Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community
- Автор: Fians Guilherme
- Год: 2022
- Язык: русский
- Жанр: Культурология
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Still regarding personal pronouns, Silverstein (1985) also analysed how Quakers in seventeenth-century England dismissed the English language system of polite deference expressed by the pronouns ye/you. The Quakers' religious doctrine gained expression as language ideology via the rejection of pronouns that mark deference, authority and hier- archy in favour of the pronouns thee/thou—which express familiarity and equality. If, as the Quakers assert, all people are equal before God, all people should also be equal before language.
With vocabulary choice and neologism creation revealing who holds authority over a language and which language ideologies are at stake, ordinary conversations become prime locations from where to analyse language change. In Esperanto, communicative exchanges—from forums on digital media to debates at SAT-Amikaro—evince significant leeway for negotiation on language use. Through exploring ethnographically how Esperanto speakers gather in a room—surrounded by dictionaries and grammar books—and discuss which words are more suitable to refer to unfamiliar objects and themes, we see several actors emerging as potential linguistic authorities. As a consequence, language arises as a controversial, ever politicised matter, in which nearly every speaker can have a say and contribute to its development.
5.3 Who Holds the Power When
the Original Authority Is Dead? The Principles of Flexibility, Internationality and Primordiality
Just as in numerous Western languages, disputes over who has the authority to create and disseminate new words also take place in Esperanto, and the debate revolving around drone, droneo, senpilota aviadilo and spavo illustrates this. Effectively, as research on other languages has shown, vocabulary choices are intrinsically linked to language ideologies. Analysing the competing principles that orient this language's ideology will enable us to flesh out how standards and percep- tions of right and wrong regarding vocabulary choice are defined in a language whose original authority—its creator—is dead.
Expanding the organicist approach to languages, Zamenhof designed Esperanto to be turned from an 'artificially' constructed language into a living one by making room for vocabulary to be negotiated on a regular basis. In what I call theprinciple of flexibility, this linguistic trait works to make Esperanto accessible and inclusive. As a way of opposing linguistic discrimination, the principle of flexibility empowers speakers to develop Esperanto through use, as an open-source code/language, whose development lies in the speech community's continuous collab- oration and language co-production. This principle is responsible for the perception that, in proposing words to describe technological devices not yet named in Esperanto, for instance, any speaker is potentially enti- tled to contribute to language development. Even though such flexibility must—and does—have limits, it is loosely defined by language compre- hension: flexibility and improvisation allow the conversation to continue as long as the interlocutors understand each other and their offhand vocabulary, even though they may not be sure about the correctness of a given word or expression. This is the principle that Reza attempted to resort to when uttering drono at the debate.
However, as in numerous Western languages, there are also criteria and mechanisms to make Esperanto stable and coherent, such as corrections and repairs, without which an ever-changing language could neither be effectively learned nor enable real understanding.
Through practices of correction and repair (Macbeth 2004; Netz et al. 2018), classrooms—particularly conversation classes—emerge as spaces where Esperantos flexibility is accommodated within the policing of correctness. In Esperanto courses for beginners and intermediate students at SAT-Amikaro, teachers regularly encourage learners to participate in discussions and form sentences since the first classes. In doing so, teachers place language improvisation at the core of their pedagogy, while also highlighting when a given improvisation attempt is mistaken. Frequently highlighting that French Esperanto speakers must keep the Chinese and Japanese Esperantists in mind when they use the language, these teachers often remind their students of Esperanto's inclusive language ideology and cosmopolitan orientation: 'if we use this specific word or pronounce this with such French accent, would Chinese Esperantists understand what we are saying? If not, we may need to reconsider this'.[20] Having learned Esperanto at SAT-Amikaro, Alain applied a similar logic when pointing out to his interlocutors that drono and droneo were 'too French to be real Esperanto'.
Just as language classes, also learning resources (such as prescrip- tive grammars) enable tracing which vocabulary choices and language uses are perceived as right and wrong.[21] Likewise, the development of Esperanto vocabulary relies partly on corpora and dictionaries such as the Esperanto-French, French-Esperanto and monolingual dictio- naries constantly present on the table during SAT-Amikaro's debates, surrounded by wine bottles, cheese and snacks. Such dictionaries are complemented by technical ones oriented towards construction workers, chemists, railway workers and other experts, as well as pocket and online dictionaries. Additionally, as formal mechanisms to reinforce perceptions of correctness regarding vocabulary choice, pronunciation, prosody and writing style, UEA holds, within the scope of the Universal Congresses, the well-established Belartaj Konkursoj (Literary Contests) and Oratoraj Konkursoj (Oratorical Contests). UEA also supports the organisation of KER-Ekzameno, the Esperanto language proficiency exam in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Certainly, these materials and formal standardisation mechanisms hold certain linguistic authority, but they do not always form a coherent whole, nor are they free from controversies—which results in two further competing principles.
On the one hand, there is what I call the principle of internation- ality. For Esperanto to be easily learned and understood by many people around the world and, thus, conveyed as fairer and more egalitarian than hegemonic languages—as its supporters often claim—its root words must be as 'international' as possible. This is the principle that steers Esperanto language teaching at SAT-Amikaro, with the aim of urging French people to use Esperanto in a way that could be easily understood by, for instance, Asian Esperantists. In addition to this, as an interna- tional language, Esperanto standards are not to be attached to particular national standards, so that an international vocabulary neither sounds nor reads 'too English' or 'too French', as put by Alain. Without calling it such, the principle of internationality was outlined by Zamenhof as the Fundamento's fifteenth rule:
The so-called 'foreign' words, i.e. words which the greater number of languages have derived from the same source, undergo no change in the international language, beyond conforming to its system of orthog- raphy. Such is the rule with regard to primary words, derivatives are better formed (from the primary word) according to the rules of the international grammar, e.g. teatr'o, 'theatre,' but teatr'a, 'theatrical' (not teatrical'a), etc. (1905: 11)
While the principle of internationality privileges roots and neologisms stemming from European origins, it often clashes with another principle, also resulting directly from Zamenhof's pen: that of primordiality.
The Fundamento (particularly its 2,700-word dictionary), book of proverbs, Fundamenta Krestomatio and several original and translated poems, novels and other foundational texts provided Esperanto with a plethora of root words that, for many Esperanto speakers, suffice to make for a fully-fledged language. As per the Fundamento grammar, Esperanto is agglutinative and allows users to borrow words from other languages as needed, provided that they borrow one basic root and derive related vocabulary from it. Thus, rather than having vocabu- lary stemming from different roots from the same lexical field—such as house, building, mansion, mayor and city hall—residence-related words in Esperanto, for instance, would derive from the same root, dom: domo, domaro, domego, urbestro and urbodomo.