Talk:Esperanto/Archive 14

This is an archive of past discussions about Esperanto. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 10

←

Archive 12

→

Some statistics

It's difficult to know the number of esperantists. If you are interested: http://parracomumangi.altervista.org/StatistikojUzoSept09.pdf and http://parracomumangi.altervista.org/StatistikojAWSept09.pdf contain some statistics about the famous Kurso de esperanto, the usage of September. It can help to estimate, is not something exact, it's not easy to understand the number of people who learned Esperanto, but it can help. For example: 6309 downloads for Windows (kurso.exe); for Linux: 458 (kurso-3.0.deb) + 132 (kurso-3.0.i586.rpm); total 6899. Maybe 50% of those learned esperanto in september? or 30%? or (pessimistic) only 10%? the latter would be 690 new Esperantists only by this course (but the esperanto associations are hundred or thousand in the world). We can only estimate, but the statistics can be used as/if you want. The website sais it was authorized by the administrators of Kurso de esperanto to public the statistics. Mi amike vin salutas —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.4.163.214 (talk) 19:33, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Google search result

I just did a Google search for "esperanto". The first result was this Wikipedia article, but with a description saying:

"Description of Esperanto with answers to arguments against its use as an international language."

This doesn't seem really objective. Any possibility to change that in the Google results? 188.60.49.11 (talk) 15:26, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Useful Phrases

I'm learning Esperanto now, and they are teaching me to say, "Mia nomo estas ...." not "Mi nomiĝas" which is what is under useful phrases now -- 98.203.152.242 (talk) 08:03, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

There are lots of ways to say things. Mia nomo estas X is the English way. Use whichever you want, but we shouldn't be listing them all. (X estas mia nomo. Nomo mia X estas. X: jen mia nomo. Oni nomigis min X. Jam tro!) kwami (talk) 09:26, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Researched links etc that are removed

Recently I took a lot of time and effort to improve the Esperanto article. However today all of it has been removed again. I put in more links etc. If you don`t agree with an addition made thats oke, but everything has been wiped out again even the information i added about travel networks. Please state why you move or don`t approve of my addidions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Douwebeerda (talk • contribs) 12:56, 7 January 2010 (UTC) Ethnologue is a good source according to my viewpoint on language subject, also if you want to change that, just change that, right now you are also destroying many new links I and also other persons made. So instead of just wiping everything i would prefer it if you talked to me or talked on the discussion section.

Also it just needs to give an overview. This is what ethnologue says, there is already discussion about the number of speakers in the section. In the summery it seems not useful to me to have big debates about numbers, and personally i find the etnhologue number more trustworthy than any other source i have seen. A research by one german student seems to be less trusty then this authoraty on language.

So please talk instead of undoing everything I and other people made to improve the Esperanto article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Douwebeerda (talk • contribs) 12:19, 8 January 2010 (UTC) Douwebeerda (talk) 12:24, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

This has been gone over numerous times. For one thing, Ethnologue is hardly a reliable ref. For another, when others dispute your claims, the polite thing to do is to discuss the changes on this page and attempt to come to agreement. It is not polite to call them vandals. You might want to read WP:Edit warring and WP:Vandalism.

I've protected the article for a day, to stop tit-for-tat reverts while we discuss your points. kwami (talk) 12:38, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

But why do you also remove links i made to pasporta servo, about the international meetings that are held. Why do you destroy all of my editions and not just your number? That is what i do not get. I put a lot of effort in my changes, and apparently you like nothing of that but dont give arguments. So why do you also remove the other stuff? And still you dont give any arguments why your source is better? Why is a finnish study made by one person better than ethnologue according to you? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Douwebeerda (talk • contribs) 12:43, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Because that's your job, and I've got other things to do. I'm just policing the article. You restored the edits that you knew others had objected to; if you had only restored the pasporta servo stuff, that would probably have been the end of it.

As for sourcing, as I've said several times already, we've had this debate numerous times. I'll leave it to the editors who first objected to your edit to explain it to you. kwami (talk) 12:48, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

To kwami,

What is normal in these cases? since the person that wiped all my additions also hasn`t given any reasons yet. Douwebeerda (talk) 12:57, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

None of your changes have been wiped out. They're all there in the page history. They can be restored at any time.

The normal thing to do is just this: start a discussion. (Prosfilaes is likely offline at the moment.) If you do not get satisfaction through discussion here, consider WP:Dispute resolution. Remember, we're a bunch of people who often have opposing points of view, so each of us trying to push through what we want first and talking second is not a viable tactic in the long run. Not to say that most of us don't try from time to time ;) kwami (talk) 20:13, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

ToProsfilaes, please respond.

Ethnologue is a good source according to my viewpoint on language subject, also if you want to change that, just change that, right now you are also destroying many new links I and also other persons made. So instead of just wiping everything i would prefer it if you talked to me or talked on the discussion section.

Also it just needs to give an overview. This is what ethnologue says, there is already discussion about the number of speakers in the section about number of esperanto speakers. In the summery it seems not useful to me to have big debates about numbers, and personally i find the etnhologue number more trustworthy than any other source i have seen in the article.

So please talk instead of undoing everything I and other people made to improve the Esperanto article. Douwebeerda

I have a job; I can't check Wikipedia every few hours.

Ethnologue is a lousy source for any one language, because all it does is echo other sources. In this case, I think it's almost certainly wrong or at best out of date; I see no modern estimates that come close. I note the estimates based on Hungary's census, which I would think would skew high, aren't anywhere close. Like Marcus Sikosek, I've done my own estimates based on the Esperanto speakers of Greater Boston, many of whom I've met. For Boston to have its fair share of those two million speakers, literally 99% of the fluent Esperanto speakers in the area must never show up at meetings. In addition to WP:NPOV and WP:V we have a responsibility not to mislead the readers, and the combination of those three factors to me demand that we should never just give the largest of a set of controversial numbers.

Your other edits were similarly concerning; "Esperanto has had continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers for over a century" is neutral and encyclopedic; "Esperanto has grown since the start in 1887 from the idea of one person to an internationally living language which is now being spoken by 2 million people in 115 different countries." is POV, uses the questioned numbers uncritically, and what does 115 different countries mean? A count of every country where an Esperantist resides can't be current, has no clear definition (there's between 192 and 203 countries, depending on whose list you use) and is just unhelpful. To the extent that such a number might be useful, we could mention how many national associations there are.

You deleted the sentence "However, no country has adopted the language officially." which is important, as that's one of the ways a language is measured in the world.

It's Boulogne-sur-Mer, not Bologne sur mer. That's a minor point in some ways, but when I see a bunch of edits with obvious mistakes like Bologne sur mer, it makes editing the good parts in and reverting just the parts I find distinctly problematic or wrong take so much more time.

"This falls short of" is neutral; "This isn`t yet", assuming that's an apostrophe (outside of its use as a grave accent, its use in Unix, and use as the ASCII character itself, ` shouldn't appear in Wikipedia), isn't neutral, since "yet" implies it will be in the future.

You made big chops in the criticism section that were consistently biased towards Esperanto. Esperanto's phonology is far from its most well-thought out feature, but you removed a claim that it was "provincial" (which it is). You removed the sentence "Many critics see its aspirations for the role of a preponderant international auxiliary language as doomed because they believe it cannot compete with English in this regard." (which is very true, and very citable, and critical to why it hasn't been a huge success.) You biased the criticisms; instead of stating the criticism neutrally (it is a list of criticisms), you added "according to some people" and the like. "Esperanto asymmetry in gender formation, which can be found in almost every language," is POV; it's an attempt to poison the criticism before it's even stated. In reality, Esperanto's style of asymmetry in gender formation is probably unique to Esperanto, and while I suspect gender is tangled in the heart of virtually all languages on the planet, it's tangled in each one in a unique way, and certainly dentisto / dentistino stuff is not in "almost every language". The criticism section is the hairiest and most problematic in the article, which is why I tend to head for the revert button whenever I see it light up in a mess of uncomparable diffs.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:15, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanations. And my apologies for the removing of critical data. I see that that is why you also removed my additions on other fronts. I will try to redo those additions. I still think it is important that people see in how many countries it is spoken since this stresses the international orientation of the language. Your idea sounds usefull as to stress that, I`ll have a look into that. Douwebeerda —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.83.204.191 (talk) 21:57, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Panjabi is probably spoken in s.t. like 115 countries too, but we don't consider it an international language. I think some other criterion is needed. kwami (talk) 09:54, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Criticism's location in the article

WhisperToMe add a POV tag to the Criticism section with a note "Criticism should be distributed throughout the article". I disagree strongly. Esperanto is a language, and the article should read like other language articles. Grammar, history, orthography, etc., etc. should be as neutral as possible. All the fuss about Esperanto as a international language project should be confined to one section; if you want to know about gender in Esperanto, you should be able to find what it is without a confounding blizzard of argument about what it should.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:58, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Anyway, that's not what a POV tag is for. I'll remove it. kwami (talk) 01:04, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

The POV tag is necessary for the section, not because of the content but because of the organization. I do not believe that the arguments above work, considering the Barack Obama article
Think about the Barack Obama article - note the lack of a "criticism" section
"Criticism of Barack Obama" redirects to Public image of Barack Obama - If one wants to discuss the public image of the language in one section or sub-article, that is fine. But it must have this name and have both positive and negative aspects.
"if you want to know about gender in Esperanto, you should be able to find what it is without a confounding blizzard of argument about what it should." - The gender section is indeed the place for info about praise and criticism about gender in Esperanto; the reader should be forced to read the information. By having a criticism section a reader already biased one way or another can read a section that "confirms" his beliefs.
I will immediately let the NPOV noticeboard know of this case.
WhisperToMe (talk) 18:55, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/Noticeboard#.22Criticism_section.22_at_Esperanto_language WhisperToMe (talk) 18:57, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

First, I'm personally offended that you post a POV tag to the article without following the instructions to post to the talk page, and then when someone does post to the talk page you run off to the Noticeboard before you even discuss it. That's not the way we do things around here.

Let's look at Barack Obama, say Barack_Obama#Legislation:

Obama cosponsored the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act.[68] He introduced two initiatives bearing his name: Lugar–Obama, which expanded the Nunn–Lugar cooperative threat reduction concept to conventional weapons,[69] and the Coburn–Obama Transparency Act, which authorized the establishment of USAspending.gov, a web search engine on federal spending.[70] On June 3, 2008, Senator Obama, along with Senators Thomas R. Carper, Tom Coburn, and John McCain, introduced follow-up legislation: Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008.[71]

I don't see any place where it criticizes him, despite there being pages of criticism of these bills. I don't see anything in Barack Obama that would be the equivalent of dumping the criticism section in Esperanto all over the article.

Again, it's completely unWikipedian to tells us that the article name must be Public image of Esperanto. There's certainly room for discussion here, but the public image of Esperanto has nothing to do with what's in the Criticism section, most of which is pretty esoteric.

"the reader should be forced to read the information." Really? So if you want to know about the meter, you should forced to read about how it totally sucks and is unusable, and how it completely rocks and it's the Imperial units that suck? That's another page that a huge argument against your solution; it doesn't even mention the controversy about the meter, it just tells you what it is. Esperanto at the very least shouldn't spread the controversy about the language all over the page; you should be able to read about what it is.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:14, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure that the NPOV board was the exactly the right place for this, but I saw it there and am responding. I can understand why WhisperToMe might have considered it an NPOV issue though because some of the language does seem to be problematic. Specifically, bullet point 4 in that section contains the phrase "...unimaginatively provincial..." without the phrase being part of a direct quote. Using those words outside a direct quote implies that it is our judgment the language is unimaginatively provincial which would violate NPOV.

Furthermore, I have to agree with Whisper that the criticism of gender belongs in the section about that issue, rather than segregated and isolated from the relevant content as it is. there are other points that could also be redistributed into the body of the article, but probably best to discuss them individually. I hope that other editors will consider these points; at the very least it should be possible to trim the criticism section and rewrite a few of those phrases. Doc Tropics 00:22, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't see where in English grammar or French grammar it goes after the language for how it uses gender. Esperanto is a language that has been in use for a hundred years; surely we should be able to describe what it is neutrally without getting off into how someone is unhappy with its design. Again, I refer to meter, which discusses the unit of length without once mentioning how some people think it's much worse than yard/feet/inch and other people disagree.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:00, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

"unimaginatively provincial" is a summary of a type of criticism, not a novel judgement on our part. I agree with Prosfilaes that the criticism section should stay separated. Eo deserves such a section, because it is a language project, not just a language, and so reception of the language is pertinent in a way that it wouldn't be for Balinese. But it *is* a language, and a description of the language should be just that: a description of the language as a language. Criticism belongs in a section of social impact & public response. kwami (talk) 06:04, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Esperanto will now be teached in brazilian Public school

with reference to "In Brazil, an effort is being made to approve a law to teach Esperanto in public schools.[28]"

See: hubpages .com/hub/Brazilian-Schools-Will-Teach-Esperanto http://www.senado.gov.br/agencia/verNoticia.aspx?codNoticia=95294&codAplicativo=2 http://www.pagef30.com/2009/09/15-september-2009-esperanto-approved-by.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.208.62.72 (talk) 07:32, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Pakistani translation

The founder of 'Pakistana Esperanto-Asocio' Prof. Allama Muztar Abbasi from Murree Pakistan wrote several books on Esperanto and compiled the Esperanto-Urduo Vortaro (Esperanto-Urdu dictionary). Moreover, he is the first Pakistani who translated Qur'an from its original text into Esperanto. The translation of Qur'an with the name of Vera Libro was published in 2000.

Does this mean that the Qur'an had been translated to Esperanto before, but this is the first such translation by a Pakistani? How is that notable? If this is the first translation, how is the translator's nationality relevant to that sentence? —Tamfang (talk) 07:42, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Mi forigos la paragrafon. —Tamfang (talk) 08:25, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

'cz' in Esperanto

Some people, such as the editor who reverted me, seem to believe that 'cz' can not occur in Esperanto words. I would recommend to those to study a little bit how this language works, before reverting others. In Esperanto, compound words can be formed by adding the root of one word to another. So, the root 'pac' and the word 'zorgo' can combine to 'paczorgo'. While that's not a word I've seen before, it is by no means foreign to the language. — Sebastian 22:12, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I now realize that the editor who reverted me does at least have a strong interest in Esperanto, having e.g. been the main editor of Esperanto etymology. Still, it would be nice to assume a little bit of good faith and consider that other people, too, may know what they are writing about. — Sebastian 22:43, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Aren't there some roots with gz? —Tamfang (talk) 08:24, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean cz? None that I know of. It would be hard to pronounce (voiceless+voiced s in a row), so it's unlikely. --Schuetzm (talk) 15:33, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

No, I mean gz, which is two voiced consonants in a row. If such roots exist, they're a better illustration of the problem than compounds with cz. —Tamfang (talk) 22:53, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Good idea to look at other letters. That gives us an even better example: "uz", which sorts after "ux", which is used for "ŭ". That certainly is uzed in Esperanto roots! — Sebastian 23:20, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, in the RETA Vortaro, it would order reuzpapero and reŭmatismo incorrectly. — kwami (talk) 04:44, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

I was assuming roots. At least in the dictionaries I have, that's how words are ordered. Also, I think it would have to be pacozorgo, since the shift in voicing would have made paczorgo almost impossible for s.o. like Zamenhof to pronounce, so I'd argue that cz actually is foreign to the language. — Kwamikagami — continues after insertion below

No, it doesn't have to be: "Oni ne uzas ligfinaĵon [kiel "-o-"] en tiaj kombinoj, kie la antaŭelemento plej nature fariĝas A-vorto".[1]. But a better example are actual roots containing "uz" - see above. — Sebastian 23:20, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

That link is down, but that's not how I read it from PAG: a nominal or adjectival head in a compound nominalizes the flankelemento (I forget what that is in English); so yes, if you wanted the flankelemento to be adjectival, you'd use the intrafix -a- rather than -o-. But the point may have been that you don't create compounds for what can be expressed by adj + noun the way you do in German, which is the closest I see in PAG to the Bertilow quote.

But Eo prides itself on being written the way it's pronounced. If you can't pronounce paczorgo, you shouldn't write it either. As the PAG puts it, the intrafix is elidable when its preservation is not required for pronunciation or other considerations. They specifically note that Z retained the -o- between consonants that differed in voicing, as here, or when it avoids gemination (affixes as in mallonga excepted). — kwami (talk)

The idea to change the -o- to -a- is nice, and I wish Zamenhof had had that idea, but it doesn't look like he did: The quote continues «Ekzemple dikfingro = "fingrospeco, kiu kutime estas pli dika ol la aliaj fingroj"». Here are a cloned and a cached version: [2] [3]. — Sebastian 04:26, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

I wasn't assuming bad faith, I just disagreed with you. — Kwamikagami — continues after insertion below

I believe you; I never had the impression you assumed bad faith. (More on your talk page). — Sebastian 23:41, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Tamfang, words with kz are often (perhaps generally) pronounced as if they were gz, but they aren't spelled that way. (One of the few irregularities in the language.) — kwami (talk) 15:41, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

But why assume roots? This could be how an alphabet listing of threads in Usenet was sorted.--Prosfilaes (talk) 19:57, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Unwarranted self importance

Come on, one thousand native speakers? This article needs more NPOV and less fanboy/girl-isim. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.234.123.137 (talk) 04:25, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

I'd be a bit more careful before calling others "self-important"; such labels may fall back on the name-caller. The number is sourced to a university study, have you taken a look at that? Fair enough, that's not an official count, but it's the best we have. If you have anything better, please let us know. BTW, the fact that there are native Esperanto speakers is undisputed, some are even very cute. — Sebastian 20:29, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

in section Criticism

"Esperanto phonology is unimaginatively provincial" - is it scientific opinion? --ZmiLa (talk) 10:46, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Obviously not. It's just a criticism some voice (notice how some have managed to voiced pretty conflicting claims about its cultural status: "no culture" vs. "European"). I have removed the provincialness criticism, as I just checked its source and couldn't find the claim in there, with the closest thing to it being that it "is a constructed language with Romanic and Germanic roots, Belarussian phonology, and Slavic semantics", which is descriptive, not critical, in nature. The point thus smells like OR to me. --JorisvS (talk) 13:23, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

lede

I took out the stuff about Eo being spoken, written, on the radio, etc. Come on, it's a language, and we don't bother with stuff like that in the ledes of other language articles. On the other hand, I changed the propedeutic wording to 'superior', as that's the point. (All languages have propedeutic value.) — kwami (talk) 23:31, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Useful Phrases

The name of the useful phrases section should definitely be changed because it doesn't seem very wikipedia like. I am sure you'll find something in WP:NOT. Jbhf1 (talk) 16:43, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, we should probably direct the reader to Wiki Books or s.t. — kwami (talk) 22:59, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

"constructed language" vs "constructed international auxiliary language"

The article begins with the indisputable claim that Esparanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Lower down, however, there is the claim to be the most widely spoken constructed language which is more disputable, as this includes "constructed" national languages like New Norwegian, largely the creation of Ivar Aasen and spoken by about half a million Norwegians according to the Wikipedia article on it. I would suggest correcting or qualifying this. Geoff Bache (talk) 18:49, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I've never seen New Norwegian considered a constructed language, though. It is a a standardized Norwegian dialect. There are a couple languages out there that are sometimes tossed around as constructed languages, Hebrew language and Filipino language, but they're not normally so classified.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:48, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't think language planning counts as construction. Definitely not Filipino, which is a political fiction. Hebrew is a more interesting case, but it's reconstructed, and not intended to be a new language. — kwami (talk) 22:59, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Other interesting cases in point are Rumantsch Grischun and Bahasa Indonesia. In my opinion, what matters is that these standardised languages were actually constructed: the material they were based on is of secondary importance. As such they can at least in part be categorised as constructed languages. The same goes for reconstructed languages, too: Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic themselves were of course no constructed languages (if we assume they existed at all), but contemporary reconstructions no doubt are. —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 23:50, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about Rumantsch, but Indonesian is just Malay. Standardization of an existing language is hardly the same thing as inventing a new one. If you tell Indonesians they speak an artificial language, I'm sure they would disagree. As for pIE, there actually is a conlang based on that. Otherwise, no-one uses these reconstructions, so they aren't languages today. — kwami (talk) 00:26, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

I know about Modern PIE, but here I was rather referring to scientific reconstructions (which can differ greatly, see f.ex. Schleicher's fable). In my opinion, the whole difference between artificial and natural languages is artificial in itself. Instead, you can say there is a scale between those two extremes. A standardised language for a group of existing dialects is closer to the constructed end of the scale than those dialects themselves (although even they will undoubtedly contain "created" elements), but less close than for example an umbrella language like Folkspraak or my own Slovianski, while the latter are closer to natural languages than, say, Esperanto, which in turn is closer to the natural languages than Klingon. The question at which point of the scale natural languages end and constructed languages begin is subjective, and whatever solution you pick, there will always be a huge gray area. Therefore, the only criterium that can be evaluated objectively is: "how, where and when did this particular form of the language come about?" As for the how: in how far was it based on actual usage? As for the where: was it created behind a desk or in a conference room? As for when: the most current opinion AFAIK is that if a constructed language has second-generation native speakers, it ceases to be artificial and start to be natural. This last thing disqualifies most of the examples (except Rumantsch), because even if they started off as constructed languages, they can no longer be considered as such. Nevertheless, I think Geoffbache has made a good point, and IMO there would be no harm in adjusting the text accordingly. Regards, —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 01:00, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

We could then say that all languages are constructed, and for that matter also artificial, and on the other hand that Esperanto is natural. But no-one uses the terms that way. No-one thinks of Spanish or Italian as being constructed; words and phrases mean what they're used to mean, not what they could be argued to mean given literal interpretations of their components. If they were, you could argue that the southernmost point of Europe is Tierra del Fuego, since Europe is a "continent", a "continent" is a continuous landmass, and South America is part of the same continuous landmass as Greece. That's just not how the word is used. — kwami (talk) 01:35, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

I think "this particular form of the language" isn't the right tool; a constructed language should be distinct enough from any other to be its own language. As long as New Norwegian or Rumantsch Grischun are dialects of Norwegian and Rumantsch, they aren't constructed languages. Hebrew really is the exception, but whatever modifications were made, it's certainly treated as the natural continuation of Biblical Hebrew and not as a constructed language.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:46, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

That is beside the point. Whether a language is constructed or not does not depend on the material it is based on, but on the way it came into being. Basic English is considered a constructed language as well (a subset language, to be precise). What really distinguishes constructed languages from natural languages is that they have an author (or a group of authors) and a purpose (which may well be serving as a Dachsprache for speakers of several dialects), while natural languages by definition do not (or at best, a codifyer and/or a regulating body). But like I said, it's a more like a scale with a huge gray area, and while I'm not saying that Nynorsk is artificial, it surely is more artificial than for example Finnish. In other words, every natural language has artificial elements and every artificial language has natural elements. However, it is impossible to tell at which point one group ends and the other one begins. —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 12:54, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Most categories are fuzzy. By that token, it's impossible to day from night, but we still use the words relatively unambiguously. — kwami (talk) 17:43, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

I am not an expert on categorisations of language, but if words whose meaning isn't self-evident are to be used on Wikipedia, then I think some sort of attempt at a definition should be made. I don't think distinguishing between a "planned language" and a "constructed language" is like distinguishing night and day, and while "constructed auxiliary international language" is a bit of a mouthful, it is at least clear what is meant. I also don't really buy the "different enough to be a language in its own right" thing. As as Swedish speaker I can say that they're sufficiently different that I can understand standard Norwegian pretty easily but New Norwegian is mostly a closed book to me. As I'm sure you know, a language is just what you get when you combine a dialect with an army and a navy :) Geoff Bache (talk) 18:37, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

But isn't Basic English a "constructed auxiliary international language" by the argument being used here? For that matter, isn't regular English?

I agree that we need to define our terms, but that's why we link constructed language. In any case, once we introduce the full concept in the lede, we really don't need to repeat the whole thing with every mention. — kwami (talk) 19:08, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, Basic English is most definitely a constructed auxiliary international language. That's how it is usually classified, anyway. But well, as far as there is any doubt, let's take another example: Latino Sine Flexione, a.k.a. Interlingua de Peano. Like Basic English, it doesn't have a word of its own (which was quite a clever move if you ask me, since everybody can buy the dictionary around the corner), just a grammar that's about as simplified as Interlingua's. Nevertheless, LSF is always classified under the constructed languages. And why? Because it has an author (Giuseppe Peano) and a purpose international auxiliary language).

Obviously, Nynorsk, Modern Hebrew, Rumantsch Grischun and the like are no international auxiliary languages. But like the latter, they do have an author and a purpose, the difference is only that the purpose is different. They form a separate subcategory of the constructed languages, namely those that were intended to become the umbrella language of a nation. And unlike auxlangs, they tend to grow into natural languages fairly quickly.

All in all, I agree that it would be foolish to write "constructed auxiliary international language" all the time when we mean Esperanto etc. and not Nynorsk etc. But in this particular sentence it wouldn't hurt to add the word "auxiliary". After all, night is night and day is day, but for some the night ends at sunrise, for others at 6 AM. —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 19:32, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

I linked 'constructed language', which should make it obvious what we mean. Adding "auxiliary international" won't solve the problem if s.o. wants to insist that English and French fit the bill, and aren't necessary for anyone using a little common sense. — kwami (talk) 20:00, 18 October 2010 (UTC)