Malsaĝecoj
Finally figured out something that has been puzzling me for a long time.

Esperanto was never going to be a universal language because humans don't need or want a universal language. But it might have been much more useful if Zamenhof hadn't missed three BIG pieces of human perception and reality. The title above (roughly meaning Stupidities) includes all of them.

In general Zamenhof (1) used hard mathematical logic where it didn't belong, and (2) used soft natural processes where they weren't needed and (3) didn't notice one major reason why English is popular.

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(1) The BIG miss was in the realm of adjectives. Zamenhof was following the idiotic "sciency" view of perception, which is still unfortunately widespread. Every "science" teacher will tell you There's No Such Thing As Cold Or Dark. Cold Is Only The Absence Of Heat, And Dark Is Only The Absence Of Light.

So Esperanto forms its adjectives mathematically. Varma is warm, Malvarma is cool. Luma is light, Malluma is dark. For every pair of qualities, Zamenhof rather arbitrarily chose the 'good' one as unmarked, and prefixed the 'opposite' with Mal. But what's an opposite? It's a hopelessly slippery concept, not reducible to math.



First, Mal is the wrong prefix. Mal doesn't mean 'not' in any language, it means 'bad' in most, 'small' in Slavic, 'paint' in German, and 'shopping' in English. Orwell fixed this problem in Newspeak with Unwarm and Unlight, while intentionally leaving the main mechanistic failure in place.

The main failure is simple. Yes, Goddamnit, There Is Such A Thing As Cold And Dark. Cold is completely distinct from abstract and meaningless crap like Not-Hot or Lack-Of-Hot or Zero-Hotness. Human senses are explicitly two-ended and dynamic. Cold means Less Hot Than It Was Before, or Less Hot Than It Is Over There. Dark means Less Light Than Before, or Less Light Than Over There. Beyond that, Cold and Dark carry huge piles of associations and memories that are utterly disjunct from the analogies and flavors of Hot and Light.

And even if you want to disdain human perception as Subjective you still have the same complete contrast of qualities and processes at the mechanistic level. How do you make something hot? By [electrical or mechanical] friction, or by combustion, or indirectly by fission. By transforming a bit of mass into vibration of entire atoms. And how do you make it cold? Not by transforming energy back into mass, not by defriction or decombustion or defission. Those processes DO NOT EXIST. You make something cold[er] by blocking off the usual sources of heat, or by hugely complex refrigeration cycles that essentially move the vibrational energy Over There. Similarly with Light and Dark. You make something light[er] by directing electromagnetic energy toward it and encouraging the energy to bounce into our eyes; you make it dark[er] by absorbing some of the energy instead of reflecting it.

All of those processes could be collapsed into the loose idea of steering energy in various directions, with lots of complexities tacked on. The important thing in all of them is the dynamic movement of energy one way or another, which corresponds nicely with the human perception of dynamic change one way or another. The same applies to other opposable pairs like High vs Low or Fancy vs Plain. It's always a directional change from an actual or remembered baseline.

Presence vs absence, One vs Zero, the "sciency" or Esperanto way of thinking, doesn't come anywhere near the physical AND perceptual reality of adjectival qualities.

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(2) This is more subtle and linguisty. Zamenhof was trying to compromise or mix the virtues of synthetic and agglutinative languages, and lost both.

Agglutination is strictly mechanical, and it IS common among natural languages.

Verbs in Esperanto are properly and beautifully agglutinative. Start with a root. Romp is a root meaning break. The next attachment gives the tense, -a- for present, -i- for past, -o- for future, -u- for conditional or subjunctive. The next attachment can be -s for simple active or -ta for passive participle or -nta for active participle. Mi rompas = I break. Mi rompos = I will break. La rompanta knabo = the boy who is (in the habit of) breaking (things). La rompota fenestro = the window that will be broken. All perfectly orthogonal, just like Turkish or Korean. Because this is a natural mechanism, verbs are easy to learn and powerfully flexible to use. The best part of the language.

Nouns are messy and confused. I think Zamenhof was trying to mix agglutinative and synthetic without fully understanding why the mix is impossible.

He started with agglutinative. All nouns end in o. To form plural add -j (which should have been -y). La fenestroj = the windows. To form accusative add -n after the root or after the plural. La knabo rompis la fenestron = the boy broke the window. La knaboj rompis la fenestrojn = the boys broke the windows. So far it's agglutinative, BUT Zamenhof didn't take full advantage of the agglutinative way of thinking. Natural agg languages use the case ending for all the dynamic directions and relationships that a noun can assume. They have consistent endings for the inevitable NGDA, and by-means-of, along-with, into, out-of, away-from, and a dozen others. This means that agg languages don't need a lot of little connector words, because the dynamic directions are bundled with the noun.

The one oblique case that natural languages DO NOT bother to mark most of the time is accusative. Logically and binarily, you might think the accusative would be the most general. Zamenhof clearly thought so, which is why he chose to mark ONLY the accusative. But natural languages don't think so. In German and Latin and Russian, you'll find two or three cases that do get marked pretty solidly and consistently, but the accusative is only present part of the time for some classes of nouns.

Here's where Zamenhof lost the tune. Agg languages mark the noun and stop there. Mechanistic logic says that one set of attachments gets the meaning across, so that's all you need. Synthetic languages spread the grammar across a major part of the sentence, generally with different forms and different mappings for nouns and adjectives and articles.

Zamenhof picked up this quality of agreement and used it mechanically and orthogonally, which misses the point. La malbona knabo rompis la belan fenestron = the bad boy broke the pretty window. La malbonaj knaboj rompis la belajn fenestrojn = the bad boys broke the pretty windows. Since the number and the (unnecessary) accusative are marked reliably and completely on the noun, you don't need to mark the adjective.

In synthetic languages the splashed-out forms are more like a spice or color than a mechanism. In German the article normally carries the case and number fairly reliably; the noun may carry only the number; and the adjective may carry only the case. Everything depends on everything else, so each word carries less of the load both productively and receptively. You can sniff the relationship from one or all of the pieces, and that's enough.

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Finally (3), Zamenhof didn't catch one of the big selling points of English. No diacritical marks. He grew up in Polish, which uses lots of different diacritics inefficiently, so he should have been more sensitive to this point.


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Artistic sidenote: Happystar is, of course, using complementary colors to illustrate the point literally. Longtime Esperantists would see it metaphorically. They would change the right side to "Malverda stelo? Iam." Sometimes. The USSR had a peculiar off/on relationship with Esperanto, similar to their relationship with ham radio. Sometimes they used and manipulated these two 'internationalist' groups for propaganda purposes, and sometimes they strongly discouraged both groups as potential spies. It was hard to keep up with the dynamic directions of favor/disfavor.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 10:06 AM