Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 July 19

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July 19

I'm like how come?

How did the ubiquitescent expression "I'm like" ever come to mean "I said" or "I thought"? Do other languages have their own counterparts of this? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 03:43, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

For research purposes, this use of like is often called the quotative "like". One source states: "The process of grammaticalization is most obvious in like as a quotative. There seem to be no data of when like was first used in this way; [...]" (Simone Müller, Markers in Native and Non-Native English Discourse, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005, p 201). There is something similar in colloquial German "und ich so ..: "[whatever it was I said]" ---Sluzzelin talk 04:10, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Anyone old enough and close enough to the phenomenon can tell you it developed from people saying "Then I said something like..." "Then she went like..." "Then I was like..." μηδείς (talk) 04:21, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Heard today from a 17 year old girl discussing another girl at the recent deb(utante) ball - "She like looked like real good." I liked it. HiLo48 (talk) 08:35, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

French youths seem to use genre in a similar fashion.[1] "Et je suis, genre, ouais, quoi encore?" ("And I was, like, yeah, what again?") --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:15, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

In Swedish, it's ba (short for bara, normally meaning "just, only"). "Och jag ba - vem faaaan är det där!" ("And I'm like - who the F*CK is that?").--91.148.159.4 (talk) 11:35, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Swedes also use typ "type", which literally corresponds closely to French genre, but it's not so much of a quotative, more like "kinda, sorta" - although that meaning is actually close to the sense of "like" that gave rise to the current English quotative.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 11:44, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

The odd usage of this word dates to, like, the late 1950s at least. See Maynard G. Krebs. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:44, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

So, is it possible to passivise it? Scenario: You walk into a conversation and someone's saying:

• ... and she goes Yada yada, and I’m like Yida Yida ..."

and you want to know who her interlocutor was. Instead of asking "Who were talking to?", could you ask "Who are you like to?", or even "To whom are you like?" Or is that only possible with "I go/went" ("Who do/did you go to?")? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 05:01, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

No, because, as already mentioned, the phrase doesn't mean "I was talking to", it means, "I [said, did > 'went' > 'am'] (something) like" with a bunch of "uh"s and "um"s thrown in. "Like" developed as a more eloquent substitute for "um". See Valley girl and Valley Girl (song), the lyrics for which you can find here.μηδείς (talk) 01:55, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I thought not. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 05:57, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

There has been interesting linguistic research on this. "Like" does not only refer to quoting (it would be more accurate to say, paraphrasing) the words of oneself or others. It also serves as a way of explaining to one's interlocutor one's unstated emotional state or thoughts at the moment in the past to which the narrative is referring.

So she was like Ima get this dress this green one and I was like OMG

Translation - My friend told me she intended to purchase a particular green dress; in response, I felt incredulity and bewilderment, although I did not reveal these feelings to her by any verbal utterance. BrainyBabe (talk) 11:04, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

I see. The other version certainly has the advantage of conciseness ... if nothing else.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 05:57, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Obligatory sex-based gender marking for animals

In English dogs, cats and goats are usually just that, unless you want to elaborate with "bitches" (pardon me!), "billy-goats" and so forth. In French the generic noun for the animal is arbitrarily masculine or feminine, sometimes with an optional variant for the opposite sex. But how about a language with an obligatory [semantic] gender distinction, whereby (i) sentences with a subject, object and noun do have an overt gender distinction for the subject, and therefore (ii) "The llama stole my shoe" differs according to whether it's a male or female llama? (Surely there'd be an option for a llama of unknown sex; but at least in principle you'd have to remember which sex every example is.)

I did look in grammatical gender but I don't think it answers this. -- Hoary (talk) 05:33, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I'd have thought if the gender-distinction was actually obligatory, you'd have to say "A male-llama or a female-llama has stolen my shoe" - you cannot make a statement about 'llamas' in the abstract, because they don't exist. Or to look at it another way, you are using a language where female-llama' is a subset of 'female', rather than a subset of 'llama'. Biologically speaking, this is possibly justified. AndyTheGrump (talk) 05:50, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

See List of animal names. Oda Mari (talk) 05:56, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

...Or even better, don't. Our List of animal names article looks like a prime example of stuff that would have been deleted years ago if anyone had noticed it existed. Marked as lacking citations in 2007, and still full of arbitrary nonsense: a horde of Gerbils, anyone? AndyTheGrump (talk) 06:10, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

(ec x2)The only example of this issue that I could think of in English - what is the neuter singular word for cattle; one Bos taurus of unspecified sex? Roger (talk) 06:44, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

That would be an ox. DuncanHill (talk) 07:55, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary includes "especially an adult castrated male of the domestic species" in its definition of ox. I would certainly balk at calling a cow a "female ox", which sounds like a contradiction in terms to me. Angr (talk) 09:16, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

(e/c) Not true. One meaning of "ox" is "a castrated male".[2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Colapeninsula (talk • contribs) 09:17, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Chambers 20th Century: ox a general name for male or female of common domestic cattle (bull and cow), esp. a castrated male of the species" - so the castrated male meaning is one meaning of it (but I must say one I never heard growing up in dairy country). It is the ordinary English neuter singular of cattle. DuncanHill (talk) 09:26, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the word can have both meanings, but I think for a lot of people the castrated male meaning is the most salient, so if you use it in the more general sense you're likely to confuse people if you don't say specifically what you mean. Angr (talk) 09:37, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Sexual dimorphism is so marked in cattle that one rarely does need to refer to a neuter singular Bos taurus. There isn't another word (except steer, which to my mind is much more strongly associated with a castrated male, and rather American anyway) for a singleton B. taurus. DuncanHill (talk) 09:52, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

For reference, the several horns of this particular dilemma are addressed at Cow#Singular_terminology_issue. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.66.82 (talk) 10:08, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Sexual dimorphism is even more marked in human beings, and certainly more relevant to human beings, and yet we have at least three gender-nonspecific terms for a singleton H. sapiens: human, human being, and person. There's also cow, which is probably the most common generic term for a singleton B. taurus among city-dwellers who rarely encounter live ones. If you ask 1000 English speakers "What animal does beef come from?", what percentage do you think will answer "Cow" and what percentage do you think will answer "Ox"? Angr (talk) 10:15, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Reminds me of a commercial with three young attractive people, one of whom has a bowl of cereal but no milk. He looks out to the field where the cattle are grazing, locates a specimen, and takes his bowl out to milk the animal onto the cereal. The girl remaining in the cabin says to the last lad, "are you going to tell him that's a boy cow?". Response: "he'll figure it out." --Trovatore (talk) 23:48, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Hoary, when you say "how about a language...", do you mean "Do such languages exist?"? In German, some animals have a generic term in the neuter gender (Pferd "horse", Schwein "pig", Rind "domestic bovine"), a masculine term for the male animal (Hengst "stallion", Eber "boar", Stier "bull"), and feminine term for the female animal (Stute "mare", Sau "sow", Kuh "cow"), but that's a minority. Many more animal names have a generic term in either masculine or feminine gender that does double duty for the corresponding sex (Hund "dog; male dog", Katze "cat; female cat", Ente "duck; female duck") and then a different (sometimes morphologically related) term for the opposite sex (Hündin "female dog", Kater "male cat", Enterich "drake"). And some animal names only have the generic term, and sex has to be marked with an adjective (Lama "llama" / männliches Lama "male llama" / weibliches Lama "female llama"). I don't know if there is any language in which the sex of all animals has to be explicitly grammatically marked. How would they handle hermaphroditic animals like worms? Angr (talk) 06:38, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Indeed I have never heard of a language where the gramatical gender has to match the biological gender. That is not how gender works in languages. --Lgriot (talk) 08:44, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you all for the input. ¶ Of course, natural languages don't have boneheaded lexical rules that apply wherever imaginable; I'd had in mind sex distinctions that are at least moderately conspicuous to "normal people" -- those likely to be concerned, whether farmers or others -- and not only to those equipped with patience and microscopes. The llama example was deliberate as I guessed that the word for llama would be relatively new in most if not all languages known to people here, too new for it to be likely that there'd be an anomalous term. ¶ German sounds similar to English and French: you have the generic term but also sex-specific options. ¶ Lgriot, I partly agree: correlation with actual sex is of course not how grammatical gender (as we usually think of it) works. (And indeed there are famous instances where it obviously does not work, e.g. German Mädchen, the neuter girl.) However, it is one element of grammatical gender. ¶ Email from a Czech acquaintance suggests that there's a lot of division in Czech of the kind that I have in mind. Apparently slon and slonice are male and female elephant respectively, and also verbs are (or can be) marked for gender. What I don't yet know is whether slon is to slonice what Hund is to Hündin, or whether it's what bull is to cow. I rather suspect the former. -- Hoary (talk) 09:35, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

• Two Observations

First, there simply is no unmarked English singular for cattle. If necessary you can say one head of cattle, or a bovine.

Second, it is a mistake to expect Indo-European languages necessarily to have a strict opposition male/female with each form equally differentiated from say, a hypothetical *can- 'dog', *cano 'sire', *cana 'bitch'. It simply doesn't work that way because strictly, the grammatical gender oppositions

neuter/masculine/feminine

do not represent the biological sex distinctions

unspecified/male/female

but rather the metaphysical distinction

inanimate/animate/animate-marked-for-feminine

It is a mistake to view the masculine/feminine distinction as primary. Indeed, the who/what distinction is primary, as is reflected in the fact that Hittite has that distinction, but no feminine, that Greek and Latin retain forms which distinguish only between common gender and neuter, and that the common gender system has re-arisen time and time again such as in Dutch and Scandinavian dialects.

μηδείς (talk) 15:38, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry to be late in responding: I was rather under the weather and thus unable to go to the library and look for the red Cambridge Textbook on Gender -- which of course is something I should have done even before asking in the first place. Yes, of course I'm aware that [grammatical] gender and sex are for the most part unrelated (and that various languages have two or more genders that can be termed neuter). And I'm aware of the inanimate/animate distinction. I hadn't had Indo-European languages particularly in mind. It did seem intuitively (?) plausible that some languages would -- aside from their own anomalies, parallelling "cow" versus "bull", for long-domesticated and other animals -- have pairs of masculine and feminine words, the feminine of each pair being being a lot less marked than it is in French or German. ¶ My very sketchy information on Czech (which of course is Indo-European) suggests that it's so there. On the other hand WP's article on Czech (which strangely treats gender as part of "declension") says that pes (dog) is masculine animate, [...] kočka (cat) [... is] feminine, and morče (guinea-pig) [... is] neuter which if so simply true shows that my conjecture is mistaken. -- Hoary (talk) 02:22, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't think anyone has mentioned markedness, which may interest. Wareh (talk) 05:10, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

I didn't mention it by name, but I had been thinking of it. -- Hoary (talk) 02:22, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

harvesting equipment history

In Edward Thomas's poem "Haymaking" line 22: "Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook" The "tosser" is probably a machine. Where is that word defined or where illustrated? Thank you, Neal Rubenstein

• Removed email address, postal address, and telephone number

I removed your contact details. Your question will be answered here. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:44, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

There are machines that turn the hay, but I think this is more likely to be a reference to the person who tosses the hay onto the cart, in the primary meaning given in the OED of "one who or that which tosses". I suppose it could mean the pitchfork, but that is not noted in the OED.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 16:24, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I tend to think the poem refers to a piece of equipment rather than a person, because it doesn't make sense for most of the team to "rest" while one member lies "forsook." Shantavira's guess of a pitchfork seems plausible. My first thought was that it might refer to a tedder, which does sort of toss the hay in order to fluff it up. I'm not finding strong evidence the two terms are used interchangeably. --some jerk on the Internet (talk) 16:47, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Anything's possible in poetry. I'd normally expect to see "forsaken" in such a construction, not "forsook". But he needed a rhyme for "brook" (here's the poem). -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:02, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

"The tosser lay forsook"....? Clearly of interest to those involved in the dating of British English slang. Ghmyrtle (talk) 11:56, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

As User:some jerk on the Internet says above, the poem refers to a piece of equipment. The piece of equipment would probably be a pitchfork. "Pitching" and "tossing" are words with similar meaning. By the way, the tosser is also the individual operating the pitchfork. Therefore I think the suggestion there is also that the man previously tossing hay is also "forsook", a reference to being without purpose momentarily. I think this would be a link to the poem.

Reference is importantly made to shade in the poem All living things are noted as seeking shade. The full sentence is:

The tosser lay forsook

Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood

Without its team:it seemed it never would

Move from the shadow of that single yew.

Therefore we know that the primary reference to "tosser" is to a piece of inanimate equipment. By extension we associate the man with the piece of inanimate equipment he operates. Bus stop (talk) 13:10, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

You seem to have some uncertainty about whether your link "would be" to the poem. I can confirm that it is a link to the poem. But so was my link. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 19:08, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

JackofOz—yes, you are correct...I didn't notice that you had already linked to the poem. And yes, I was unsure (to a slight degree) that I had linked to the correct poem. Great minds link alike, I guess. Bus stop (talk) 12:26, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Courage, mon vieux. Vive la confidence! -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 12:34, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

It sounds to me like a hay rake, or something with a similar function, but that's based on my knowledge of modern haymaking, and not of the poem or of older techniques. John M Baker (talk) 02:41, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

This is one of those times when putting "hay tosser" in google images works quite well. μηδείς (talk) 01:40, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

article 5 of Statute of ICJ

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities

Esperanto

Why hasn't Esperanto been adopted as an international auxiliary language? --134.10.113.198 (talk) 17:13, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Our article on the International Auxiliary Language Association answers this question directly, and you can find a lot more information in the International Auxiliary Language article. Looie496 (talk) 17:43, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

But note that Interlingua, the language promoted by IALA, has never taken off to the extent that Esperanto has. Comparing the number of articles in the Esperanto and Interlingua Wikipedias is instructive. The fact is that although Esperanto has a number of defects, as identified by IALA, it does have a substantial following. Esperanto, although not perfect, was good enough to achieve a certain amount of success, and no subsequent artificial language has ever been able to overtake it. --rossb (talk) 21:15, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Why adopt a fake language that practically nobody speaks when you can use a real one (like English) already spoken by millions and millions? --Nricardo (talk) 23:18, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Because natural languages all have political connotations; i.e. why do the evil colonial imperialists get to "win" by having their language become the universal language simply because they had the force of arms to destroy all the good, peaceful cultures of the world? The advantage of a constructed language is that the constructed language doesn't have a history... --Jayron32 23:31, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

And also because English, with its crazy spelling and wild mixture of Romance and German-derived words, is a very difficult language to learn for most of the world's people. Looie496 (talk) 23:38, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, which makes it so unlike every other language in the world, which are purely analytical systems which are entirely internally consistent and easy. --Jayron32 00:03, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

English is very easy to learn, so long as you start at birth. Much easier than learning Esperanto as an adult. DuncanHill (talk) 00:06, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Esperanto is constructed entirely from European languages, for the most part from the languages of colonial powers, during the height of European colonialism, so how would that solve anything? Adam Bishop (talk) 05:37, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Solve? The problem you have 'identified'--"colonialism"--is a modern Western (I.e., Indo-European) conceit. Neither the Chinese nor the Arabs nor the Zulu nor the Sioux has any guilt complex over the indigenes they have slaughtered. Meanwhile, Europe commits suicide. μηδείς (talk) 05:47, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

The problem is real. First, nowadays "colonialism" is a concept known to and used by the whole world (even though the non-Western cultures like to forget that historically, they have been equally evil as the West, just less successful). In the most primitive case, "colonialism" really stands for "other nations conquering my nation", which nobody likes. But even aside of that, it's enough to use the word "national pride", which is certainly universal. Nations outside of Europe are naturally reluctant to adopt the language of an existing nation or imperial power - but, as Adam Bishop observed, a hybrid of the languages of several existing nations within a cultural region is hardly much better. There is an additional problem in that connection - because of its origins, Esperanto is easy to the speakers of European languages, but not so easy to everybody else. BTW, colonialism is not an "Indo-European conceit" - it is not more characteristic of Ossetians than of Chechens, and it's no more Indic than it is Dravidian.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 10:50, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

BTW, it's really funny how some Westerners will identify moral decency (or human rights, or abhorrence of colonialism, or democracy, or the presumption of innocence, etc.) as a feature unique to the their nation or culture - and hence conclude that, in order to preserve its unique features, their nation and culture should get rid of that moral decency (or of abhorrence of colonialism, etc.)! The first part in itself is nonsense (increased moral sensitivity is a feature of prosperous and modernized cultures in general, which happen to be located mostly in the West, and these cultures have only very recently developed these features to an appreciable extent); but even if the first part were true, it would still be quite incompatible with the second part. If they love the West as much as they claim (although loving a culture as such is meaningless enough), then surely they should also love its alleged "conceits" such as moral decency, abhorrence of colonialism, etc..--91.148.159.4 (talk) 11:06, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Esperanto is constructed entirely from European languages, for the most part from the languages of colonial powers, during the height of European colonialism, so how would that solve anything? English, on the other hand, is a European language, a language of a colonial power. How is using English any better than using Esperanto then? JIP | Talk 16:40, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Nobody I know speaks Esperanto, so it is much more useful for me to learn other things instead. Googlemeister (talk) 20:38, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Literature, Media and Native Speakers. People other than linguists learn languages either to communicate with native speakers or to access the language's literature and media. Tolkien commented on their lack of literature as artificial languages' downfall. Esperanto has, by far, the largest literature and media of any constructed language. There is the movie Inkubo available on youtube, starring Captain Kirk. μηδείς (talk) 01:05, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

For some criticisms of Esperanto as a language, see Criticism of Esperanto and a thorough (and entertaining) analysis here. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 12:19, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

I will add that yes, Jayron, Esperanto is in fact a purely analytical system which is entirely internally consistent and easy; some people actually criticize it for that, seeing it as "unnatural"! And DuncanHill, there's no more useless argument than "English is easy as long as you start from birth": a human brain is perfectly capable of learning any language, no matter how irrational and inconsistent, as long as you start from birth; that's no argument for English at all. --Orange Mike | Talk 13:05, 20 July 2011 (UTC) (learned English from birth, Esperanto as an adult; would rather see us all using Esperanto)

I'm certain that DuncanHill had no idea whatsoever that was the case. --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 18:52, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

If there was a natural language that wasn't easy to learn as long as you start from birth, that language wouldn't fare very well as a natural language. I know of people who, at one time, spoke Finnish, English, Portuguese and Chinese, all of them very well, pretty much fluently, because they had learned them in their childhood. That doesn't mean they'll still be capable of all this in their adulthood though. JIP | Talk 18:59, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Re: "that's no argument for English at all"--the funny thing is, there is no need whatsoever to provide an argument to convince people of the value of learning English. μηδείς (talk) 22:09, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

In many places, the "arguments" for learning English have included brutal beatings, public humiliation, and refusal to listen to a word that the "ignorant savage" had to say (in courts, etc.) Just ask any historian of Cornish, Manx, Cymry, Gaelic (Irish and Scots), etc.; or members of several living Native American peoples. Similar histories can be told of the imposition of French over Brehon, Russian over Ukrainian, etc. --Orange Mike | Talk 14:38, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

You so crazy. Languages don't whip people. People whip people.

As a Slav myself, (i.e., slave) I immediately demand reparations from all former colonies of Rome, and the colonies of their colonies, as well as the institution of Old Church Slavonic as the obvious candidate for replacing English as the One World Language.μηδείς (talk) 16:43, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

There are men on reservations in this very state of Wisconsin who were beaten severely for the crime of speaking their tribal language instead of English. I'm not talking about the 16th-19th century forcible suppression of Celtic languages by the English; I'm talking about experiences within living memory, about tribal elders who bear the scars today. I'm sorry, but if you find that funny, I find your concept of humor contemptible. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:10, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

What I "find funny" is your ascribing the crimes of certain individuals to a language, based on some sort of hysterical leftist victimology. A Sioux friend of mine--yes, she uses that word--was hidden underground until age twelve so as not to fall into the clutches of the bureaucrats. More power to her. But in so far as English as a language, so what? If they had spoken Klingon or Sindarin rather than English would she have been better off? And how do you propose we convince people to switch to some artificial internationalist language without the use of force? It's naive eutopianism based on the notion that things will be better when my gang gets in charge. In the meantime, people are breaking the law to enter anglophone countries and learning English of their own accord with no law or argument necessary. μηδείς (talk) 20:54, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

I have heard that the only reason why we Finns escaped such a fate, having to forcibly learn Swedish as our only native language, was because Russia conquered Finland in 1808. We are still forced to learn Swedish at school, but as a secondary language, and the Swedish don't see anything wrong with us speaking Finnish as our native language. JIP | Talk 19:02, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

One of the many arguments against Esperanto is that inevitably it would break up into regional dialects, just as English has done over the centuries (we have US English (and its internal variations), Australian English (and its internal variations), New Zealand English, South African, Indian, etc., and while, for the most part, they are mutually intelligible, there are still many cases where words have to be looked up for the full meaning to be understood. In fact, Esperanto already has 'regional' variations, depending on the mother tongue of the speaker, and it isn't even anywhere near being accepted as a world language yet. We can take this a step further and envisage a future world with a number of languages, all of which have sprung from Esperanto, and all of which are mutually unintelligible, defeating the purpose of the language entirely. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:03, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

You forgot UK English. —Akrabbim^talk 16:24, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

I didn't forget UK English - I am a native UK English speaker. My politically correct sense of blame and shame inherrent in being born native to an ex-colonial power prevented me from even mentioning my own dialect. ;) --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:32, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Oh OK, I was pretty sure that was the case, but I was compelled to set the record straight by my pathological US-centrism arising from the unconscious inferiority complex caused when faced with the possible illegitimacy of my native dialect. —Akrabbim^talk 16:52, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

That's OK, fellers; my native dialect (Bubba-American) is universally despised (and the users thereof discriminated against) as a marker of racism and culturally-impure thought, even though in fact it is the native speech of an internally-colonized subgroup exploited by the ruling classes of their own and other kierarchies in order to maintain the dominant paradigm. --Orange Mike | Talk 17:01, 21 July 2011 (UTC) (Jim and Blondell's oldest, the one that moved Up North)

There are a number of mechanisms embedded in Esperanto as a movement to prevent this kind of thing (the assertion "[i]n fact, Esperanto already has 'regional' variations, depending on the mother tongue of the speaker" is contrary to fact), from the creation and prestige of the Akademio to the use of the Krestomatio and other fundamental documents as models for style. I have no trouble reading Esperanto magazines from China, Brazil or anywhere else; and I believe my experience is fairly typical. Individual style is much more accomodated by the flexible syntax and grammar of Esperanto, than it is in, say, Latin or English. --Orange Mike | Talk 16:10, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

OK, I am not sure where I read it, and I am unable to find the source, so I have to take that comment back for now. However, from what I can remember, the article was about different 'levels' of speaker of Esperanto - about how much they use Esperanto in daily life vs. their native languages (or the languages in their surroundings) and how those languages seem to influence their Esperanto. I do rememeber that the article mentioned differences in pronunciation (yes, there is a standard, but some people still use the sounds they are 'used to' - the same reason we have Indian English, for example), and also in idiom, as well as small differences in grammar (this is what it said, not me). Don't get me wrong, I am not against Esperanto in any way - I dabbled in it, myself, when I was younger, and my knowledge of European languages allows me to read more or less anything in Esperanto. I am merely presenting a counter-argument here. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:53, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, AndrewWTaylor for publishing this criticism of Esperanto. It was indeed entertaining to read--although, were I an Esperantist, it is exactly the sort of "criticism" against which I would like to fight. Much of his criticism was aesthetic and superficial--although some was objective and stinging. As it stands, 7 of the top 10 in the List of languages by number of native speakers are Indo-European, 8 of them Eurasiatic per Joseph H. Greenberg, and 9 of them, all save Chinese, were Nostratic. Where the Zulu? Where the Zuni? Were I tasked to create an interlanguage, it would be an SOV language with an Arabic/Japanese syntax, a cosmopolitan Indo-European lexicon, and a phonology and auxiliary lexicon accessible to the Chinese. μηδείς (talk) 05:10, 22 July 2011 (UTC)