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Esperanto and Esperantist ideology

 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto Post Reply
26 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6199 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 25 of 26
04 October 2013 at 5:25pm | IP Logged 
I've never met a person who constantly talks about a final win for Esperanto; I only know a couple of people who I hear second-hand have that view, and they've never expressed it during our extensive conversations.

Esperanto is easy - in relative terms, compared to other languages. Easy isn't the same thing as effortless. I've heard it be both undersold and oversold on this point - when I hear monoglots say "oh, maybe I'll learn it, but only after French and Spanish", I wince, because they'd probably learn both faster if they learned Esperanto first, and probably won't get around to any of them in practice.

Juan: Esperanto was not invented for no reason. It was the lifelong goal and dream of a person born into a city with 4 languages, who constantly saw friction due to the impossibility of communication between individuals across language barriers - most of the population did not speak all 4 languages. It's not a perfect language, but it is a surprisingly pragmatic one: it was designed to be comparatively easy to learn and use, and succeeds quite well on that front.
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ennime
Tetraglot
Senior Member
South Africa
universityofbrokengl
Joined 5664 days ago

397 posts - 507 votes 
Speaks: English, Dutch*, Esperanto, Afrikaans
Studies: Xhosa, French, Korean, Portuguese, Zulu

 
 Message 26 of 26
21 October 2013 at 3:26pm | IP Logged 
I remember the Esperanto movement in South Korea, which has two elements to it; there is a very leftist group of activists, very involved in organising around a.o. the G8, and with strong linkages to Japanese anarchist Esperanto groups; and there is the more "regular" Korea Esperanto-Asocio, linked to UEA, etc. The two groups didn't intermingled, though they knew of each other.

Personally I believe that it is impossible to be truly politically neutral when espoucing an "ideal", no matter what this ideal is. And there are many political esperanto groups, a.o. a political party trying to get the EU to adop Esperanto. Then there was TEJO's decision to hold the last Youth Conference in Israel, which is far from politically neutral (when there is an open call for a boycott, the neutral thing to do would be to stay away and make no statement at the same time, not to have a conference there.) Overall, these two examples are probably why I don't really partake in the Esperanto Movement, which ever that movement, as I consider the "neutral" claim to be an illusion...

For the most part, my experience has been, though, that most people learn Esperanto just for the sake of learning it... and treat it as any other language they know...
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