Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
Esperanto? Only if you would like to ruin the whole EU as fast as possible...
It would take decades, maybe a century of active teaching and other work throughout the EU before enough people would speak the language fluently, and it would have to be a mandatory language taught at least in higher education (which would, of course, narrow the time that could be used for learning other languages). Too many people would protest that kind of spending of resources. Too few people already speak Esperanto.
Esperanto was a fashionable idea in the first decades of the 20th century but has since then lost a lot of its popularity. There are still some active hobby users of the language but only about 10000 people in the whole world speak it fluently and maybe 100000 can use it actively ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto ) It is also the opinion of many language experts that Esperanto has been replaced by more advanced, and easier international languages like Interlingua, just like Esperanto replaced the more primitive Volapuk before it.
Esperanto has many oddities that should have no place in a supposedly easy to use international language - like the use of many diacritical marks (breve, circumflex) above basic letters, increasing the amount of letters. Heck, I don't even know where to get a breve using my keyboard...It would be rather impossible to write esperanto using most current keyboards. The (odd) Esperanto alphabet: a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z.
Interlingua would be a far better, more easy-to-use artificial language but it would, naturally, still have many of the same problems with Esperanto.
Choosing a few major languages as the official EU languages could be a good idea if only people could agree on those languages (easier said than done...). English would be a natural choice, but what about the others? German and French? But what about Spanish and Italian that have lots of users too? Or the Scandinavian languages that are most closely related to each other making understanding between them easy? Why no Slavic and Eastern European languages? We would quickly run into political arguing.
Anyway, I think that using English as a kind of de facto international language may already be the reality in many international organizations, including the EU.