CONFERENCE ON ESPERANTO STUDIES

Under the auspices of the Center For Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CED) and the World Esperanto Association (UEA)

The Center For Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CED) and the World Esperanto Association (UEA) will arrange the 36th conference on Esperanto Studies in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Languages: Esperanto and Danish (with consecutive interpretation into Esperanto).

Date and time: 2013 July 25   09:00—13:00.

Venue: The room named Hirsch in the concert hall and conference center Harpa in Reykjavik.

Participants: All persons registered for the World Congress have the right to participate.

Program

• 09:00—09:30.   Eckhard BICK: The relational dictionary DeepDict: Corpus-based lexicography in Esperanto
  
• 09:30—09:40.   Discussion on Eckhard's presentation
• 09:40—10:05.   Probal DASGUPTA: `John afterran Peter' isn't `John ran after Peter': Esperanto and Whole Word Morphology
• 10:05—10:15.   Discussion on Probal's presentation
• 10:15—10:35.   USUI Hiroyuki: A Japanese ultranationalist and Chinese anarchists: unknown forerunners of "sennaciismo" in the East
• 10:35—10:45.   Discussion on Hiroyuki's presentation
• 10:45—11:10.   Break
• 11:10—11:25.   Detlev BLANKE: On some recent publications on esperantology
• 11:25—11:35.   Discussion on Detlev's presentation
  
• 11:35—12:00.   José Antonio VERGARA: A bridge between schools of thought in Interlinguistics: Two Interlingua-motivated reform projects for Esperanto
• 12:00—12:10.   Discussion on José Antonio's presentation
• 12:10—12:50.   Guðrún KVARAN: Icelandic language policy, legislation about the Icelandic language, and the tasks of the Icelandic Language Council.
                          (Lecture in Danish with consecutive interpretation into Esperanto.)
• 12:50—13:00.   Discussion on Guðrún's presentation

CED and UEA plan to publish a volume with the presentations.

Abstracts below.

Organizers, commisioned by CED and UEA:
Christer Kiselman, professor emeritus of mathematics; member of the Esperanto Academy; member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Address: Uppsala University, Department of Mathematics, P. O. Box 480, SE-751 06 Uppsala, Sweden
E-mail addresses: kiselman@math.uu.se; christer@kiselman.eu     Congress number: 183
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Mélanie Maradan, translator, terminologist and PhD student. She is UEA's commissioner for terminology.
Address: Uni Mail, Faculté de traduction et d'interprétation, 40 Bd du Pont-d'Arve, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland
E-mail address: melmaradan@yahoo.fr     Congress number: 454

Abstracts (in alphabetical order)

• Eckhard BICK: The relational dictionary DeepDict: Corpus-based lexicography in Esperanto
  I will present the relational dictionary DeepDict (at www.gramtrans.com) and the corpus search engine CorpusEye (at corp.hum.sdu.dk). These tools are the result of extensive university research projects and allow users to determine actual Esperanto usage in ordinary texts. For each word, DeepDict creates a graphical overview of the most typical usage, word combinations and related word fields. For instance, one can easily verify the difference between scii (know-1) and koni (know-2), or inspect the word field of ĉevalo `horse': rajdi `ride', galopi `gallop', fojno `hay', hufo `hoof', selo `saddle') etc. CorpusEye, on the other hand, presents individual examples in a sentence context, allowing the user to study topics like affixation, statistical distribution, word order or newly coined words in Esperanto. Both tools are useful for lexicographers, teachers and language aficionados, but DeepDict also targets language students and anybody who cannot find sufficient usage information in other, ordinary dictionaries.

• Detlev BLANKE: On some recent publications on esperantology
  I will inform about recent professional information brochures, on an important bibliography, and present a book on rhetorical style figures and terminological activity. In addition, I will review the contents of three recently published proceedings of conferences on esperantology, the sixth issue of Esperantologio / Esperanto Studies, and the interlinguistic section of Language Problems & Language Planning 2012.

• Probal DASGUPTA: `John afterran Peter' isn't `John ran after Peter': Esperanto and Whole Word Morphology
  In general linguistics, there has been a divergence since the nineteen sixties between those who propose to give the lexicon serious power in the linguistic description and those who treat it as mere foam decorating the syntactic ocean, whose currents and waves make all decisions. Call them word realists and word skeptics. The skeptics give the syntactic computation a great deal of power. One place where we can find crucial facts bearing on this issue is the planned language Esperanto. If the computation maximizing word skeptics were right, the expressions (a) Johano postkuris Petron `John pursued Peter', lit. `John afterran Peter' and (b) Johano kuris post Petro `John ran after Peter' would have had the same range of interpretations. But even in this maximally logical language, if Peter goes jogging to get some exercise and if John follows suit a couple of hours later, we would be able to say (b) but not (a). We are not dealing with a single contrast between two arbitrarily chosen expressions, but with a systematic fact. This fact concerning compound words and their unpacked equivalents is displayed just as clearly in Esperanto as it is in ethnically anchored languages. This is one argument in favour of the word realist standpoint in the general linguistic debate against word skeptics. In the present study we examine these and related phenomena in Esperanto, and to this end we employ the apparatus of Word Formation Strategies.

• Guðrún KVARAN : Icelandic languague policy, legislation about the Icelandic language, and the tasks of the Icelandic Language Council
  In the year 2009 the Icelandic Parliament passed for the first time a bill on Icelandic language policy. This legislation had been prepared by the Icelandic Language Council during a period of two years. I shall present a review of this development and the influence of the language policy so far. An important outcome is that there is now a special law relating to Icelandic, including Icelandic sign language. This law and the language policy are a great support for the work of the Icelandic Language Council and I shall give an account of the main tasks of the Council concerning the preservation of the Icelandic language.

• USUI Hiroyuki: A Japanese ultranationalist and Chinese anarchists: unknown forerunners of "sennaciismo" in the East
  It is not widely known that the sennaciismo (literally `anationalism', which advocated the exclusive world-wide use of Esperanto) of Lanti, a French Esperantist, had its forerunners in East Asia. In 1919, when Eugène Adam (the real name of Lanti) still believed in a merely auxiliary role of Esperanto, a Japanese ultranationalist, KITA Ikki, developed his fantasy into a revolutionary program according to which the Empire of Japan should adopt Esperanto. He foresaw that 100 years after its adoption the language would be the only tongue spoken in Japan proper and the vast territory conquered by it. It is even less known that Kita was inspired by several Chinese anarchists he befriended, who called for the substitution of Esperanto for Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth century. This presentation will shed light on the sociocultural climate in East Asia which enabled such an early appearance of "anational" thinking. It was due, among other things, to a lack of ethnolinguistic confidence in this part of the world.

• José Antonio VERGARA: A bridge between schools of thought in Interlinguistics: Two Interlingua-motivated reform projects for Esperanto
  Launched in 1951 by Alexander Gode/IALA, Interlingua is the only contemporary international planned language besides Esperanto with some organized activity around it. As an extreme representative of the naturalistic school in Interlinguistics, its main principle of construction is the use of the so-called international vocabulary (actually, Latinate in origin) with Romance grammar, somewhat simplified in the manner of English. Given this limited internationalism, texts in Interlingua are readable at sight by users of the various Romance languages.

  Ever since its inception Interlingua has generated intense debate between its supporters and those of Esperanto about the question of which are the most appropriate criteria for a constructed interlanguage. Such arguments were expressed sometimes through polemical pamphlets, sometimes by more temperate studies.

  Significantly, the remarkable characteristics of Interlingua and the modest attention that it received among scientific and academic circles motivated two seriously elaborated proposals to reform Esperanto that, however, did not take hold. Their different principles were oriented respectively to what shape the Latin and Greek roots should have (Albert Lienhardt, Optimala ortografio de la Internacia Lingvo Esperanto, 1978), and to a proposal for a derivative Esperanto modeled on Interlingua with international vocabulary and an Esperanto-like structure (W. Verloren van Themaat, Demolingwo, 1985–1996).

  Comparing the main elements of the naturalistic and schematic schools in Interlinguistics, as they can be found either in Interlingua and Esperanto, the lecture examines in detail both proposals, using among other materials an unpublished manuscript about Demolingwo that the author sent to me before his death.

  About the speaker: José Antonio Vergara, MD, a public health epidemiologist, teaches the History of Medicine and Science, Anthropology of Health and Epidemiology at the Universidad San Sebastián, Puerto Montt, Chile. He is interested in Evolutionary Biology, Language Ecology and Esperanto Studies. Current president of the Esperanto International Science Association (ISAE), he lectured four times on different topics at the World Esperanto Congress University Courses (IKU) and at a Symposium on English-only Science in a Multilingual World organized by ESF and presented at the AAAS annual conference (Boston 2008), as well as in the ILEI symposium at the University of Copenhagen (2012).

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The address of this page is: www2.math.uu.se/~kiselman/rejkjaviko2013en.html. Last updated on 2013 July 17. To Christer's home page.