Monday, December 2, 2019

"Esperanto Is A Tool To Talk With The People From Other Countries Who Don't Understand Each Other's Native Languages"

As suspected, my electricity keeps going off and on, one of the reasons I haven't written the kind of post I need to keep looking up stuff to write and a sustained effort.  I hope it's better tomorrow.   

I am getting negative feedback about the Esperanto posting, the right kind of negative feedback from the kind of dolts I knew would have that reaction, so I'll continue with those.  I love pissing those guys off.

It is typical monoglot idiocy to think that Esperanto was supposed to become the first language of anyone, obliterating mother tongues.  As I showed the other day, it's a paranoid delusion they shared with, among others, Hitler.   As I showed the other day to obviously no effect.  Perhaps they don't read their own language very well. Post-literate. 

We know that wasn't the intention because we have L.L. Zamenhof's First Book of his language in which he stated his intentions to have a single, easily learned lingua franca that would be widely known and so would be everyone's first second language, they retaining their mother tongues, probably better than has happened under the various "natural" language hegemonies, Latin, English, etc. 

Two things come to mind.   First is an interview I saw years ago, in which a displaced Soviet author, who had fled to the West, ending up in, where else,  New York City.  He bitterly complained against American liberalism, LGBT rights, among other things, and that his books were unknown in the country he now lived in.  That could be because his books, as his interview were entirely and exclusively in Russian - his English being, apparently, inadequate despite living here for a number of years, not good enough to either make his own translation into English or to give an interview in it.  I don't know why anyone else hadn't valued his work enough to translate it, maybe it was junk or maybe they were just some of the hundreds and thousands of books which never are translated. 

Another was a scientist whose discoveries, more than a decade earlier, had been unintentionally re-discovered by someone else.  As I recall the scientist who had been unknowingly copied was pissed-off about it.  The second researcher hadn't realized he was rediscovering something because the original papers of the first scientist had been published in Icelandic and not translated.  

If Esperanto had already been the lingua franca of educated people, it being extremely easy to learn, both of these guys could have learned it well enough to publish their work in their own translation - as a number of Esperantists have done - and their work would be open to the world instead of, in one case, being unknown in the country he lived in, though many, many millions in the world read Russian, and in the other in a fairly little understood language little read outside of his own small country. 

A good deal of what I've read in the language is by authors whose mother tongues were everything from Icelandic (Baldur Ragnarsson) to Croatian, (Spomenka Stimec) to Japanese (Verda Majo,  Miyamoto Masao), Czech (Josef Rumler), Ukrainian (Mikaelo Bronŝtejn),  Hungarian, (Kalman Kalocsay, Teo Soros, etc.)  and I could name other authors and people online, Chinese, Mongolian, Nigerian, etc. most of whom have never been translated, that I know of, into English. 

As a Jutubisto from Slovakia said a couple of years back,  "Esperanto estas ilo por paroli kun la homoj de malsamaj nacioj kiuj ne komprenas siajn hemlingvoj."  Esperanto is a tool for speaking with the people of other nations who don't understand each other's native languages.  Which it does do, online probably more than at any other time in its existence.  If he'd said it in his native tongue or Italian, the language where he lives now, I'd never have understood it. 

In the United States, as in other countries, it would seem to also be useful as a tool for ignorant tools to expose themselves as tools as they ignorantly say stupid things about it.  They're no less stupid than jerks who yell at people for speaking Spanish or French or Navaho instead of English, they're just a slightly different flavor of bigots. 

No comments:

Post a Comment