The Bottom Line: Expressions of Opinion

Much has been made of Bill Clinton's purported diversion of funds from a failing Arkansas S&L. So far, we only know that the Clintons, rather than profiting from the situation, claim to have suffered a $69,000 loss.

Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Bill Clinton siphoned off a million dollars from the S&L in question. This works out to about four-tenths of one cent for every man, woman and child in the United States. Compare this figure with the thousands of dollars in debt piled on every American by the two preceding administrations because of their negligence and misfeasance in the S&L fiasco. If Bill Clinton were to have his hand officially slapped for his alleged misdeed, then his two predecessors would proportionally deserve to be poached in boiling oil, spitted over a slow fire, hanged several times, drawn and quartered, and minced into hamburger and fed to rabid dogs, the Eighth Amendment notwithstanding.

Since the Republican Party does not seem to be pursuing its own miscreants as vigorously as it is persecuting the current president, we may suppose that the two gentlemen in question will pass their twilight years as revered Elder Statesmen, while Bill Clinton, far from succeeding in cleaning up the general mess they made, will, like Alice's Red Queen, continue to have to run twice as hard just to stay in the same place.

I remember a time when a man would automatically give his bus seat to a lady -- at least if she was carrying a heavy grocery bag, or was obviously pregnant. That was an era (now forgotten) when children did not address grown-ups by their first names, and even grown-ups, if they didn't know each other, would use an honorific, out of simple politeness.

Tmes change, and not always for the worse. But it still caused a painful twinge when I saw my letter responding to Ann Philips (Jan. 15) with the honorifics ("Ms.") excised. The final line ("Right, Philips?") was particularly grating, because I never, ever, would have spoken in such a way to anyone whom I didn't know personally.

Well, it says right there that all letters are subject to "editing and condensation". I understand the need to save space. Still, I would think that it might have been better to keep in the twelve characters (including three spaces) that were recovered by removing "Ms." three times, and save much white space and a few lines by not breaking down my original three paragraphs into nine.

One may "applaud, with regret, Admiral Inman's decision to withdraw" as Albert Koedding does in his letter about "media cannibals" (Jan. 21). One may applaud his decision with no regrets whatsoever, as columnist William Safire does. One may even attempt, as I do, to stifle a bored yawn about the whole afair. But whatever one does, one should not attempt to justify one's opinion with a sentence that contains at least three major errors in fourteen words, as Mr. Koedding does by stating that "his withdrawal deprives the nation of the continuing service of an accomplished public servant..."

Admiral Inman left government employ a decade ago, to take up a lucrative, though apparently not very successful, career in the private sector, to which he has now returned accompanied by many sighs of relief, apparently including his own; his government service has hardly been continuing. During the entire period of his work for the government, he not only worked in the executive branch and was thus not accountable to the public, but he also held posts that freed him from even the most cursory public oversight; he was hardly a public servant. Finally, during at least his last years working for the government every post he held was supervisory; he was hardly a public servant.

I don't know whether Admiral Inman's withdrawal is our loss or not. Mr. Koedding does not demonstrate that it is.

One of our members who lives in the area served by your newspaper has sent us a copy of your article about an ongoing project to translate the Holy Bible into Klingon, the language of a fictitious race of space-going warriors in the various TV and motion picture Star Trek series (Jan. 11). He felt that the article would be of interest to us because of the title: "Sure beats Esperanto."

I must confess that the reason for this title eludes me. In the first place, Esperanto is nowhere mentioned in the article itself. In the second place, it is not clear to me how a project which up to now has translated only one and a half books of the Bible into Klingon could somehow give this language an edge over Esperanto, in which a complete Bible has been on the market continuously for more than seventy years. In the third place, I don't believe that even the two individuals named in the article as working on the project would agree with your headline, since both speak Esperanto and are in fact members of the national U.S. organization to promote Esperanto, the Esperanto League for North America.

We appreciate free advertising. We would appreciate it even more if it were accurate.

Fascinating to read about Ziad Fazah of Brazil (Sunday Punch, Jan. 23), who can speak 56 languages when the average student in this country leaves school able to speak only one -- and that one, often, not very well.

Still, I find myself just a trifle dubious of his claims. Fazah's dream is said to be "to create a universal language that would be written as it is spoken." Most people who know anything about languages are at least aware of the existence of Esperanto, which has been around for more than a hundred years now, is spoken by some two million people -- and is written exactly as it is spoken.

I notice in today's paper that former Marine Corps Lt.-Col. Oliver North has announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

There's a major problem here. If elected, Col. North will be required to take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Col. North already took such an oath, almost thirty years ago -- in that one he promised, if I remember the wording correctly, to "preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." A few years later he demonstrated not only that he did not understand what was in the Constitution, but also that he was perfectly willing to ignore it if it disagreed with his own personal political convictions. He was, in fact, convicted in court for a crime deriving from those Constitutional violations; the conviction was overturned not on the grounds that he had not engaged in criminal activity (despite his own claims that he was "exonerated") but because there was some question as to whether that activity was covered by a Congressional grant of immunity in return for testimony.

How, then, can the people of the United States trust this man when he again swears to uphold the Constitution?

As soon as I saw Eric Korn's comment early in his review of Pierre Janton's Esperanto (Feb. 4, 1994) that "Esperantists are Bourbons who have learned and forgotten nothing," I had the immediate feeling that perhaps Mr. Korn had been carrying out a too-intimate investigation of Kentucky's most famous export product, which bears the same name as that distinguished royal line. Nothing else in the article gave me reason to change my mind.

I could write a several-page point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Korn's four columns of misinformation, but let me concentrate on the asterisked terms in the paragraph that takes up most of column three. Mr. Korn writes that "the neat *oo, *aa, *ee -- 'nominality, adjectival, adverbially' -- are inexplicably forbidden." I would appreciate it if Mr. Korn would show me, anywhere in the canon of Esperanto, where these terms are forbidden. I do not remember ever having seen anybody actually use these particular expressions, but I have seen similar expressions of the form grammatical ending + grammatical ending in the Esperanto literature. They are uncommon, but not unknown, and certainly not forbidden.

The asterisks on *mi parlantas, mi *parlintas (apparently Mr. Korn cannot decide whether it is the pronoun or the verb that is incorrect) belong there only because the root parl' does not exist in Esperanto; perhaps Mr. Korn means parolantas, parolintas. Again, perfectly legitimate words that are simply rarely used. Mr. Korn's attribution of "a choice of present tenses to rival English (and to baffle Chinese and Arabs and Slavs)" to Esperanto overlooks the simple fact that Esperanto has only one present tense, that ending in -AS; the words given are merely verbified adjectives, like the word bluas, an expression which sometimes confuses native English-speakers like Mr. Korn because (unlike the Japanese and the Chinese) we have no corresponding forms.

Finally, since the column was ostensibly a book review, I would be interested to know what Mr. Korn thought of the book. Nowhere in his column does he comment on this.

Jerry B. Mitchell of Rodeo (Feb. 25) points out that, while the men involved in the Port Chicago mutiny were illegally refusing to carry out their duty because of fear, merchant sailors and military men throughout the world were going into battle with the sure knowledge that many of them would die, and that because of this these mutineers deserve no special consideration, even at this late date.

Interestingly, nowhere in Mr. Mitchell's letter is the word "black" used. White Americans, as well as black Americans, sailed on those hazardous North Atlantic merchant convoys; white soldiers, as well as black soldiers, hit the beaches of Normandy and went into the meat-grinders of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu and Iwo Jima. But at Port Chicago it was black sailors who were forced to carry out the hazardous work of loading notoriously touchy munitions, while white sailors were exempted from the duty. And when one of those dangerous cargoes went up in an explosion so huge that one local writer later felt justified in attributing it to a prototype nuclear device, it was overwhelmingly black sailors who died.

From what I've read, the "mutineers" were protesting not the dangerous job itself but the fact that black men were being singled out to perform it while their white counterparts got on with less hazardous duty. If such a protest is "a politically correct course in self-esteem" (to use Mr. Mitchell's somewhat hackneyed and generally misunderstood terminology), then let me -- as usual! -- line myself up here on the side of political correctness.

Three cheers and an "Amen!" or two for Greg Dubs' Forum letter ("Murdering Language," Feb. 2). English is in no danger of disappearing in this country; the worst we can expect from the languages of immigrants, from Asia and elsewhere, is that, as the immigrants themselves learn English, they will force some of their own semantic and linguistic habits on American English, bringing back to the language some of the flexibility and vitality it enjoyed in the age of Shakespeare.

One minor quibble. In his final sentence, Mr. Dubs takes us on an excursion into utopia when he recommends that "all children [be] required to learn one European language, one Asian language and one Native American language." This could not happen in any California school system extant today, and perspectives for language-teaching are even grimmer. Even in Europe, where language-learning is the norm, three foreign languages are generally beyond anyone but the privileged few, even when all three are European languages with familiar words and structures.

From my own experience, I can suggest a reasonable alternative. Esperanto is a very easy and quick language to learn, with far more bang for the buck than any other language in terms of progress per unit time. Recent experiences in the Chicago school system show that children take to it like a duck takes to water. Such a language, without detracting from other, more important subjects in the schools, could quickly become a very useful alternative means of communication -- and one that would guarantee linguistic respect on the part of everyone concerned.

In my Esperanto course at U.C. Berkeley there are several foreign students; they are absolutely astonished (and horrified) by the amount of space and time the American media have been devoting to the Corrigan-Harding brouhaha. From their point of view -- which is that the media exist to provide real information -- this is totally incomprehensible.

If we assume, however, that the media's major purpose is to pander to the baser interests of their readers -- possibly in deference to advertisers -- then the mass of Corrigan-Harding stories becomes easily understandable. The ancient Romans had an expression for this -- "Bread and Circuses."

It would be interesting to compare the amount of space given in West County Times over the past month or so to the Corrigan-Harding story with that devoted to the U.S.-Japan trade dispute. It is also interesting to see the reader response to questions on these two topics. As I remember, the previous Corrigan-Harding question, about three weeks ago, generated an entire page of commentary by readers; that on the trade dispute, last week, evoked a total of three publishable replies. Which just goes to show where we as a people, aided and abetted by the media, place our priorities.

Your article on Esperanto (March 30) was interesting and fairly accurate, but contained one or two of the usual errors. One of these was Nicholas Bray's determination that "the fall of Communist régimes that once gave Esperanto backing because of its internationalist overtones has removed a major support."

While many (certainly not all!) of the East European Communist governments financially subsidized their own national Esperanto organizations, they never extended that support to the international Esperanto movement. Furthermore, the purpose of such support was generally twofold: to use Esperanto as a tool for "informing" other (generally Western) nations about the situation in the countries in question; and to maintain control over those organizations, usually for the purpose of limiting, not promoting, the spread of Esperanto within the population at large and its use by that population. After all, many officials of the governments in question shared Stalin's perception that Esperanto was a "dangerous language" -- which, since it gives those who speak it a means of conceptually leaping over national boundaries, it may certainly be, to those who prefer to keep their populations in ignorance.

The loss of such financial support is certainly regrettable. But many of us believe that such a loss will be more than offset by the new opportunities, and the greater freedom of action, that the new situation represents. Esperanto, after all, is spoken not by régimes or by organizations, but by people; and while the régimes have changed and the organizations have had to make their peace with the new system, the people are still there, as they have always been and always will be.

(Information about Esperanto is available by phone from 800-828-5944, or by E-mail from elna@netcom.com)

Student Bill Clinton once took a trip to Moscow, where he secretly met with Leonid Brezhnev to plan the overthrow of the United States. The plot failed, so nobody cared. At the same time, Clinton went to great lengths to avoid being drafted. Since every red-blooded American lad with a greater-than-single-digit I.Q. was doing the same thing at the time, though usually with less success, nobody cared. I see new evidence of Bill Clinton's insatiable womanising every time I pass through a supermarket checkout stand, but nobody seems to care. Vince Foster committed suicide over Clinton's looming political problems, thus becoming the first man in the history of American society to kill himself over another man's problems, but nobody cares. Whitewater was supposed to expose Clinton as a wheeler-dealer, but all it showed was that the man is far from being a financial wizard. There was supposed to be evidence that the Clintons engaged in a criminal conspiracy to siphon funds from a failing S&L for political purposes, but I've heard little or nothing about this in recent weeks; it will be interesting to see how much blood the Special Prosecutor can milk from that particular stone. Kitchengate might have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but the American people seem to feel that even the President of the United States has the right to decide what kind of food he is going to eat. And now we find that Hillary Clinton, in the space of a mere half-year -- six months that apparently included both 1978 and 1979 -- managed to parlay a $1,000 investment into $100,000. This is almost as deserving of investigation as that chap in Port Hueneme who, last week, parlayed a one-dollar lottery ticket into three million dollars in the space of a few hours -- a simple impossibility, if you don't have inside information about how the balls are going to pop.

What next, folks? Is it true that Chelsea Clinton is running an international child pornography ring? Does Socks the Cat demonstrate contempt for family values by engaging in un-American promiscuity? Is there solid evidence that George Stephanopoulos is Count Dracula's illegitimate son? And what of the rumors that Bill and Hillary guaranteed their election by participating in vile satanic rituals involving animal mutilation and infant sacrifice? Watch for these and other titillating revelations, to be brought to you by those who, until last year, thought they owned the White House in fee simple.

In Stephen Wade's article on the decision by the Association of Spanish Language Academies to do away with the Spanish "ll" and "ch" as separate letters (Saturday, Apr. 30), he writes that this move "was taken mainly to simplify dictionaries and make Spanish more computer compatible with English."

The decision may indeed simplify Spanish-language dictionaries, but, since the two "letters" in question are already digraphs using standard English letters, it will have absolutely no effect on making Spanish more computer compatible with English. The European Union did propose certain changes in Spanish orthography along these lines, but they consisted of doing away with the separate letter "ñ" and the stressed vowels "á", 'é', etc. Since the article does not mention these proposals, which would have increased "compatibility," we may suppose that they were specifically rejected by the Association.

Dana M. Studer (Thursday, Apr. 26) writes to complain about ACLU intervention to allow Sikh children to carry religiously-required knives to school while at the same time acting to prevent Christian children from praying in schools.

To the best of my knowledge, the ACLU has never opposed prayer in public schools. For one thing, that would be wasted energy; as one wag put it, "As long as there are exams in public schools, students will say prayers there." What the ACLU has opposed, generally successfully, is organized prayer under the auspices, tacit or explicit, of the school authorities. So Ms. Studer is comparing individual expressions of religious belief permitted by the school to group expressions of religious belief organized by the school -- or, if you prefer, apples and oranges.

If the ACLU supported a ban on Christian children carrying Bibles to school in their daypacks, Ms. Studer would have a case. If the Sikh community insisted on organized Sikh rituals being carried out during school hours and on school property, and the ACLU failed to come out in opposition to this, Ms. Studer would have a case. As it is, Ms. Studer has no case.

Leaving aside Raymond James of Morecambe's assertion (Readers' Letters, June issue) that "no-one speaks [Esperanto], apart from a few die-hard fanatics" -- the World Almanac and Book of Facts (1994 edition) places the number of those "few die-hard fanatics" at two million, but let it pass -- I find myself at a loss when faced with his argument that Esperanto is somehow incapable of borrowing words from other languages without damaging its "purity". While Esperanto includes a clear mechanism for building new words out of old ones -- something sadly lacking to English -- it also includes a clear mechanism for deciding when to borrow a new root from some other language. In fact, when push comes to shove, every single root in Esperanto is borrowed from some other language -- and the system continues to function flawlessly, despite this, whether the word comes from Hindi (bangalo = bungalow), Arabic (alg^ebro = algebra), Japanese (hibaks^o = survivor of a nuclear attack), or whatever.

I would like to send you this letter by faksmodemo, but I guess I'll just have to run off a copy on my laserprintilo.

Wendy Ashby and Ron Clark's letter on Glosa (Letters, May 7) was interesting and addresses an important question. But before anyone jumps on the Glosa bandwagon, it might be worthwhile putting Glosa's current status into historical perspective.

For all intents and purposes, Glosa is now some fifty years old, since it is a slightly modified version of Interglossa, whose first textbook was published by Lancelot Hogben in the early 1940's. The argument might be made, however, that Glosa as we know it today dates only from the early 1970's, when Ashby and Clark discovered Hogben's work and, with the author's permission, revived it under a somewhat different name. So for the sake of argument, let us put Glosa's age at twenty.

Esperanto, another constructed language, in 1907 celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the publication of its first textbook. At that time it had already, among other things:

Been used as the sole language of communication at several international conferences numbering more than 1000 participants from several dozen countries;

Developed a respectable corpus of original and translated literature;

Acquired a speaking population of some tens of thousands;

Been effectively banned by several governments, starting with that of Russia, which saw in it a bearer of alien, and therefore dangerous, ideas.

Esperanto is not unique in this; several other planned languages have shared some of these properties, though on nowhere nearly so great a scale. I might mention in particular Volapük, Ido, and (to a lesser extent) Alexander Gode's Interlingua. Glosa, on the other hand, appears to be qualitatively different. Developing as it has in an era when international travel and communication (via telephone, fax, internet) are technically much easier and more accessible than they were during Esperanto's first two decades, Glosa has, so far as I know:

never been used as the sole language of communication at any international conference of any size;

not developed a literature;

no speaking population; and

never been considered by any government as a bearer of dangerous, or any other sort of, ideas.

Ms. Ashby and Mr. Clark give a contact address for Glosa. There are hundreds for Esperanto, but those that might be of most interest to readers of New Scientist are: Esperanto Association of Britain, Esperanto Center, 140 Holland Park Avenue, London W11 4UF, tel. +44 (0)71 727 7821; and the Esperanto League for North America, Central Office, P.O. Box 1129, El Cerrito CA 94530, tel. +1 800 828 5944 (toll-free number for in-country use only), E-mail elna@netcom.com. Those with internet access can obtain information immediately and directly from file transfer protocol repositories at ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl:/pub/esperanto and ftp.netcom.com:/pub/elna; the latter is also accessible via World Wide Web at URL ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/elna/elna.html, and is hyperlinked to several other Esperanto sites. Readers in other countries can obtain contact addresses of other national and local Esperanto organizations from the addresses above.

In the March issue of Control, talking about "A Fieldbus Standard Revisited," Terry McMahon writes, apparently referring to a fictitious advertisement elsewhere in the issue:

     Esperanto was a great idea, and for the three dozen people 
     in the world who can speak it, it's the perfect communications 
     tool.

Paul Lewis's article "N. Korea a plutonium mystery" and the accompanying Q/A article and sidebar (June 4) were an interesting and revealing discussion of North Korea's (probable) secret attempts to construct nuclear weapons, and sum up much of the material we've been seeing in the newspapers for the past several months. But one thing remains unclear to me, despite all the threats and complaints: which terms of which treaty to which North Korea is signatory forbid it to use plutonium created in its own reactor to construct nuclear weapons? If doing so makes North Korea an "outlaw nation," as it has been described, and in conspiracy to "thwart the will of the international community," as our representative to the U.N. is quoted as saying in the article, then the United States has been an outlaw nation and in conspiracy to thwart the will of the international community since we started building the first plutonium bomb -- later to be dropped on Nagasaki -- at Hanford Reservation more than half a century ago. The term "hypocrisy" comes immediately to mind.

I have little respect and less love for the thuggish Kim regime that has dominated North Korea for much of that same period of time, but it sticks in my craw to see even the most obnoxious first-grade brat being beaten on by a 15-year-old 180-pound school bully, which is the role that the U.S. seems to be playing in this affair.

In your front-page article on the proposed Klingon translation of the Holy Bible, I find the following:

     There are two versions of the Gospels in Esperanto, a turn-of-the-century 
     languages whose inventors hoped would become a universal tongue. 
     (It hasn't).

Perhaps you are thinking of the Esperanto translations of the Gospels by the Dutch classicist Gerrit Berveling, recently made available by a publisher in Brazil?

As a netsurfer of somewhat more than one year's experience, I applaud Garry Davis's recognition, in the June/July issue, of the internet (usually spelled with a small Œi¹, however) as a means of bringing mankind closer together. It is now possible (to use an actual example) to hold two productive exchanges of mail with a Hungarian colleague in Germany ... before breakfast!

Still, one major problem remains. Davis writes: "Until this century, communication among humans was restricted and partial. Now, at last, a global nervous feedback system is in place." Communication remains restricted and partial. We have had the international telephone network in place for years; before she came to the United States in 1990, I could punch two buttons on my telephone and be talking to my best friend, in Shanghai, in approximately ten seconds. But suppose that I had punched a Tokyo number ... at random. When someone at the other end had answered the phone, what then? Communication would, almost certainly, have been stopped dead. While the average Japanese studies English in school for upwards of six years, the average Japanese also can't put together a single sentence in the language -- and my Japanese is almost non-existent. Ditto for Paris, Teheran, Phnom Penh, Coutonou, Ekaterinburg ...

(But not Shanghai? some may ask. Well, my friend and I both spoke in Esperanto. I only had a problem once -- when I had to go through a Shanghai switchboard operator to reach her at another phone. The switchboard operator spoke nothing but Chinese. My Chinese is about as non-existent as my Japanese. A request to the phone company here for an English-speaking switchboard operator brought the reply that I could have one ... in about twelve hours. By that time my friend would have been long gone.)

The internet is no exception. Currently there is an argument taking place in the newsgroup "news.groups" in Usenet, one of the branches of the internet, about the language of that newsgroup (the argument was triggered by someone's use of French in discussing the creation of a new group, "soc.culture.quebec", where French would seem highly appropriate). One participant in the discussion posted as follows:

     If you are aware of any non-English Big 7 newsgroups that are not 
     in the soc.culture.* subhierarchy, please state them.  I, and I had 
     assumed most (until last week), had assumed that those groups were 
     justifiable exceptions to the rule. (And I eagerly grant you that the 
     assumption was just that, an unspoken assumption.)

     However: the alternate hierarchies of fr.* and de.* (and so on) exist 
     for a reason... To segregate by language. (I will grant a partial 
     justification of region as well... but why has the usa hierarchy 
     failed so then?)

     Hierarchies that segregate by language perform other functions than 
     keeping xenophobes off each other's back. They let people screen the 
     data that their site will receive. This is a not inconsequential 
     function of these hierarchies.

It is interesting to note that almost all of the newsgroups in the above-mentioned Big 7 -- at least among those I read -- are dominated by American posters, followed by a large minority of Canadian, British and Australian posters, with a few northwest European posters added for effect. They are "international" only by a very loose interpretation of the term. They don't qualify as "global" at all. There is, however, one notable exception to this general distribution of participants, which I shall mention below.

Years ago, Prof. Humphrey Tonkin, now President of the University of Hartford, pointed out that communication has two facets: a mode and a medium. The medium -- telephony, radio, satellite communication, the internet -- progresses with breakneck speed. But the mode -- language -- has not changed significantly since prehistoric times. With this in mind, let me also recommend to you and your readers the excerpt from the recent World Federalist pamphlet on Esperanto, by John Roberts, that you published on pp. 17-18 of the same issue. Particularly, I would like to recommend Roberts' views on language and global democracy, which largely mirror my own (p. 18). And then let me recommend to those World Citizens who are also netsurfers a quick look at the newsgroup "soc.culture.esperanto" -- probably the most ethnically balanced and global international newsgroup on the net.