Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village by Sylvan Zaft: Preface

Preface and Acknowledgements

This is the preface to a work-in-progress, Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village by Sylvan Zaft.

You may make electronic copies and paper copies for your personal use, and you may freely distribute verbatim copies which include this notice provided that you do not charge for these copies. You may not post this material to any site. You are invited to insert links to any of these sites. For any other use, including publication, you must first get my permission. I welcome any suggestions about how to improve this work. My address is sylvanz@aol.com.

When I read Claude Piron's Le défi des langues: du gâchis au bon sens soon after it came out in 1994, I felt very strongly the need for this kind of book for non-specialists in English. Le défi des langues presents the need for and the value of Esperanto to readers of French. It shows how enormous are the difficulties of learning foreign languages, and how the enormity of those difficulties is usually overlooked. It explains the huge and unnecessary costs of the present methods that are most widely used for inter-lingual communication, costs that are both monetary and other than monetary. It demonstrates how Esperanto works in theory and in practice and those features of the language that make possible rapid and deep communication after only months of study.

Le défi des langues points out how we are led to believe that we can master a foreign national language in a reasonable amount of time whereas the truth is altogether different. There are all kinds of advertisements that promise us that we will be speaking a foreign language after using a self-help book or some tapes or some video tapes or a CD-ROM. What these advertisements never show us is testimonials from individuals who, after using the product as directed, found themselves able to engage in in-depth discussions of their favorite topics, whether they be sports or public affairs or philosophy or gourmet cooking. To be able to say "How much does that cost?" and "Where are the rest rooms" and "The dress is blue" is certainly helpful, but it does not equate with speaking a language in anything like the sense in which we speak our native language.

Translating Le défi des langues presents major challenges because the linguistic examples are, of course, aimed at native speakers of French. Most of them would be only confusing to English readers who have not learned a great deal of French.

I have written Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village to provide English readers with a book that will present the need for Esperanto clearly and in an interesting way. Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village is not a work of propaganda that ignores the major criticisms that have been directed at the Esperanto. It presents the features of Esperanto that have been criticized as being too difficult and examines them in terms of their cost-benefit ratio. It compares the features of Esperanto with the features of other languages. Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village is not a book by a linguist and it is not a book for linguists. It is a book for those non-specialists who may not be interested in learning Esperanto but who are definitely interested in learning about Esperanto, about the features of this language, how it was developed and how it is used in practice by those who communicate freely and naturally with each other in a common tongue which they were able to learn in a reasonable amount of time.

This book obviously owes much to the work of Claude Piron. He is quoted and referred to in many places. For those who read French I cannot recommend too highly Le défi des langues and for those who read Esperanto I cannot recommend too highly La bona lingvo.

A number of errors have been avoided through corrections offered by Jan Olds and William Harmon. Fellow Michigan Esperantists including Kurt Jung, Robert Sterns, Sherry Wells and Sheila Devlin have offered much encouragement and they too have made useful suggestions and pointed out errors. I am grateful for all of this assistance.

David Richardson went over the manuscript in a very thorough and authoritative way. He found a great many errors and made many suggestions for tightening the text. In several places he suggested improved language which I have incorporated into this version. Because of his help Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village is better organized, easier to read and more accurate. I deeply appreciate his generous help.

Because I have used my own judgment as to which suggestions to accept and which ones to forego, I am naturally responsible for any remaining errors and shortcomings.

I would also like to thank Paul Lutus for his web-editor program Arachnophilia which he has generous made available as careware, asking in return only that users devote just one day to "saying the important things, of performing the kindnesses that naturally occur to us when each day might be our last." Arachnophilia automatically converted the tables in Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village, making it easy to transform the manuscript into hypertext markup language. Those interested in downloading Arachnophilia may find it at:

www.arachnoid.com

I hope some day that Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village will appear in a paper version. However, since it is very easy nowadays to make a document public electronically I am taking advantage of this to put out Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village in this form so that it can be immediately useful to anyone who has access to the Internet. At the same time I invite comments and corrections so that any remaining errors can be expunged.

Sylvan Zaft
Farmington, Michigan
March, 1998

On to Chapter 1: The Dream and the Reality

The Contents of Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village

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