The Debate page.
A lot of the arguments that have been made on the subject of International
Auxiliary Languages (IALs) relate to features of one or another,
especially Esperanto. And the same questions have been taken up over and
over again. So this page has been set up so that you can read the debates
and judge for yourselves.
On this page, you will be able to see:
The words will not be just my own. Instead, I provide linkage to people who
are experts in interlinguistics, or are considered so by their supporters.
They include:
The Great Debate on the Esperanto Accusative
Esperantists defend their language's use of a special form for the
accusative case of nouns (and, since in Esperanto, there is adjective-
noun concord, adjectives as well). In a book by Gaston Waringhien, a
whole chapter
was devoted to a defense of this feature. The great linguist Otto
Jespersen looked at the use of case inflections in modern languages,
and in his book An International Language
devoted a chapter to case. You are invited to
read both, and make up your mind which makes more sense.
The Debate on Ido's founding
One of the things that Esperantists seem to put forth in defense of their
language is their resentment of the move in 1907 to improve it. The history of
this event was put down in a pamphlet, "A History of Our
Language (Ido)," by Otto Jespersen, who served as vice-president
of the Delegation Committee. Another person who wrote a summary of what
happened was Leopold
Leau, who served as Secretary to the Delegation Committee.
Although Jespersen and Leau were there, Esperantists seem to have
constructed their own
histories, painting pictures of betrayal and deception. These of course
are prepared by people who were not there and have an axe to grind, and clearly
are designed to defame the character of de Beaufront and Couturat, who were the
main promulgators of Ido. More impartial histories, such as Henry Jacob's posted on the Web, contradict the Esperantists' histories. I invite you to read, and compare.
If you want to comment, 
send me e-mail.
This page was originally a part of my site on Geocities, maintained until 1998.
The last edit on the Geocities page was made on Nov. 16, 1997. The pages on Geocities
could not be edited between 1998 and 2009, and were preserved as they were, until
download in preparation for migration to this site took place on May 22, 2009.
Please inform me of dead links and any other
problems.
Last modified by B. R. Gilson
(brg1942@gmail.com) June 15, 2009.
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