🚀 go-pugleaf

Sigh.  Anyone who could characterize Esperanto as "ugly" just doesn't know the
language well enough to have a basis for judgement.

While I sympathize with Mike Urban's points about the utility of Esperanto not
depending on whether or not it is beautiful, much stronger statements can be
made concerning the less utilitarian virtues of the language.  To put it in a
deliberatiely provocative but appropriate form, I have sometimes lectured on
the topic "The Cultural Value of Esperanto in Education."

I have greatly enjoyed the novels of Alexis Kivi, the founder of modern Finnish
literature.  And I have benefited a great deal from the insights obtained by
reading literary works from Hungary and Bulgaria, where due to their histories
the good guys always lose, resulting in a literature far more pessimistic than
the optimism of American literature.  These cultural joys and insights came to
me through excellent native-speaker translations into Esperanto.  This provided
a window onto worlds that otherwise I wouldn't even have known about.

Among other important cultural benefits, this kind of direct contact with
smaller cultural groups helps guard against a very common dehumanizing
dismissal of these groups.  Even teachers of French or German, who ought to be
in the business of heightening the multi-cultural awareness of their students,
are likely out of ignorance to claim that "there is no such thing as a
Bulgarian novel."  Such attitudes slide easily into the notion that Bulgarians
aren't really quite fully human, unlike we English speakers who have a real
literature.

Moreover, the beauty and power of Shakespeare for native speakers of English is
closely related to the lack of expressiveness that non-native speakers suffer
when trying to express themselves in English.  English obtains nuance and
expressiveness through an enormous and multi-source vocabulary.  It is
extremely difficult for a foreigner to pick his/her way through this loaded
minefield.  Do I say freedom or liberty?  Is the noun form of strong
strongness?  Etc.  Esperanto provides nuance and expressiveness in a very
different way, through a small vocabulary with extremely powerful
word-formation mechanisms which, due to their regularity, can be expolited by a
non-native speaker.

When I speak English or Spanish with a Mexican, one of us is in a strongly
dominant position and the other unable to fully express oneself.  The full
power of the language of Cervantes is not accessible to me, nor the power of
the langauge of Shakespeare to the Mexican.  But it is a fact that in Esperanto
both of us can be FAR more expressive of our thoughts and emotions, of our
culture, than in either foreign language.  True, I am less expressive in
Esperanto than in English.  But the key cultural point here is that I am far
more expressive in Esperanto than I can ever hope to be in Spanish.  The same
is true for Italian, despite having lived in Italy for a year.

Bruce Sherwood