On 11/23/05, Larry Sulky <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> My greatest concern about Esperanto is not the grammar, which, though more
> complex than some natlang grammars, is probably more regular than any, and

More regular than any natural language that inflects for all
the same grammatical categories, anyway.  I've heard claims that
Indonesian/Malaysian  is similarly easy because it has much less
inflection, though I don't know if it has so little irregularity.

> therefore pretty easy. I'm not so concerned about the lexicon, either; a
> word that baffles me may be perfectly clear to another.

More global neutrality in the lexicon would be a plus,
but having a reasonably small core set of roots
and a powerful derivational morphology (affix system)
is more important.  A language having 10,000 words
of which about 2000 are cognates for the average
learner would probably be _harder_, other things equal,
than the original Esperanto with its 1000-odd roots
and powerful set of affixes; and probably harder
(for many purposes) than modern Esperanto,
in which one can get by pretty well with a vocabulary
of 2000 or so roots (though you need a rather larger
vocabulary to read books without having
to look in the dictionary frequently, due to the unfortunate
tendency, which Don and Todd have talked about, for
some European Esperanto speakers to
use borrowed words when compounds from
existing words would do perfectly well).

> My concern is the phonology: consonant clusters, less-common consonants,
> voiced/unvoiced distinctions, and strong stress rules. I fear that these
> features will ensure that those speakers who (learning Esperanto as adults)
> cannot master them will be ghettoised in relation to those for whom these
> features are easy and natural. I can learn to speak Esperanto with very
> little "accent"; can someone whose language lacks 1/3 of the phonemes of
> Esperanto do so?

Maybe so, maybe not... it seems to take a lot longer, anyway.
Most of the Japanese speakers of Esperanto I've met (admittedly
only a few, and most of them were comparative beginners,
having started to learn the language only a couple of years
or so before I met them) had a strong accent such that I
sometimes had to ask them to repeat or clarify what they'd
said.  I've scarcely travelled outside the U.S. because of
health problems, so Don Harlow would be better placed
to comment on how many Asian speakers of Esperanto
manage to overcome the phonology problem and
how long it typically takes them.

> That, to me, is where the greatest challenge to neutrality lies.

I reckon you're probably right; this is why Konya seems
to me among the best of the recent non-Euroclone IAL
projects.  Ceqli is fairly cool grammatically and has a
global vocabulary but, though an improvement phonologically
over Esperanto, Interlingua etc., it still has consonant
clusters, and too many phonemes.  Vorlin is simpler,
but still has voicing distinction and (medial only)
consonant clusters.  Toki Pona is the only recent
public conlang* that has a simpler phonology than
Konya, and it is too simple in grammar
and lexicon to be a general-purpose IAL,
nor does it have self-segregating morphology,
which I think is pretty important for ease of
learning if not for ease of use, especially
when few cognates are recognizable.
I'm confirming this suspicion I've long
had, while learning Volapük.  It has a derivational
morphology similar to Esperanto's, but because
so few of the roots are recognizable, the
parsing problem is quite hard; when I see an
unfamiliar word of two or more syllables,
it may take several trial-and-error
checks in the dictionary to figure out
whether it is several morphemes
or one, and if several, where the boundaries
are.  I had that problem occasionally
while learning Esperanto, but often
recognizing a cognate helped me resolve
it; this wouldn't be much help for a speaker
of Japanese or Indonesian learning Esperanto,
or anybody learning a language with
global vocabulary sources.

(Before Andrew Nowicki comments:
Yes, I know Ygyde has a simpler
phonology than Konya but it has other
problems typical of classificational
languages.)

* - I use the term "public conlang" because I couldn't
think of another to designate all the conlangs that
have actual speakers besides their creator.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/esp.htm
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