Esperanto ASAP- Introduction
INTRODUCTION : ANTAÛPAROLO
1). What is Esperanto?
Esperanto is a modern 'foreign' language - but probably at least ten times easier to learn than French, German or Spanish. It was written by a Polish optician Dr Ludwig Zamenhof and published in 1887.
The main critics of Esperanto malign it as being an 'artificial' or 'man-made' language. However, surely every other language in the world has been man-made! The difference is that they have developed haphazardly and illogically over hundreds or even thousands of years whereas Esperanto is a planned language designed to be easy to learn yet powerful enough to express any idea- however complex- usually more clearly and less ambiguously than the so-called 'natural' languages.
Zamenhof intended that Esperanto should be used as a second language by everyone. It was not intended to replace national languages. A Pole meeting another Pole would use Polish, an Arab meeting an Arab would use Arabic but a Pole meeting an Arab would use Esperanto for clear and easy communication without the need for hand signals or a few distorted words of English or French.
1). Why Should You Learn Esperanto?
Esperanto is a modern 'foreign' language - but probably at least ten times easier to learn than French, German or Spanish. It was written by a Polish optician Dr Ludwig Zamenhof and published in 1887.
The main critics of Esperanto malign it as being an 'artificial' or 'man-made' language. However, surely every other language in the world has been man-made! The difference is that they have developed haphazardly and illogically over hundreds or even thousands of years whereas Esperanto is a planned language designed to be easy to learn yet powerful enough to express any idea- however complex- usually more clearly and less ambiguously than the so-called 'natural' languages.
Zamenhof intended that Esperanto should be used as a second language by everyone. It was not intended to replace national languages. A Pole meeting another Pole would use Polish, an Arab meeting an Arab would use Arabic but a Pole meeting an Arab would use Esperanto for clear and easy communication without the need for hand signals or a few distorted words of English or French.
There are probably three main reasons for an individual to learn Esperanto :
(a).It is easy to learn and hence very satisfying for those who have found other languages too difficult (e.g. the author)}
(b).Once mastered it opens up the possibility of correspondence with people in almost every other country of the world.To illustrate this printed below is a list of the countries for which the author could provide an address of an active Esperantist (Just contact him!)
(*Democratic Republic Congo; +Congo Brazzaville).
In addition the Universala Esperanto-Asocio has (or at least has had) members also in :
Azores, Bermuda, Botswana, Gabon, Gambia, Guyana, Jamaica, Lesotho, Moldavia, Namibia, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, Sudan, Tahiti, Yemen.
(c).Even if interest is in other languages Esperanto provides an excellent introduction to grammar and simple linguistics. Experiments have proved that young children who have learnt Esperanto are capable of learning other languages much, much more quickly than children who have never studied Esperanto.
Linguistic experiments in Sheffield schools ,confirmed by the Finnish Ministry of Education and by a more recent experiment in Austria, Croatia and Slovenia proved that primary school children who learnt Esperanto first were able to learn English (and German) much more rapidly (30-35% more quickly) than their non-Esperanto colleagues
Refs:
J.B.Halloran, British Journal of Educational Psychology, Nov.1952
Opetusministeriön Esperantotyörhymä Muistio, Helsinki 1984 p.28
Interkulturo,Besednjakova 1, SL-62000 Maribor,Slovenia
Doctorate Thesis, Mauro La Torre (1999)
3). How does Esperanto achieve its aims?
The three main aspects of a language are :
(a). The Grammar
The Grammar in Esperanto has no exceptions. Let us consider the situation of verbs. Perhaps you can remember little else of French and German in school but pages and pages of irregular verbs! Typical text books(*) in French, German and Spanish contain respectively 4, 6 and 4 summary pages of tables of the various verbal forms (and these only contain information for the most common irregular verbs). The Portuguese volume contains 15 such pages!
(*The 'Teach Yourself' Series (Hodder and Stoughton): All Edition 1)
The summary in Esperanto for every known verb can easily be achieved in just ten lines! (See chapter 3, Section 10)
(b).Pronunciation
Esperanto is 100% phonetic i.e. every letter has one and only one sound, there are no silent letters and the stress is in a fixed position. It simply could not be easier!
(c).Vocabulary.
The Esperanto vocabulary is based on the most commonly used words in Western European languages. This makes it very easy for anyone with a smattering of French and German. Of course, non-Europeans do not have this advantage- yet Esperanto is so much easier for them to learn than English or other European languages that Esperanto has done particularly well in countries such as China, South Korea and Japan.
Furthermore by a brilliant system of logical word building using prefixes and suffixes Zamenhof succeeded in building a huge vocabulary from a relatively small number of roots. Thus if we compare the English-Esperanto and Esperanto-English sections of a well known dictionary* we can see the economy of word learning required in Esperanto :
English-Esperanto 254 pages
Esperanto-English 119 pages
(*Teach Yourself Esperanto Dictionary (Wells)}
Despite this, Esperanto is usually more exact and less ambiguous than English!!
Lastfoje ^san^gita : la 27an de novembro, 2006
