Talk:Esperanto

Slavic middle plane

Claude Piron's 1981 paper "Esperanto: european or asiatic language?" is cited to support the statement that Esperanto's grammar has more in common with Asian languages than with European ones. The paper's section titled "The Middle Plane" highlights several language features that are traditionally considered individually, but together can be construed as an additional linguistic structure that might be worth mentioning in this Wikipedia article.

This information could be added to the "Linguistic properties" section, in the "Classification" subsection, or in a new subsection called "Syntactic and semantic middle layer" or "Slavic influence".

Specifically, the paper's section "The Middle Plane" covers these aspects of the language:

• (1) Word order and style
• (2) Syntax
  • (a) sequence of tenses
  • (b) obligatory reflexive
  • (c) distinction between modifying and predicative complements
  • (d) use of adverbial form with infinitival or clausal subject
  • (e) infinitive as prepositionless complement of noun
  • (f) asymmetry or constraints placed on the use of prepositions followed by infinitives
• (3) Various non-Western aspects (distinctions of nuance)
• (4) Obligatory distinction between transitivity and intransitivity
• (5) Turns of phrase
• (6) Semantic associations of roots, independent of source language
• (7) Forms taken by loanwords
• (8) The writing system (abbreviations, and lack of coarticulation effects)

Dotyoyo (talk) 20:29, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

The problem with Piron is that he is a language activist, and so his ideas should be checked against other secondary or tertiary sources. We can include this with an attribution to Piron, but we shouldn't give his ideas undue weight or prominence. Esperanto was designed to be an intermediary language, with a synthesis of different elements from its source languages, which makes attributing certain features to specific (groups of) source languages difficult, especially when these languages are in a continuum or a Sprachbund. It is for example often unclear whether a given feature is supposed to be classified as "Slavic-influenced" or more generally "Central European-influenced". TucanHolmes (talk) 09:26, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I've added a sentence regarding Claude Piron's work to the end of the classification section. Dotyoyo (talk) 01:56, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

There's a reason this was removed from the article years ago. It only works if by "Asiatic" you mean "Russian". There's obviously a Slavic core, e.g. in semantics and phonology, that many people have commented on. But people wouldn't read 'Asiatic' to mean 'Russian', and if it's not that, what's "Asiatic grammar"? Topic-comment rather than subject-verb syntax? Verbs as adjectives? Verbs as adpositions? Nouns as adjectives? Nouns as adpositions? Noun classifiers? Actor-pivot morphology? Infixes? Aspect rather than tense? Lack of pronouns as a part of speech?

Non-Western, sure (i.e. Slavic). But "Asiatic" here is undefined and therefore meaningless. It doesn't add anything, only gives the false impression that it's saying something.

For "European", there is a vaguely defined Standard Average European that has some utility. But there's nothing comparable for Asia. — kwami (talk) 03:04, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

If we are mentioning Piron, we should be clear that he is an Esperanto activist, rather than an academic authority. His writings from his website should be treated as both self-published and heavily partisan. That means that, if we're making exceptional claims (like, that Esperanto grammar is more Asian than European), then we need an exceptional source and Piron is not an exceptional source. That applies even if we attribute him, because the mere fact of mentioning the claim gives it a credibility it doesn't obviously merit. Kahastok talk 11:07, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

WP:RS doesn't support this. There are several obvious problems with it. One is the claim that Z didn't know any "Asiatic" languages. Yet Hebrew and Aramaic are Asian languages. (Off-topic: I didn't know Z had studied Aramaic. I've never seen that before.) Another is the alleged "syntactic simplicity" that Eo shares with Chinese -- French and German are a lot simpler than Chinese is, at least to someone from a European background, and I doubt that Eo is 'syntactically simple' from a Chinese background either.

The Slavic connection is much more straightforward (and easily defined), and Piron's paper seems to have done a much better job with that. That's also something that a number of other people have noticed.

Claims that Eo is not "Indo-European" are usually made by people who have little to no idea what non-IE languages are actually like, and are never AFAICT accompanied by any data apart from a few (often inaccurate) generalizations. — kwami (talk) 20:46, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Claude Piron knew both Esperanto and Chinese; he did professional interpretation for UNO then the WHO from English, Chinese, Spanish and Russian into French. Does this make him biased? Are PhDs who disparage Esperanto without ever having tried to learn it, or at least find out how it works, more "objective"? IMHO his arguments, as laid out in his free.fr user site (kept up unchanged by his friends since he died), make sense, and if one wants to refute them it should be with equally solid arguments from people who seriously knew Esperanto, not with a disparaging "Oh, he's an Esperanto activist, he doesn't count". For a serious opinion about, let's say, German, would you not require a reference from someone who seriously studied German? Then why should the opinions of those who seriously studied Esperanto be rejected as "Esperanto activists" when looking for a serious opinion about Esperanto?

This said, I believe that Claude Piron's opinions merit a mention, and that they should be attributed to him, not necessarily taken as "the truth from on high". I tried to do that in the article text. After reading Piron's article, I find his opinions interesting, to say the least. — Tonymec (talk) 21:59, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Point about needed to know a language before opining on it. We shouldn't cite people who don't know the topic. Per WP:RS, they aren't acceptable as sources.

I would be curious as to how Piron determined that Chinese is syntactically simpler than French. Is it that in French you need to choose between être and avoir to govern a participle, or that in Chinese a word may function as either a verb or a preposition? The one isn't followed by European languages in general, whereas the other is nothing like Eo.

By "Asiatic", does he mean just Chinese? Or is Esperanto closer to Arabic, Sanskrit, Tagalog and Korean than it is to French? Does he have significant knowledge of "Asiatic" languages, so that he has some idea of what he's talking about? — kwami (talk) 22:37, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Well, IIUC by reading the article, by "Asiatic" he meant "Chinese-like" i.e. not only Mandarin, but what one might call "Sinitic" languages. He draws a parallel between the way Chinese and Esperanto build derived words from constant "building blocks" as opposed to European languages where you have to learn the whole set of relations again for each basic root: for instance, the family ox, bull, cow, calf, beef, veal, etc. corresponds in Esperanto to bovo, virbovo, bovino, bovido, bovaĵo, bovidaĵo, etc., and the same set of prefixes and suffixes are used again with the radix ĉeval- to make the equivalents of horse, stallion, mare, foal, filly, and words nonexistent in English for "horse meat" and "foal meat" if they were needed. Similarly for every "family" of animals, where in English (or French or…) one has to learn the whole set again but in Esperanto (or, IIUC, Chinese) a single set of affixes works with all word roots, making the learning effort linear rather than quadratic in relation to the amount of concepts learned. Similarly for samlandano compatriot, samklasano classmate, samfamiliano relation (i.e. person of the same family) etc. where Esperanto and Chinese simply plop different roots between a common prefix and suffix to mean "member of the same <something>", while European languages need ad hoc variants in every case. — Tonymec (talk) 23:22, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

It's not syntax, then, but word-formation, and not Asiatic, but Chinese. (Sinitic is Chinese.) That makes much more sense, and I think is defensible. — kwami (talk) 23:31, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

The word Sinitic was unfortunate; I imagine Tonymec was thinking of e.g. Vietnamese, which is unrelated but (as I misunderstand) similarly isolating. —Tamfang (talk) 23:24, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Also, don't delete tags from an article. They're there for a reason, and need to be resolved. — kwami (talk) 23:33, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

I thought I was giving the needed "clarification". — Tonymec (talk) 23:50, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Deleting a citation-needed tag without providing a citation is not clarifying anything. — kwami (talk) 01:36, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

P.S. A single word root can be used in Esperanto as a preposition, a verb, an adjective, a noun, etc., with the single requirement that the result have a meaning. The difference with Chinese is that Esperanto nouns, verbs, adjectives, but not prepositions, need a specific "grammatical ending" to make their nature clear. For instance, the preposition per "by, through, by way of" has been reused as the verb per·i "to transmit, to be a go-between", then its present participle per·ant·o "go-between" reused in kotiz·per·ant·o "one who collects membership fees (for some association)", abon·per·ant·o "one who collects subscriptions (to some magazine)" etc. (where I use the middle dot · to separate the "invariable elements" used in word-building, the way Zamenhof did with dots, apostrophes, or the like, in the various different-language editions of his book The International Language). — Tonymec (talk) 23:50, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

A root is not a word. Peri is a derivation of per. It's a different word. In Mandarin, the single word yán can mean 'to follow', but is also equivalent to a preposition 'along'. It's ambiguous whether you're saying 'following the river' or 'along the river'. Esperanto is most emphatically not like that. — kwami (talk) 01:35, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Zagreb

The Zagreb method is an Esperanto teaching method that was developed in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (present-day capital city of Croatia),

I believe Zagreb was the capital of Croatia then too, and would prefer

... developed in Zagreb, capital of Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia),

or, even better, omit any direct mention of Croatia or Yugoslavia, whose relevance is not obvious. That's what links are for. —Tamfang (talk) 18:52, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

KTP

Historically, much music has been written in the language such as Kaj Tiel Plu.

Kaj Tiel Plu ('and so forth', literally 'and thus more') appears to be the name of a performing group, not a work. Either way, the sentence could be clearer. —Tamfang (talk) 00:43, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

By the way, there exists eo:Kategorio:Esperantaj muzikaj grupoj. —Tamfang (talk) 00:45, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Islam

When did Ayatollah Khomeini recommend Esperanto as a international language?

When was the Esperanto Koran published?

Is Esperanto still used in Iran, especially in Qom?

MountVic127 (talk) 04:25, 28 May 2024 (UTC)