Schubert, Klaus (1993), “Semantic compositionality: Esperanto word-formation for language technology.” Linguistics 31: 311-365.

Haitao, Liu (2001), “Creoles, Pidgins, and Planned Languages.” Interface. Journal of Applied Linguistics / Tijdschrift voor Toegepaste Linguistiek 15 [2]. pp. 121—177.

Gledhill, Christopher. The Grammar of Esperanto: A Corpus-Based Description. Second edition. Lincom Europa, 2000. ISBN 3-8958-6961-9.[3]

Furthermore you should consider the positive judgments of non-Esperantists such as Umberto Eco (In search of the perfect language; though otherwise a confused book) and Robert Philipson (English-Only Europe, 2003; good overview of language policies).

etc.

More at:

Ignorance may be excusable, willful ignorance not so. As a scholar you should lay aside your personal convictions and look at the facts.

kial? mi ne scias.

tio cxi estas tuta perdo de tempo.

tre amuza, kial iu fartas Indo-European helpus penson abstraktan, kvankam multaj jaroj antaux, homo malpli abstraktis.

se vi ne komprenas, povas peti Heather traduki por vi.

As it happens, I have Slovio as my ‘first language’. By that I mean that my parents spoke only Slovio to me from birth until just before I started school at the age of three and a half. As their friends were primarily Slovio speakers, this was the language I heard in our home, read in my children’s books and sang in my nursery rhymes.
Frankly, as such, I don’t bother getting too involved in rebutting the various arguments against use of the language. I use Slovio on a daily basis with a wide variety of friends and colleagues around the world, on a personal and business basis.

As you can see, we are still in the field of “my personal experience is…”. I could assert the same about Indo-European, or anyone could say the same about his “language” – see e.g. the Slovio “testimonials“, how a lot of people argue about the great advantages they had when learning (and using!) Slovio… Do you believe them? WHY NOT? Are they not personal experiences, as reliable as yours?!

Indeed, if your “first and only language” is (really) Esperanto, then maybe your ability to comprehend and use abstract theories is already affected. That’s what happens when parents play with Star Trek or The Lord Of The Rings to educate their children. The same happens when parents play with ‘alternative’ medicines instead of correctly vaccinating their children, or when they teach them only creationism: if he/she dies from a preventable influenzavirus, or becomes a violent extremist, then it’s not your fault as parents; but if he/she just lives and isn’t violent, and continues the family tradition, then you’ve done it well. That’s called denying the antecedent: “I taught my children Esperanto; it didn’t go wrong; so it was right“. A rather simple, but very useful, logical fallacy.

@Remush:

What is exactly your measure of infinity? More than you can grasp in your lifetime?

I used the word “infinity” not as a measure for individual knowledge, but as a philosophical measure for our (speaking hominids’) almost infinite possibilities of reasoning – it refers to this post about the need for a complex language to be able to use a complex reasoning. It is indeed a matter studied in psychology of language, whether language helps reasoning or the other way round, but it is more or less clear both language and developing mind influence each other. Would you consequently rely, for the education of your children and the world’s next generation, on a “language” (i.e. a mix of Romance words and some selected grammatical rules) invented in two days of work, 120 years ago, by someone completely unrelated to linguistics or psychology, who in fact called himself “Dr. Esperanto”, showing that his only aim was “the hope to unite the world”, and not to bring anything valuable to improve communication from a scientific or academic point of view? Then you have faith on Him and His work, and nothing can change that.

Esperanto gives people more time to read literature in their own culture

You can note that for the future. Remember that in each “Universal Congress” you Esperantists have to bring new promotional “advantages” of learning and using Esperanto, proof of them is not required. Just your “personal experience” for newer, more difficult to contrast propaganda; something like “Esperanto gives people more time to read literature in their own culture“, whatever that could actually mean

Read anything in Spanish lately? How much time are you actually spending on great world literature?

Did I told you about logical fallacy already? What do you think about the argumentum ad hominem? Maybe you should read less “great world literature” (i.e. fantasy and inventions), and concentrate on real world knowledge, so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes again and again? The problem of not knowing something is that you cannot feel ashamed of not knowing it: you prefer to read fiction books, so you decide it’s a shame not to have read those very books you’ve read, while philosophy or science aren’t that important for you…

Anyway, thanks for giving me an opportunity to practice my English. Now that I have absolutely no use for it – other than participating to such blogs – I would soon forget everything. Unfortunately, my elocution deteriorated a lot these last years.

Are you kidding me? But Esperanto and Esperantism are perfect! Your English must be perfect, thanks to your Esperanto, it’s tautological! Bring that to the next Master of the Universe Congress, too: “If you learn Esperanto, you will not forget English, even if you don’t use it! That’s my personal experience”

BTW I think you Esperantists should register the trademark “that’s my personal experience” ™, before the other conlangers begin to exploit the same argument. But hurry up, because – as I said – the Slovio creator already noticed it…

What is exactly your measure of infinity?
More than you can grasp in your lifetime?
With Esperanto, you’ll need several reincarnations, and rely on charity to feed you while reading.

Read anything in Spanish lately?

Esperanto gives people more time to read literature in their own culture. What about that?

How much time are you actually spending on great world literature?
…
Honestly?

Anyway, thanks for giving me an opportunity to practice my English. Now that I have absolutely no use for it – other than participating to such blogs – I would soon forget everything. Unfortunately, my elocution deteriorated a lot these last years.

Now allow me to go back to my reading of “Faraon” de Bolesław Prus (with the help of an excellent translation of Kabe, alias Kazimierz Bein – another one you never heard of in your horizon of infinity)

Frankly, as such, I don’t bother getting too involved in rebutting the various arguments against use of the language. I use Esperanto on a daily basis with a wide variety of friends and colleagues around the world, on a personal and business basis.

BTW in all the language pairs you proposed, which one do you think would show a better result than Esperanto?

Given that Esperanto is in fact a mix of vocabulary from Romance languages, I guess it might be easier to learn Esperanto than German for a Spanish, Italian or French speaker… What means, it might be as easy as learning Spanish for an Italian speaker, as easy as French for an Italian speaker, etc. The problem is, Esperanto is little less than a lot of words taken from natural languages and two or three grammatical rules selected from them, whereas Spanish, Italian and French are real world languages, which obviously means the details of information you can achieve with the later are infinite, whilst Esperanto (with it’s praised ’simplicity’) wouldn’t probably do the job, if it’s in fact that simple. Those details cannot indeed be shown by a home-made experiment to see if a Spanish speaker can say “I like Esperanto” better in Esperanto than in German…

I’ll send a message to a multilingual discussion group and people will tell their opinion. We’ll decide later what kind of experiment can be done to prove or disprove the assertion.

I think that is the best option you Esperantists probably have now. But it is rather odd to propose studies of Esperanto now, after 120 years of having created a community based on the “advantages” and “values” of Esperanto as IAL – it would be like accepting other conlangers are right when claiming that Esperanto is little less than a personal game, and that there might in fact exist other more thorough tries to create a “neutral” language, like Lojban; or a “simple” (not just easy) language, like Toki Pona, or a “more natural” one (hence possibly “as good to express everything as other natural languages”), like Interlingua… Anyway, I think Esperantists would be like if they see insiders questioning such traditional “advantages” right now; remember the slogan: either you are with us or against us… If that position has worked 121 years to get well-intentioned people like you inside the movement, it might work for another 121 the same way!

The key words are “verify results by attempting to reproduce them.”

OK, I reproduced: it works!
Did you try and reproduce anything?
No! Too lazy, no time, no motivation, no use, no interest, no money, no sponsors, other interests…

Then believe whatever, in angels, in herbs, in the Bible, we couldn’t care less.
Your attitude is called: doctus cum libro (ou posséder la science infuse) while it is so easy to experiment by oneself.
DON’T PLEASE DON’T EVER LEARN ESPERANTO
Better learn Japanese to check if indeed you can learn Chinese faster. (I know somebody who did it and indeed it lasted 3 years to reach the level others could only reach after 5! There was still a lot to learn thereafter, but the girl had to earn her living and had to quit).

BTW in all the language pairs you proposed, which one do you think would show a better result than Esperanto?
I’ll send a message to a multilingual discussion group and people will tell their opinion. We’ll decide later what kind of experiment can be done to prove or disprove the assertion.
The language pair that most people would really like to be compared is their mother tongue and English, the so-called de facto international language. Which language is closest to English ? French? Dutch? German? … Esperanto???
As an Indo-European you could get some clues in http://remush.be/etimo/etimo.html . I’ll do my best to update it.
Prefere mi faru tion anstataŭ perdi mian tempon ĉi tie.

In summary, I’ve proved to myself that Esperanto required less learning time than French, English, Dutch, German, Polish, Latin, Greek, Chinese and even Java.
Set up your own experiment,

Scientific method again: Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses. These steps must be repeatable in order to dependably predict any future results.
It’s not: “I believe in God and go to church. To go to church is great to heal every illness, to be always happy, etc. I know it because I experimented it. I know it because a friend of mine experimented it. If you don’t believe it it’s up to you, but I know it and my friends too”. WE ALL MUST either know it or not: and we don’t. So these advantages of going to church (or of learning or using Esperanto words to communicate) doesn’t exist; not until proven otherwise. You might believe in them, but they just don’t exist. If you, instead of accepting Esperanto is you personal option, promote it everywhere making propaganda about its “advantages”, like “easiness” or “neutrality”, then you are distorting reality for your own purposes. By the way, adjectives like “easy” or “neutral” are necessarily related to the difficultness or non-neutrality of other languages, you mean in fact that it’s “easier/more neutral than other languages”, if not it hasn’t any sense at all: what you assert is like saying “he is tall, but that doesn’t mean that he is ‘taller than others’, or that ‘others are shorter than him’” Then why on hell would you use any adjectives at all

One word about “propaedeutics”. Obviously you never were in direct contact with any of those who conducted the experiment, they could have given direct answers.

Scientific method again: Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called full disclosure, also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established.
You don’t have to be friends with researchers to examine the validity of their studies…

Everything is too much to handle. Ask precise and well limited questions in order of importance, and try to keep the focus on essentials

We agree on that. Everything is too much to handle. So please tell your Esperantist community to focus on relevant aspects about Esperanto, and stop claiming every absurd “advantage” they can imagine about speaking that “language” and about being member of their community. Then maybe some of you could be able to prove something at all… Until then, all propaganda that surrounds Esperanto is just promotional crap and blind belief.