forum participation at least temporarily - even when there's no hatred (and I think there usually isn't), you're entirely correct that many of these threads do end up feeling like tilting at windmills, and that is not at all pleasant. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5320 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 15 of 72 06 May 2010 at 4:56am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Get the EU to support Esperanto, make Esperanto a school subject, Hitler and lots of bad people persecuted Esperantists And yeah, word roots, exactly that. Sure, it's got the affix system and the agglutinative-ish grammar, but it still sounds like really weird Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrhenrik Triglot Moderator Norway Joined 5876 days ago 482 posts - 658 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, French Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 72 06 May 2010 at 5:39am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
As eventually became somewhat evident from the discussion on Esperanto's culture, the main problem seemed to be the very loose definition of culture. For some people, culture is people in national costumes dancing in ways you'd never dance without said costume on and eating strange food. For others, culture is a collection of similar opinions and the people sharing them. Of course you also have everything in between. My point here is that I wouldn't call that hating either. You could perhaps call this discussion of what hate is fairly uselessly semantic, but I'd argue that once we've successfully branded someone "hater", we're way too free to ignore everything they have to say. Disparaging people for speaking or appreciating a language is indeed something we don't want, here on the forum at least, and as far as I know at least one person with some edgy opinions on the subject got removed from the forum.
Clear contrary evidence according to your definition. Others may have completely different opinions on both what might be considered evidence, and what is indeed being proven. Discarding a different opinion there as hate seems to be a self-destructive short cut. There were some posts that indeed crossed the line, and as I said earlier in this post at least one person has been removed as a result of them. Concerning the fighting windmills analogy I used - actually that's not quite what I meant. I'd apologise for that, I reckon that might be because I'm not too familiar with the saying - I haven't even read the book. What I meant was that the threadstarter seemed to see "haters" where there according to my definition of the word were none. In any case, personally I'd be very happy if we'd all stop using words such as "hate". It's just one giant simplification which allows for some very destructive short cuts in logic and communication. Things are way too complicated for someone to just plainly "hate" Esperanto, there is always (from my experience) a much more complex reality than the vastly simplified "hate". Here I'd write what my point is, but I'm not too sure any more. Oh well, it's late. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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