Esperanto - yay or nay?

[MrBogosity]

According to the Universal Esperanto Association's website, they have representatives in "the United Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, etc."

The UN may have never made an official move, but it wasn't for lack of this group's trying.

The fact still remains: language is a bottom-up system of self-organization, like evolution or economics. It can't be imposed from the top down. Even if they did get everyone to speak Esperanto, it wouldn't be too long before you had different dialects, which over time will diverge into their own separate languages based on the particular communities that use them.

[Tom S. Fox]

The UN may have never made an official move, but it wasn't for lack of this group's trying.

Yes, but that doesn't make it a failure of the government.

The fact still remains: language is a bottom-up system of self-organization, like evolution or economics. It can't be imposed from the top down.

Why not?

Even if they did get everyone to speak Esperanto, it wouldn't be too long before you had different dialects, which over time will diverge into their own separate languages based on the particular communities that use them.

I don't think there is much room for dialects within the UN.

[MrBogosity]

Why not? Because people do what they want. Look at all of the attempts to do even minor things with English. One of the most successful ones is the rule--completely artificially injected--that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition. And look at how many people do.

Another example is sign language. It's artificially created, and there's an "official" version, but the truth is signers do what they want, and when signers from different areas try to talk together they often have difficulties.

[Tom S. Fox]

Why not? Because people do what they want. Look at all of the attempts to do even minor things with English. One of the most successful ones is the rule--completely artificially injected--that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition. And look at how many people do.

Yeah, but that's because in most cases it is completely impossible and unnatural.
Besides, how you speak a language is different from whether you speak a language.

Also, what makes you think that Esperanto would necessarily split of into different languages? We haven't seen that happening to English, yet, and that's spoken in different places of the world.

[MrBogosity]

We haven’t seen that happening to English, yet

Oh, really? Go to England and talk to a cockney sometime. "Oy, daon' be jak, mate! Cam an nok ap ta ra'le an' 'um an weal gaw ap th'apples an pears u' me fla' an' 'av a bi'o tao'n d'ole!"

[Tom S. Fox]

Even if people somewhere started to speak a variation of Esperanto, they could easily learn to speak standard Esperanto again.

[MrBogosity]

And they could choose to speak The Queen's English if they wanted to, too. What's your point?

[Tom S. Fox]

What's your point? You said that the possibility of the language changing is a problem, and now you admit that it isn't a problem.

[MrBogosity]

No, I'm saying that language IS going to change, on its own, and that trying to enforce things from the top down--either to enforce changes or to force things to stay the same--is foolhardy.

[Tom S. Fox]

What do you mean by "enforcing from the top down"?

[MrBogosity]

Artificial constructs are top-down enforcement. Like the sentences-ending-with-prepositions thing. It's an attempt to artificially control the uncontrollable. Same thing with the feminist extremists' attempts to get rid of gender-based personal pronouns. It just doesn't work.

[Tom S. Fox]

Okay, but who, in your opinion, is trying to enforce what from the top down in regards to Esperanto?

[MrBogosity]

The group I just mentioned. They've been trying to do it for over 100 years!

[Tom S. Fox]

This may also be due to conservatism.

Also, you are skipping topics again. We were talking about why language change may or may not be a problem. Why are you talking about the UN, again?

[MrBogosity]

I wasn't talking about language change. I was talking about the inappropriateness of trying to control a bottom-up system from the top down. That's all I've EVER been talking about in this thread.