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
An individual may not need many years to learn a new constructed language, of course. But I was not talking about individual learning but about the wide enough adoption of the new constructed language throughout, say the EU, in this case. One might need to use force too as many would oppose such a decision and see it only as a waste of resources better used elsewhere. I was just talking about political realities.
I do agree that an international auxiliary language - constructed to be to be easy to learn and use - could be ideal - but maybe only in theory. We still don't have such a common easy-to-use language widely adopted anywhere in the world despite many decent proposals. Why? Because in real life it could just take too much effort to make such a constructed language used and understood widely and well enough for it to reach the necessary stage of adoption.
Personally - I would have nothing against wider usage of Interlingua, Ido or Esperanto (those being the three most used constructed auxiliary languages to this day). However, I doubt whether majority of people, even only in the European politics, would agree.
We need to see the realities. People just see it more useful to learn and use widely spoken natural languages than an artificial constructed language used by only a few thousand people so far.
Adopting Esperanto or Interlingua as the official EU language would not just mean that a few diplomats had to learn to language (and learn it really well), but also much other work would be necessary. We would still need lots of translators (very fluent in the new auxiliary language) as all the EU decisions and discussions would have to be translated into tens of other languages for non-speakers people to understand. (And it would sure take a century before most Europeans would understand Esperanto fluently even if force was used..). Journalists etc. would have to learn the new language too - and not just the basics but advanced language too. Many EU officials would eventually insist having also software in the new auxiliary language instead of English or other language that they may not speak natively. Etc. etc. etc.
A good international auxiliary language could make a lot sense in many cases - but in reality its wider adoptions could mean too much work - which is exactly the reason why that has still not happened and may never happen.