Esperanto: A Case Study in Typological Intersections
(Published on: May 17, 2007)
I realize that the paper itself says that it's dated September 1, 2007, but I think that's because I regenerated it on that day for some reason. The paper was originally turned in some time at the end of Spring 2007, when I took LING400 Language Typology.
I was only a sophomore back then, and my original thought upon rereading this piece was that it sounded "young," so keep that in mind when you read it. Basically, I hadn't fallen into "my style" yet when I wrote that paper, and so I say certain things in ways I wouldn't necessarily do today. It was a substantial piece of research though, and I think I argued it well. It makes more sense if you understand Relational Grammar (the professor who taught that class made us use it), otherwise it makes a little sense if you know some linguistics. If you don't know either of those, then it'll probably just be really boring to you :p
As bonus trivia, my original contact with Esperanto came in the fall and winter of 2004, when a beautiful girl from Germany totally changed my life. She was a native speaker of not only Esperanto, but also German and Polish, and was conversant in French and English. So she gets credit for the seeds that ultimately led to this paper.
Here's the introduction (citations abbreviated and footnotes stripped--see full paper):
Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, Esperanto currently maintains the distinction of being the most widely spoken constructed language, registering over 2 million speakers of all ages, most of whom know it as a second language only (Gordon, 2005). Zamenhof billed Esperanto as the La Lingvo Internacia---the international language---reflecting his intent of creating an auxiliary language for international interactions. On the one hand, the proponents of Esperanto celebrate the language's practicality, grammatical regularity, flexibility, and expressivity; on the other hand, critics stage counter-arguments for a clumsy phonology and problems with the very same grammatical regularity the supporters claim to see. However, we will forgo this impassioned debate in favor of exploring a more linguistically interesting side of Esperanto. The initial motivation for this investigation is indeed one that originated from an argument made by Esperanto enthusiasts; that is, Esperanto's use as a bridge language for translation as well its purported ease of acquisition. Translations have been judged to be more accurate whenever Esperanto is used as the bridge language and two separate studies in the past have demonstrably proven Esperanto's benefits to language learners: students who take a year of Esperanto before learning a "true" natural language consistently outperformed a control group which started with that same foreign language, but without first learning Esperanto (Williams, 1965; Richardson, 1988). If these testimonies hold, then there must be some underlying universal typology that Esperanto encapsulates for it to be such a successful liaison between the world's languages. In that sense, while critics point out that Esperanto is very biased in favor of European languages, there are indeed strong Esperanto movements in Asia (especially Mandarin speakers in China). It seems the only places where the language has not gained a significant following are in the Americas and Africa (Gordon, 2005).
