THE ESPERANTO FLAMEWAR FAQ


INTRODUCTION

Your newsgroup has been lucky enough to benefit from a 
crossposted flame war about Esperanto, a planned language 
aimed at easing international communication and increasing 
Usenet traffic. 

These flames tend to be lengthy and revolve around about 
eight arguments and associated counter-arguments, so here 
is a summary of these arguments so that you may avoid 
wasting your employer's money or failing to finish your 
thesis on schedule by repeating them one more time.

This FAQ is in the public domain, please distribute freely.
Originally compiled by franck@altsoft.demon.co.uk.


ARGUMENTS

(The arguments begin with the point against (-) Esperanto, 
followed by the argument for (+) Esperanto; simply read them 
the other way round if you are against Esperanto.)


-1. Esperanto is dead.

+1. Esperanto has 10 million speakers. (Well, it may 
have only 50000, but it definitely has some; look at 
soc.culture.esperanto and the web pages if you're not 
convinced.)


-2. A language with a simplified grammar cannot be 
expressive enough to do real literature and poetry.

+2. Yes, for instance English has no word gender, no 
inflections and extremely simplified conjugations, so 
that's why English will never have any literature. 
Real literature is written in German and Latin.


-3. You can't plan languages.

+3. Ask speakers of modern Hebrew, Nynorsk, Indonesian, 
etc.


-4. Everyone speaks English.

+4. You probably live in cloud cuckoo land. Simply try 
to discuss about something remotely challenging with 
normal people in a country where English is not the 
native language, or, more simply, read the messages of 
most non-natives (if any) taking part in the last Usenet 
flame, and weep.


-5. Esperanto will kill other languages.

+5. Esperantists want a second language for everybody 
so that we can then spend time using various national 
and local languages on their own merits instead of 
spending decades failing to master English.


-6. These Esperantists are fanatics, thinking they hold 
the Truth, and they are not even open to the idea of using 
other planned languages.

+6. Indeed, quite a few esperantists are like that, especially 
those who take part in the Esperanto flames. Nevertheless, 
there are also Esperantists, rauxmistoj, who don't care about 
esperanto becoming a universal second language and simply want 
to enjoy, now, an interesting and efficient language that allows 
them to meet strange people from all over the world.


-7. English is the language of business.

+7. Maybe, but capitalism sucks anyway. There's more to life 
than shopping and working (outside the USA at least).


-8. Everything on the Internet is in English.

+8. There are millions of Web pages and thousands of Usenet 
newsgroups in national languages; you could surf full-time 
reading only material in, say, German. The fact that your 
local news server doesn't have news groups in other languages 
may be related to the fact you live in an English speaking 
country.