Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 23:12:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Chris Johnson <cj-AT-s1.ganet.net>
Subject: Re: Esperanto and Euro-Marxism


On Tue, 14 Mar 1995 n.gant-AT-genie.geis.com wrote:

> There should be Marxist-Esperanto or Marxist-Ido groups in Europe.
>  I think it is common more in the eastern European countries.  Also,
>  I believe Noam Chomsky is an expert on linguistics, but he is an
>  anarchist and not a Marxist proper.  Nonetheless, it would be
>  interesting to know his view of Esperanto in the context of its
>  political use-value in international information-sharing; I
>  think it would be quite important from a Marxist point of view.

I obviously can't say for sure what Chomsky's view would be, but as 
someone who sits in on his classes and reads a lot about linguistics, he 
very well may be indifferent to Esperanto.  On one hand, it appears to 
overcome the major problems that lots of artificial languages have.  It 
appears that it might be a possible human language, unlike, for example, 
lojban (Never base a language on predicate calculus.  No one who speaks 
lojban can do it in its "pure" form.); it was based heavily on other 
Indo-European languages.  It was just modified to simplify syntax and 
allomorphy.  There might be some syntactic problems.  I wonder about how 
many children have been brought up on Esperanto.  It would be interesting 
if they developed any major structural invovations.  This is something 
that is seen with pidgins: a simple form of communication (I'm not sure 
if I can call it a language, as it isn't natural in several senses) 
becomes a full creole language when taught to a child (presumably through 
the Universal Grammer).

While it is very possible he might support some sort of universal second 
language, he does support linguistic diversity.  A big project of 
linguists has been to try to save endangered languages.  As Ken Hale said 
in a very recent issue of Science News, when a language diappears, you 
lose oodles of information about how a culture looks at the world.  
(Obviously paraphrased.)

The last thing: Chomsky has never tried to tie a strong bond between his 
politics and linguistics.  It exists, but it is not the central point 
either way.

Chris Johnson                                    	     cj-AT-ganet.net
	[cjohnson-AT-bronze.coil.com will still work for awhile.]
"There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not 
even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth 
fighting for." - George Orwell



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