erobert52@… | What attracted me to LFN

• Autor: erobert52@… (“edfaedrylaw”)
• Tema: What attracted me to LFN
• Data: 2002-09-29 21:46
• Mesaje: 291 (presedente, seguente)

Dear LFNers

Sorry for writing in English, but I haven't learned LFN, or at
least, not well enough to write it. Although I haven't
contributed to the list, I was initially attracted to LFN
principally because of the apparent attitudes in your website
and your founder's statements.

As a dissident Esperanto speaker, I much appreciated your
founder's espousal of a kind of spiritual atheism. This for me
contrasted with one of Zamenhof's stupider statements in his
personal religious-philosophical agenda, where he stated that
atheists were no help in breaking down the barriers between
religions, and that therefore his 'homaranismo' project was
restricted to religious believers.

I also liked your apparent pluralist attitude to other
languages and projects. For me there is no point in being
opposed to nationalism and racism, which is implicit in
advocating a *neutral* planned language, if you hate other
conlangers instead. From your recent actions in this list, it
is clear that there are in fact limits to which your actual,
as opposed to your claimed, open-mindedness stretches.

I had a read through the translation of the Hemingway story.
I quite liked that too. What most tickled me was the bits of
dialogue in Spanish. Because when you're on a Spanish train,
you order from the bar in Spanish, or at least, you should.
You wouldn't get that from some Esperanto translators, even
today, because a lot of them would persist with their monoglot
fantasy vision (of hell!) where everybody speaks Esperanto.
The LFN version by contrast appeared to be in the real world.

Which brings me to my next point: Isn't it a bit ridiculous
that you should ban messages in Spanish in a forum advocating
use of a Romance based conlang? Do none of you speak Spanish
then? Don't you think learning it would be a good idea? Isn't
it pretty much basic literacy for somebody designing a conlang?
I can't speak or write Spanish terribly fluently myself and
have never studied it in any great depth, but I understood what
our dear expelled friend Alexandre was saying no problemo,
without me even needing to think about resorting to the
dictionary.

Finally, the last thing that attracted me to LFN was your claim
to be in the Lingua Franca/Sabir tradition. It is clear to me
now that there is little, if any, basis to your claim to have
anything to do with it at all. You reject the basic features of
creole grammars, and more especially, you reject non-European
lexical material, which Lingua Franca/Sabir was full of. After
all, it was a real language, used for speaking to real people.

The last thing Europe needs is a common language which is inward
looking. The reason I have rejected Interlingua is because of
its thinly disguised, almost racist, veneration of Western
'civilisation'. I did think it was possible to have a Romance
based conlang that lacked these attitudes, but evidently you
are no different. What seemed to get up your noses most was
Alexandre's attack on American economic hegemony in the world.

I don't agree with attacking the prevalence of English-language
culture for the sake of it. This is like saying that the tail
wags the dog. But I agree with Alexandre that the real problem
in the world IS American economic hegemony, and the problems
this causes are much more important than the linguistic
discrimination or unfairness that they cause as a side effect.
Quite literally they are a matter of life and death. And I say
this as someone with American friends.

I DID think LFN was interesting. I see now that I was wrong.
It is clear that with attitudes like this, LFN isn't going to
be going anywhere. I shall be unsubscribing from the list.

Sadly but sincerely,

Ed Robertson