Everything in the world awaits its true name, but first the overarching categories and concepts must be identified and arranged, so a system of notation, hierarchies, and models spans the whole universe.Ī language inventor is not anymore a lunatic - unlike in the book of 1984 ( merci!) - but just “a passionate amateur, in both senses of the word: a lover and a dilettante.” A delirium of naming, taxonomical madness, has seized this solitary figure. We can picture the logophile in a study crammed with books all around lie vast quantities of information yet to be collated, classified, listed, and indexed on countless tables and cards. Look at this excerpt from chapter 2, pp 19–20: Even more, when she refers to an Esperantist, Petro Stojan (p 20), she omits to present it such, and it would have sufficed to check on the English Wikipedia.īut the distortion does not only target Esperanto. Basically, she ignores any scholarly literature in Esperanto Studies, even the one in French!įirst, there is no empirical study proving that and never will, as it does not second, the community of Esperanto speakers is compact and prescriptive, full of grammarnazi and self-proclamed linguists - “I speak, therefore I am a linguist” types. 109, we read “ Dans la pratique, l’espéranto a attendance à se dialectiser ”. The reverse is true.īut, even more importantly, she asserts that Esperanto “tends to break off into dialects.” And it is not a translation problem: in the original French edition, published in 2006, on p. In her box on Esperanto, she claims that the Esperanto community is “limited in number (between one and ten million) but great in motivation”. And yet false information is spread out to the general public. She writes what she calls an update of that book of hers’. I was writing my MA thesis on the sociology of Esperanto, The Esperanto Dilemma, then. She ridicules invented languages since then, when we engaged in a fair academic fight in Palazzo Nuovo, Turin. Marina Yaguello is a renowned French linguist who wrote on interlinguistics matters already in 1984, in a book I read in the 1990s in its English translation, Lunatic Lovers of Languages. Review of “Imaginary languages” by Marina Yaguello (2022).
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