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From: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
Subject: Re: languages & happiness!!
Message-ID: <E55zzH.7zC@scn.org>
Sender: news@scn.org
Reply-To: lilandbr@scn.org (Leland Bryant Ross)
Organization: Seattle Community Network
References: <32F59A5A.60D4@sn.nono> <853605030.2652@dejanews.com> <32F294DE.1682@sn.nono> <5cv8d3$g6b@due.unit.no> <32F33694.7F3B@sn.nono> <5cvp4t$l55@due.unit.no> <32F36F77.4B2B@sn.nono> <32f4302d.8446343@nntp.best.com> <32F47426.313C@sn.nono> <32f4cc99.
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 04:47:40 GMT
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1026999@nntp.best.com> <
Organization: Seattle Community Network

In a previous article, ablehr@sn.nono (Anders Blehr) says:
>
>That Esperanto is the only language that has given birth to a culture.
>

(I doubt it.  I think all human languages are constantly both born of and 
bearing the cultures of their participants.  Thus all who participate 
actively in the use of Esperanto bring *to* it their culture--their 
native and other languages, their childhood experiences, their tastes and 
their prejudices, among many other factors--and they take *from* it, in 
greater or lesser measure, cultural features that they didn't have 
before.  And the same is true of English, Norwegian, Yiddish... and was 
true of the Gaulish Asteriks putatively spoke before his descendants 
learned French ;-) ...)

Re:  Antiquity of language construction--Greek rhaetoricians and what 
have you (from earlier exchanges between mainly Anders and Gary) and with 
reference on occasion to the "joy of using Esperanto" (ELNA's phrase) and 
the artificial flower metaphor of Anders':

Clearly the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Sanskrit of those languages' 
classical literary periods were quite divergent from their writers' 
milieux' vernaculars.  It can reasonably be argues that--though not 
perhaps "artificial" or "constructed" in their origins, these languages 
had been *kept alive artificially*--on life support, to use a medical 
metaphor--far past their prime--yet it was precisely *then*, when they 
ought "naturally" to have been *dead*, that they achieved their finest 
*artistic* embodiments--not like artificial-vs.-cultivated flowers so 
much as like cut roses blooming in a vase miles (read centuries) from 
their roots.  The derivation of both "artificial" and "artistic" from the 
same Latin "ars" (oops, pun consciously unintended) may hide (or reveal) 
a pertinent truth...

Re: the "pleasure of using Esperanto is so keen..." (Miko) and Anders' 
retort that surely "you're not saying that 'the pleasure of using 
Esperanto' is 'keener' than the pleasure of using any other language you 
master perfectly"...

Leaving aside the question of perfection, it seems to me that for myself 
and many of the more fluent Esperantists I've shared this "pleasure" 
with--many of them, like me, fluent native English-speakers; others, say, 
Norwegian- or Russian- or Japanese-speakers--the secret of the pleasure, 
the thing that makes it different from (if not keener than) communicating 
similar semantic data in English, Norwegian, Russian or Japanese, comes 
at least in part from the fact that so much in Esperanto's structure is 
"productive" or permissive that in the others is "fossilized" or prescribed/
proscribed.  It is (for *me* at least) inherently enjoyable to *create* 
meaningful utterances in Esperanto whose English counterparts, thanks to 
the dead weight of millenia of "silent people" unthinkingly straitjacketing
my mother tongue and leaving behind a mausoleal scent, would sound like I 
was paraphrasing _Finnegans Wake_ `a la Illustrated Classics for 
Juniors.  De mortuis and all that, but still, they've removed some of the 
potential pleasure from English--if it was ever there--in areas where 
Esperanto is less constricting and thus more fun.

Sorry if I got a little wordy... :-)
--
Liland Brajant ROS'           Aspergas mi per spermo de l' espero
P O Box 30091                    virginon de l' argxenta astro
Seattle, WA 98103 Usono       en la arom' de sxia sino cxasta
Tel. (206) 633-2434  	         dum farniento de l' vespero.   --Mihhalski
			
