Talk:Comparison between Esperanto and Interlingua

LFN

An anonymous user has been turning this article into something that would better be called Esperanto, Interlingua and Lingua Franca Nova compared. Now with all due respect to his or her efforts, but if we go on with this, this article will turn into the battlefield of one of those typical auxlang flamewars about whose language is better. I have nothing against LFN, but I don't think its presence in an article about comparing E-o and I-a is warranted. Otherwise we might as well add Ido, Occidental, Novial, Glosa, Europanto, Esperantido, Adjuvilo and about 500 other euroclones, and there you go. --IJzeren Jan 10:22, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Clean up

I have made an attempt to "clean up" this article, and I hope it's now good enough to justify removing the clean-up tag. If not, please put it back, I won't be offended. No, honest, really I won't. Well, maybe just a teeny bit, but then thats Wikipedia for you, innit?.

However, I have to confess that I am normally a contributor to the Esperanto wiki, so although I have tried to conserve NPOV, my own inherent bias towards eo might show through, so any Interlinguistas out there, feel free to correct errors in fact, etc. Also, I am not a linguist. Sigh. Le Hibou 00:52, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

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Respective movements

I don't know enough about the movements of either language to write on them but it would be interesting to see the way they go about promoting the language. Interlingua doesn't even seem to have an agreement on whether it wants to be the universal IAL, although it looks like they've been doing a lot more of that lately. I noticed just yesterday for example, that the constitution of the EU that the Interlinguists translated (200+ pages I think) has apparently been sent to each member of the European Parliament for the to peruse. There's also their emphasis on science and so on, whereas Esperanto is much more of a from the bottom-up approach where they start with it as a method for meeting people in other countries, and the politics of the EU, scientific journals and whatnot are merely a small part. But those are just my impressions from what I know about the two. Mithridates 04:09, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

So-called Neutrality

I know I'm not welcome to edit this article, being an Interlingua speaker, but it might be worth noting that some people see the perceived 'non-neutrality' of either Esperanto or Interlingua as a strength, not a flaw. Almafeta 19:44, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Quit playing the martyr and contribute. One of the editors above specifically said we need IL editors for this article. kwami 19:52, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

I appreciate that the Eo editors have done their best to maintain NPOV. One point that needs to be worked on is the difference in linguistic philosophy. It's been argued that once you admit the basic philosophical differences, the different design decisions follow fairly naturally. But asserting that is one thing, writing it up is another.--Chris 05:50, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Its important to be neutral but the best contributers have an opinion. Totally neutral no opinion editors are dead editors(no offence intended.). And I encourage you again to Be Bold.--Jondel 06:53, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

OK, I'm going to be bold with my current series of edits. Let me know what you think.--Chris 18:06, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the whole issue of neutrality is sort of foreign to Interlingua, so all the space in the article devoted to comparing "neutralities" seems odd. I just really looked at this for the first time; maybe later I'll boldly try to rejigger it a bit. --Cam 11:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

..

Hey, somebody who speaks Interlingua, PLEASE add to the article. There is too much on Esperanto and too few about Interlingua. It would be really nice if every paragraph talking about Esperanto pros and cons had an correspondent talking about Interlinguas pros and cons... Just my opinion! I will, too, do my best to help this article reach its full potential!!! =] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.58.150.61 (talk) 02:36, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I can only add to the request  :-) As a non-either speaker, looking to pick up at least one of of the two, I felt the article lent towards a Esperanto point of view. I had a look at the talk page so see if there were any remarks on that, which seems the case. So Interlinguists, please write up! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:982:1768:1:21E:65FF:FEC8:7C5C (talk) 23:15, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Translation Errors

"interna ideo" means "internal idea", not "internal ideal". Is the english meant to change, or the esperanto to "interna idealo" ?

malsanulejo

I think something should be said about the different ways to express the same idea in Esperanto. Note that the words hospitalo, kliniko, lazareto, preventorio, sanatorio also exist in Esperanto. Other roots can also be used, b.i. kurac (medically treat). Of course, the roots that are part of the fundamental vocabulary are preferred, but it is depending on the audience, and the skills of the speaker who can adjust to it.

The advantage of having many ways to say the same is that it permits to express an idea fluently, without hindering the comprehension. If the root kurac comes first to my mind, I can easily build kuracejo. If I think of san, I can build resanigejo, what means a construction(ejo) where one makes(ig) people healthy(san) again(re). This flexibility makes Esperanto very comfortable to speak and listen to. The remark about malsanulejo not being precise enough looks out of place. The word would be quite all right on most occasions. --Remush 00:50, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

non-Western features

About "Esperanto's European character is purely accidental; proponents tend to stress its allegedly non-Western features for ideological reasons". Probably the author misunderstood a phrase like: All the features of Esperanto are coming from western languages, but of course, some (many?) features of western languages are also found in non-western ones. --Remush 08:58, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

quasi-religion of homaranismo

This is really shoking. I changed quasi-religion to philosophy. Using the term religion is quite inappropriate here, as Homaranismo aŭ Hillelismo is valid for believers and non-believers, and is more comparable to Buddhism. Anyway, Homaranismo is not promoted inside the Esperanto movement, and few Esperantists know what it is about. --Remush 09:18, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Dubious statement

Being neutrally and sarcastically negative against both Esperanto and Interlingua, I find this statement very hard to accept:

Both languages, however have a highly regular grammar and a system of word-building with a limited number of affixes

True for esperanto, if "highly" is skipped (considering genitive is applicable to correlatives, but not nouns) but almost perfectly untrue for Interlingua. Interlingua has almost no grammar whatsoever, to apply "regular" to. The system for word-building is irregular, illogical and actually borrowed from languages outside Interlingua, essentially voiding its own independent word-building capability, and also essentially voiding itself as an independent language. ... said: Rursus (bork²) 16:22, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

A number of points in response, hopefully neither negative nor sarcastic:

1. Word building (morphology) is not what people usually think of when they say grammar. When talking about an irregular grammar, people normally mean irregular verb declensions, irregular plural forms, etc. – what Wikipedia calls syntax. According to that more common definition, Interlingua's grammar is in fact almost completely regular, except for a few collateralisms that most speakers ignore.
2. Its word building system is arguably not regular. However, it is significantly less irregular than its source languages due to the regularization of derivational series. For example: tempore → temporari, integre → integritate, pede → pedal, etc. are regular derivations, while being irregular in all of the source languages (ref.: "Forms of International Words in Derivational Series" in the introduction to the IED of 1951).
3. As for the "independence" of Interlingua: the whole underlying idea is that an international language didn't need to be invented, but was just waiting to be derived from a pre-existing international vocabulary shared by languages around the world. By definition, Interlingua is the language based on the International Scientific Vocabulary. Interlingua encourages building new words form this material (ref.: Formation de parolas in interlingua). And the ISV itself is an extremely fertile ground for building new words, as you can read in the linked article. Inherently, then, so is Interlingua's word building system. You seem to be criticizing Interlingua for living up to its stated purpose.

– McDutchie (talk) 15:57, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I completely agree that Esperanto and Interlingua were designed to do different things and both fulfil their purposes very well. I'll take a look at the article and see if I can improve it a bit. Jchthys _cont. 02:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Written as a debate?

I believe that this article is not written like a debate, but as an article which evenly treats the issue without switching sides constantly. Hence I removed the template at the top of the page. I also feel that the article makes few, if any, dubious claims that would need citations. —Jchthys _cont. 23:20, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Paternoster

Why is the Serbian paternoster here? Only English (readers' language), Esperanto and Interlingua (the two languages being compared) should be here. Also, there should be no three-dot ellipses at the end of "but deliver us from evil"—that's where the Lord's Prayer ends in Esperanto as well as Latin and the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, even if the English version usually includes the conclusion. —Jchthys _cont. 18:41, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Vocabulary?

I just wrote a lot of material for vocab, and someone decided to remove them as "unnecessary", while I view them as fundamentally important; Antonielly, could you please justify your removing my basic description of how vocabulary is built in Esperanto? "Doesn't add to the comparison" seems like a complete farce from my point of view, considering it's directly on topic.

This section of the article is not just about roots, but all vocabulary. As it is right now, it focuses entirely on how roots entered the languages, (and not well at that)... however, in Esperanto, the whole point of the regularity is its ability to build within itself. A paragraph explaining that process is thus not at all unjustified.

If an explanation isn't given in a day or two, I'm going to just revert, which I'm hardly refraining from doing right now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lackinglatin (talk • contribs) 01:18, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

While I recognize you've made a good-faith edit (yes, I know you were trying to contribute), I removed some of the paragraphs you've added because I feel they do not belong to the comparison article, but rather to the Esperanto article. Moreover, they present some inaccurate information. For instance:

Within Esperanto, a great deal of emphasis is put upon the 'isolating' and 'agglutanative' (sic) nature of the language, and is considered a strong virtue of it.

"Isolating" is very different from "agglutinative". Check the corresponding Wikipedia articles, then you will see that this sentence is self-contradictory.

The vocabulary is creatively kept quite small through the use of 50 affixes which are entirely consistent throughout the language.

This presents another inaccuracy: they are not affixes (some introductory references to Esperanto notwithstanding), but high-frequency free morphemes. Moreover, their use is not entirely consistent throughout the language, because of: the tabelvortoj, which do not use them; the reversibility problem.

In this way, once you know the two endings "-ino" and "-ido", you can take any animal's name as a root, and from it also have the name for its offspring and the masculine and feminine forms for it. If you also know "-ego", "-eto", "ĉef-", "-aro", (all roots gathered from sample languages), then you also know the words for a large specimen and a small specimen, the word for a leader of the pack of such an animal, and word for a pack of the animal--once you know the affixes, with every animal thenceforth the only word to be learned is the root.

These are too "low-level" details of Esperanto, which would better be in the Esperanto article. If we are supposed to make a root-by-root comparison between Esperanto and Interlingua, this article will get huge. And the main features of comparison will get lost amid the nitpicked details. It is my opinion that we should focus on comparing the design goals and the philosophy of each auxlang, to put the article in a spirit of high-level comparison, i.e., an encyclopedical overview to the topic.

Further, where two roots can be compounded to form a new word, this generally prefered (and never wrong), further maintaing the small vovabulary (sic) and ease of learning. Thus, within Esperanto a large number of synonyms are always possible, especially for new words.

This does not add to the comparison (the raison d'être of this article). Interlingua also has a lot of synonyms. Therefore a difference was not shown.

All Esperanto's forms are acceptable and are immediately understood by any fluent speaker; thus the language gives a greater range of expression with an equal amount of work. Interlingua simply uses spam, which in turn accomplishes its goal of wide comprehension through simplicity.

This is not a design goal of Interlingua! Interlingua was not designed to be comprehensible or simple. But this is a very common misconception, so it is not your fault that you didn't know that. And with respect to Esperanto, it is completely vague what is meant by "greater range of expression". Interlingua uses "spam", Esperanto uses "spamo", so there is no noteworthy difference here.

I could comment more excerpts of the previous edit, but I think I would be repeating myself. The main problem of the paragraphs I have eliminated is not that they have a lot of inaccuracies (which they do have, as I've shown above), but that they do not add to the comparison between Esperanto and Interlingua.

After removing the parts that didn't align to the aim of this article, there was a part of your edit that added some information to the article. Instead of deleting it, I kept it and improved the accuracy of the innacurate parts (for instance, the one that talked about the mythical design aim of "high recognizability" in Interlingua).

I hope I have succeeded in making it clear to you why I have removed some of the paragraphs in your previous edit. I also hope this will not discourage you from contributing. We all make mistakes, and some edits of mine were reverted in the past for similar reasons. I suggest you to join the AUXLANG list to become more acquainted with the design philosophies and the main differences between the different auxlang proposals. If you have some doubt which I didn't cover in this message, please let me know and I will help you. Regards. --Antonielly (talk) 03:28, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Glad to have something more concrete to respond to, though I disagree on how much you improved the 'innacurate (sic) parts' .

Concerning your first point of objection...

The isolating/agglutinative nature of Esperanto is not something I made up in my ignorance; from the wiki article:

As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. It has been described as "a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative, and to a certain degree isolating in character."

After reading your response, I decided to check and make sure I properly understood "Isolating". To my understanding, "isolating" meant that particular morphemes can be "isolated" anywhere they are used in a language, and not have changed. Reading the wikipedia article on isolating languages, I became confused at my apparent error--I didn't understand how this previous quote from the Esperanto wiki article could be justified if 'isolating' could only describe a language "in which words are composed of a single morpheme [...] in contrast to a synthetic language which can have words composed of multiple morphemes"; and alas, the reference in the Esperanto was from a book not available to me, so I couldn't check there. A quick google turned up an article by Claude Piron on exactly this issue, however, wherein he compares inflectional, agglutinative, (forgive my prior misspelling), and isolating languages in relation to Esperanto. It's a long article, so I'll quote a couple relevant sections for your convenience.

Let us now make some observations on what we have discovered. For convenience we keep the traditional terms " inflectional"," agglutinative " and "isolating", although they are poorly chosen and derive from an insufficient analysis of the facts. For example, Chinese is generally cited as the type case of an isolating language, but in fact it contains many morphemes which cannot be used in isolation. [...] On the other hand, Chinese constantly uses a system traditionally regarded as typically agglutinative: it adds morphemes to each other to form sometimes very long words [...].

What really distinguishes the isolating languages is the fact that the morphemes are invariant, each having a form that remains constant in all of its appearances, whether they be combinations, derivations or grammatical variations. [...] The important point is that, whatever the change in meaning or grammar, the morpheme itself remains untouched. A grammatical function is signaled either by word order or by invariant grammatical morphemes.

As far as its core is concerned, Esperanto is an isolating language. It completely fulfills the structural criterion defined. [...]

In some respects Esperanto resembles the agglutinative languages. But since the crucial test for being agglutinative - variability of shape of affixes or grammatical morphemes - yields negative results, one must consider Esperanto basically non-agglutinative. Yet the excep-tional visibility of the grammatical structure of the sentence is a feature which brings Esperanto closer to agglutinative than isolating languages. [1]

Apparently the Wikipedia article needs to be edited! Piron is a well known Esperanto advocate, but I don't think that undermines his credibility as a linguist speaking on such a basic topic.

Further, concerning it's agglutinative characteristics, from the wiki article on agglutination:

Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, too, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage.

This is also relative to the discussion below about the "affixes," and is certainly descriptive of Esperanto. Rather than being 'self-contradicting', one finds that the deeper one looks, the more gray the line between agglutinative & isolating traits become. Indeed, as in Piron's article previously cited:

That the traditional categories are too rigid in comparison with the not very classifiable reality is evident from the fact that a given "definitional" trait can often be found in different language families or categories, Esperanto being no exception.

So while I certainly understand your questioning the sentence, it's not without precedent or merit to use both characteristics to describe the language. In any case, considering the statement factually erroneous is certainly an overstatement...

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Speaking strictly according to usage within the field of linguistics, the 'afiksoj' are not true affixes, granted. But how else is one to translate that word? If you like, you can add a parenthetical statement adding that they are not affixes in the most technical definition of the word, but that's clearly the translation for it. Perhaps something like "afiksoj" (translated "affixes", though actually unbound morphemes as opposed to the traditional understanding) would be more to your liking? Within Esperanto, they are considered more as affixes that can also be used alone, than as words themselves that are combined more often than others. It's a matter of paradigm, and it's not so cut and dry as your retort supposes.

Arguing that they are not "entirely" consistent because of the tabelvortoj is certainly debatable... consistency does not necessarily mean usable in every single instance. One can choose to view the tabelvortoj as exceptions, (as you do), or as simply a distinct class of words that follow a different set of rules. If it bothers you, then the word "consistent" itself (without the disputable "entirely" qualified) is certainly agreeable in any case.

Lastly, concerning the "reversibility problem," the Ido article referenced should probably be updated. At the very least, it is a "problem" open to question, if not a complete farce... Granted, I'm sure some Idist will argue with me there just as an Interlinguist has done here.

De Saussure and Aymonier have demonstrated the groundlessness and practical inconvenience of the fundamental postulate of word-building in Ido, viz. the principle of reversibility. Esperanto forms from the root kron, "a crown," the verb kroni, just as English forms "to crown," French "couronner," and German "krönen." Ido will not permit the direct derivation of a verb kronar; on the ground that, if one reconverts the verb into a substantive, the latter must bear the meaning of the action expressed by the verb, viz. "coronation." In consequence of this "logical" demand, which has no warrant in the facts of the living languages, Ido is driven to such clumsy expedients as kronizar, adresizar, sudorifar, martelagar, as against the simple and more eloquent kroni, marteli, etc. Esperanto quite legitimately expresses "coronation," "hammering," by kronado, martelado, using for the purpose a suffix indicating action. [...] [2]

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Now, concerning your further deletions... I have a hard time not regarding your sweeping edits as completely biased. Trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, however, I will simply state our points of apparent disagreement.

I think, for instance, that:

1. An 'encyclopedical (sic) overview' would include a comprehensive, if brief, view of the topic presented.

2. This article is not comprehensive, and is too short. Insufficient information is presented in this section to adequately or fairly compare Interlingua & Esperanto.

From there, more minor disagreements:

3. The phoneticization of ŝeko, etc., (ideally using the actual phonetic alphabet), are necessary to demonstrate that while the orthography is the same, the roots are auditorily almost as completely similar as Interlingua's, an important point that is neglected to the point of being misleading in this section.

3a. This following paragraph, which you deleted, (and which followed the section just mentioned), clearly adds to the comparison nature of the article:

It might be thus argued that the endings of words are so variable as to be meaningless to maintain, giving Esperanto an edge by way of increased clarity with only basic understanding of 8 basic ending consistent throughout the language... alternatively, it could be argued that the root's shift of appearance, (though remaining phonetically nearly as identical as interlingua), prevents people who do not know Esperanto's alphabet from quickly recognizing the roots that Interlingua goes to great lengths to maintain. Different philosophies have led to different approaches.

Why was that removed? Edit it, fine, I was just adding information, and I understand it's not the most beautiful rendering of that information. But it's crucial to a valid comparison of root adoption between the languages.

4. "...in at least three source language units (considering Spanish and Portuguese together as one unit)" is an unnecessary detail in this article.

5. You say that it is not one of interlingua's goals to have immediate comprehensibility, but could you give me a source for that statement? Aside from it contradicting all that I've read about the language, (I can't recall a direct statement, but it was designed as an 'inter-language'), what other justification is there to import them so directly? If you are indeed correct, then I perceive absolutely no virtue or benefit to adding words as directly as done other than the unintended one (which, mind you, is often touted by Interlinguists as one of its chief sell points). It's root gathering process would thus be almost exactly as Esperanto's, but without the added clarity of regularity. Again, this is something that should be openly discussed, no matter what the answer is...

6. The paragraph wherein I gave examples was sufficiently concise enough to not be too detailed in an article such as this, and did indeed add to the article's "comparison" nature. In no way are such [brief] comparisons unmerited, as they give understanding of how word formation in Esperanto works, and why it works the way it does--directly on topic. (This would, by the way, be far too brief for the actual "Esperanto" article itself). I would much rather we have more details about interlingua's equivalent system for words added... I'm not exactly sure how to make this work within the current layout of the article, as in Esperanto word building & vocabulary are inseparable... perhaps the whole section should be renamed something more specific to "roots" if this is not thus fitting.

7. The spam discussion was previously a misguided slight aimed at Esperanto, that actually touched on something that is as much a strength as a weakness, if anything. The clarification was messy, I understand, but why was it completely removed?

I appreciate the invitation to join the list, but I've never really been able to 'get into' mailing lists. I have, however, done many hours of research on the various conlangs, and get my fix talking with people around me in real life.

Looking forward to your response...

--Lackinglatin (talk) 00:24, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

You have made some good points that can be explored to improve this and other articles (Interlingua, Esperanto, etc.), all of them needing a lot of improvements. You asked for instance:

You say that it is not one of interlingua's goals to have immediate comprehensibility, but could you give me a source for that statement?

Yes, I can. A document named Manifesto de Interlingua, written by Alexander Gode (the leader of the Interlingua project at IALA), details the design goals of Interlingua. He makes the significative declaration that "no such preconceived principles of selection [as defined, for instance, for Esperanto, Ido, Occidental, NovIAL, etc.] were possible, because it [Interlingua] was not about constructing but simply elaborating the language" (my translation).

What he meant by that assertion is that Interlingua was not created by listing a priori some quality attributes desired for an international auxiliary language (e.g. immediate comprehensibility, simplicity, regularity) and then developing from there a language that maximized the satisfaction of those attributes; instead, he asserts that Interlingua already existed before he codified it, but only in a latent form: Interlingua was embedded in the source languages, and each source language mixed the international (translingual) elements, which are Interlingua, with non-international elements (individual to that language only), which are not Interlingua, but only, say, pure Italian (or pure English, or pure French).

This interesting position is revelating to many, including even various experienced Interlingua speakers (who may acquire proficiency in the language and yet be ignorant to that philosophical position in language design). It was revelating for me when I first read it, and it still astounds me as exotic and original in the auxlang world.

I believe this information is crucial for the needed restructuring of this article. Moreover, this should be emphasized in the Interlingua article, but unfortunately it is not. Maybe we could work here and there to find a way to better fit this information in this article and in the Interlingua article.

Note that Gode claims that Interlingua was not invented, but just extracted. But, in my opinion, it is possible to legitimately defend another point of view, which considers that Interlingua was invented, like any other conauxlang that ever existed. In this point of view, we can say that, in practice, he selected a priori at least one quality attribute: etymological fidelity. This attribute can be considered as the fundamental basis for the "rule of 3" and for the determination of the prototype as the "nearest common ancestor" of at least 3 language units. I believe this point of view would be more suitable as a basis for comparing Esperanto and Interlingua, so that we avoid comparing apples to helicopters and move to comparing apples to oranges, a "less hard" comparison to do :D .

You made another important observation:

Aside from it contradicting all that I've read about the language

That is completely true and on the spot. There are a lot of material out there that claims "immediate comprehensibility" was a design goal of Interlingua. Given that they contradict what is said on the "Preface to the Interlingua-English Dictionary (IED)" and on the "Manifesto de Interlingua" (the two fundamental references concerning Interlingua), those assertions should be considered as misleading at best. Maybe that widespread claim has been written due to good-faith ignorance of the authors with respect to the fundamental references about the Interlingua design; maybe it has been written in some cases just as a hype to attract people to learn Interlingua, as it is admittedly a good selling point. Misleading information is particularly prominent in propaganda material made by partisans of the Interlingua movement (and of the movements of any other conauxlangs), and thus should be taken with a grain of salt.

The IED contains plenty of evidence that immediate comprehensibility was not an absolute quality goal of Interlingua, and it possibly was not even a regarded by Gode as a worthy goal at all. "tempore" (the Interlingua word) is less recognizable than "tempo" (the word that would be selected if similarity to the source languages were the fundamental aim); instead of "littera" for "letter", we would have "lettera"; rather than "integre" (entire), the more recognizable word according to the source languages would be "intere"; and so on. Instead, the words he chose seem to reflect a desire to keep etymological fidelity as well as making the form of each given root uniform across a derivational family (the set of words that share a same conceptual root, such as "littera"/"litterari"/"litteratura", "regula"/"regular"/"regulator"/"rege"/"regente", "domo"/"majordomo"/"domestic", etc.).

You've made other relevant points, and I would have to write a huge essay to address all of them (this message is already much bigger than I wanted it to be). Maybe we should tackle one problem at a time, so that we are successful in evolving the article while keeping consensus continuously. Which one do you think we should tackle first? Say which is in your opinion the single most serious specific problem in the article (that could be solved in one step), and let's discuss it here, before addressing all the other less important problems.

(Just do not forget to comment here in the talk page each major edit you intend to do, before doing it, otherwise some editor will not be able to correctly guess the rationale of your proposed change and she may revert your good-faith edit. Major edits which are consensual and explained in the talk page tend to be kept in Wikipedia.) --Antonielly (talk) 02:18, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

More difficult for speakers of English because of diacritics per se?

Someone added this sentence:

The use of diacritics in Esperanto makes it harder for typing and for users of languages that lack diacritics (e.g. English).

I'm dubious about the latter part of the sentence (and even the former part is less true than it used to be). Can someone cite a source for the assertion that speakers of languages whose alphabet uses no diacritics find languages which use diacritics more difficult than languages without them, other factors (phoneme inventory size, etc.) held constant? --Jim Henry (talk) 01:10, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Number of Speakers

Is there a source on the number of speakers of either language? The page on Interlingua cites a source from 1999, saying the number of people who actively speak Interlingua is only a few hundred. I don't know how one would gauge the number of speakers, or where one would find a citation for it. Should there be a citation, or am I just nitpicking?Wilcynic (talk) 01:57, 19 June 2015 (UTC) [Edit: The first paragraph of the Interlingua article cites the same source as the box to the right, but one says "a few hundred" and the other says 1500. Perhaps I'm a little too conservative in what I consider "a few", but it seems like this should be clarified. The source might also be cited in this article, if someone is able to look at it and see what it actually says. Wilcynic (talk) 02:17, 19 June 2015 (UTC)]

Fixing up the Interlingua portion of the article

@Prosfilaes: Thank you for taking the time to review my recent additions to the article. I am however concerned about some of the assertions that you have made to justify your revisions. For clarity's sake, I would like to address them individually:

• Number of speakers: While I agree completely that conflating mutual intelligibility with the number og "speakers" is problematic, I strongly disagree that this piece of information should be left out of the article completely, as it is one of the primary 'selling points,' so to say, of Interlingua, contra Esperanto. I chose to put it where I did because it seemed like the most useful place for a reader looking for a quick comparison/overview over the two languages.
  Regarding the lack of citation, it was pretty easy to add together the number of speakers of all Romance languages from their respective Wikipedia articles, and I didn't think of citing a source, though doing so could be achieved with great ease.
  Do you think that this information (number of people with whom Interlingua is mutually intelligible) should be dedicated to its own row in the table? Should there be a subsection further down in the article that speaks about the subject at greater length? What do you think?

• Control languages: As you asserted in your description of your revision, the control languages of Interlingua are clearly documented. Why leave out the secondary control languages, as their influence on the grammar and vocabulary of Interlingua is just as, if not more crucial than the primary controls in some cases? While I am refraining from outright undoing your other revisions, this one in particular bugs me.
  Can you explain your reasoning for excluding the secondary control languages?

• Morphology of derived words: Your reasoning for this revision is the most confusing to me. Nowhere in that section, or even the rest of the article, can any variation of the words "is in practice made in the language" be found. Nevertheless, the example I constructed was meant to demonstrate derivation and agglutination of new words in Interlingua using a format that paralleled the previously given example. Indeed, the given affixes and roots are used in practice in this way all the time, and although this specific example is unused in the Interlingua corpus, it still demonstrates the Interlinguist counterpart to novel word formation in an easy-to-understand manner. Even if affixing is used less liberally than Esperanto is famous for, I still think that leaving out such crucial information about the morphology of one language introduces excessive editorial bias in favour of the other language.
  In addition, the deleted portion of text tied directly into the table that follows its paragraph, and leaving out the text in this way makes the table seem cluttered and more difficult to understand than it otherwise was.
  Do you think it is possible for you to provide further justification for this particular revision than what was given?

Lastly, in answering the above inquiries, I implore you to keep in mind that editorial bias is most commonly introduced not by providing false information, but rather by leaving out relevant factual information. --VladVP (talk) 19:55, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

I think that instead of stating a flat number of speakers (which can't be made by adding up speakers, since you're going to count people multiple times), we should state languages. It'd be best if we can give comparison to other languages, particularly Esperanto, but also Spanish or French. It's easy to find numeric comparison of how intelligible various Romance languages are online, but Interlingua isn't mentioned.

It seemed more parallel and more terse. A long list of languages in this box doesn't help much, and it certainly isn't parallel with what Esperanto has in the same box.

I don't think we should compare one language in practice to the other language in theory. If there's a good example of agglutination of words in Interlingua, then we should use it. If not, we shouldn't give the impression that large-scale agglutination is a major feature of Interlingua.

Bias is often added by piling on more and more statements; in comparison articles, they are often true but mostly irrelevant statements to obscure real differences between the things being compared.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:13, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

I think it is very difficult to make an argument that there is so much overlap between speakers of different Romance languages that it would significantly affect the approximate estimation I provided. Nevertheless, I fully agree with the overall point you are making, and I would like to commence work on a section that talks in-depth about the intelligibility of Interlingua to Romance-speakers (and perhaps English speakers) in comparison to Esperanto. In the meantime, I still think it would be productive to incorporate an additional row in the overview table that mentions this core feature of Interlingua. The table is already structured in a way that compares core features of Esperanto (orthography, antonym formation, grammatical features) against equivalent features in Interlingua that are not weighed as inherently important by most interlinguists. Therefore, I think it would serve the reader well to make a few comparisons between the two languages that owe their basis to core features of the other language as well. Would you have anything against me making a small revision that introduces this?

Stylistic concerns do not override encyclopedic value. I wouldn't mind grouping IT,ES,PT,FR under the "Romance" umbrella if it wasn't for the fact that there are plenty of Romance languages that were explicitly not considered in the creation of Interlingua, chief among which is Romanian. This page talks about the sources of the Esperanto vocabulary. The biggest difference that I can tell between Esperanto and Interlingua in this regard, is that while Esperanto words are sourced quasi-arbitrarily from various (mostly) European languages, the source languages of the Interlingua vocabulary are carefully curated to ensure consistency. Perhaps this is what the table should say, providing links to different articles that talk about the vocabulary sources of each language?

I could just as well have chosen an Interlingua word that is commonly used and is also derived from (even more) multiple affixes, but I chose to parallel the example given to demonstrate word formation in Esperanto. Problem is, if I picked an unrelated word it would seem very out of place with the rest of the Morphology section. While I don't think that rewriting the whole section to use a different root word (than "san") is appropriate, i could definitely come up with multiple Interlingua words that are still formed by addition of affixes and roots to "san". Should I write the Interlingua portion of this section with a focus on words that are found in the corpus? I think this would be the best compromise.

Your closing statement is invalid in this context as it could equally be used to justify removing "irrelevant" information about Esperanto, which I don't think is the correct course of action to improve the encyclopedic value of the article. --VladVP (talk) 20:34, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Orthography and grammatical features are not weighed as inherently important? I think most linguists and even scholars of interlinguistics would disagree. Whereas mutual intelligibility is rarely mentioned in Wikipedia articles, especially not in the overview section.

I doubt there are any words of Romanian origin in Esperanto, either. That article says "84% of basic vocabulary was Latinate, 14% Germanic, and 2% Slavic and Greek", with the Latinate words generally either being directly from Latin, from Italian or Greek. (Zamenhof did not know or use Spanish or Portuguese.) I would be curious about the non-European words, and their Interlingua analogs; if Interlingua has a word for hibakusha (in Esperanto, hibakuŝo), well, French, English and Portuguese use the same spelling; in any language it's of recent origin from Japanese, even if Interlingua borrows it from Romance and Germanic sources and Esperanto and English both borrowed it directly from Japanese.

I think that examples need to be from the corpus. "malsanejo" and "hospitalo" are actual Esperanto words; any Interlingua examples should likewise be real Interlingua.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:50, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

What I meant by "inherently important" is a core innovative feature that sets the language apart from all other similar projects. In Esperanto, this is encompassed by highly schematic grammar and extreme agglutination, almost to the point of polysynthesis such as in the hospital example, the point of which of course is learnability. In Interlingua, however, the whole point of the language is mutual intelligibility! I think it is completely irrelevant how "rarely" it is mentioned in Wikipedia articles (which I highly disagree with by the way), when it is especially relevant in the comparison that this article makes. I think leaving out such a key detail would betray the reader's comprehension of the topics at hand.

(As a side note, "Interlingua scholars" who made Interlingua spent a great deal of time discussing whether to use a phonemic orthography or not. They eventually decided against it because it didn't benefit immediate understandability. This also reminds me that the article might have to mention the fact that Esperanto was mostly made by a single amateur [Zamenhoff], while Interlingua was made by a committee of professional linguists.)

"Hibakusha" is in the corpus of Neo-Latin words, so it is by default valid to use in Interlingua. The rest of the paragraph seems like a fair point, however. I will make a revision referring to IA's primary control languages under the 'Romance' umbrella, while mentioning German and Russian as secondary control languages. (Since Esperanto borrows words from multiple Germanic and Slavic languages, but Interlingua does no such thing, only using the most spoken of each to compare against)

I will write a new paragraph focusing on words found in the corpus. --VladVP (talk) 17:37, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

The space for goals in the infobox should be marked "Goals". I note that nothing in that box mentions learnability, which shares the same problem of "mutual intelligibility" of being poorly measured and mainly by partisans.

Or, you know, made and used by a large community of users versus a committee of academics. We could mention the size of the library and the literature in print in Esperanto, too. As I said, bias is frequently caused by piling on facts and what we mention and how we mention it.

Hibakusha comes from Japanese. The fact that it was adopted into various European languages first seems moot. I stand by what I said; words of non-European origin in Esperanto are going to have direct analogs in Interlingua or are going to represent a hole in Interlingua's vocabulary.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:31, 18 September 2019 (UTC)