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
Hmm... As a side note. it seems that Ido, the third big auxiliary language could avoid some of the shortcomings of both Esperanto and Interlingua. For example, it doesn't have the non-standard letters of Esperanto that use breves and circumflexes. If Esperanto could get rid of that major headache, I might be more supportive of it. Yet Ido still keeps the extremely systematic and easy grammar of Esperanto. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Ido_compared
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_and_Interlingua_compared
Too bad that the first world war almost destroyed the promising start of the Ido project.
Anyway, I don't believe that any of the current auxiliary languages could gain wide acceptance in international communication, like as an official language of some international organizations, before it would already have millions of active users and supporters otherwise, and so that it had already proven its wide acceptance elsewhere. However, English language already has that position in the world, like it or not, just like Latin had in the Middle Age western Europe.