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:2005-07-09
Member since:2006-06-02
Well, linguistic reformers get, well, reformed by others who think that their constructed language is better - hence not only is there Esperanto but Ido, and furthermore Interlingua and Atlango (the latter being one that I quite like the look of, although Esperanto admittedly might be, overall, the best bet for both Intra-European and International commmunication). There's a host of 'universal languages' at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_language)
I would say that the TC-STAR project and 'universal' languages miss the point. It's sort of like saying that we should all communicate better using mathematical symbols or other abstract signs (such as BlissSymbolics), since these are at a higher level of thought, happily unconstrained by the cultural baggage that apparently causes such misunderstanding.
The problem with this in my view is that the relationship with the abstracted or universal languages is purely instrumental and detached.To learn Italian or German or French or Chinese or even for me, a Brit, Canadian or American English, is to learn and understand the very culture of living breathing people. There will not be an effective universal language the learning of which will bring natural understanding of others until we have an enforced global mono-culture and a system of enforced global ethics. Does that sound good to anyone?
If we spent as much time and investment in secondary and tertiary education on several already existent languages as we do on intellectual ephemera such as Media Studies or Post-Modernism, we would achieve a lot more real understanding of others than any language reform might achieve, 'neat' though the prospect sounds.
(Edited for typos)
Edited 2008-05-03 10:15 UTC
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.
Member since:2006-05-09
English is not universal but is the language a lot of people learn as a second language.
Though I would always prefer something spoken in my native language, I would prefer listening to a good English speech translated by a good human translator instead of listening a poor Spanish (my native language) speech translated by software... as the same article says, the software is far far from be near perfect.
Member since:2005-07-06
The most practical suggestion, I would imagine. But good luck getting the French to agree - if Canada* is any indication, at least.
(A country where 100% of our population has to take 9 years of mandatory French classes - because 15% of the population is still unable get over losing on the Plains of Abraham 300 years ago.)
Member since:2007-10-11
About that, I learned a very interesting thing a few days ago:
Until WWII, the most widely taught second language in Europe was French. Interestingly enough, the first reason why English gained preeminence was that one of the condition for a country to benefit from the Marshall Plan was to make English the most widely taught second language.
According to my source, the reasonning behind that was that if everybody spoke the same language, wars could be avoided.
Well, here we are, 60+ years later, and despite the huge effort, the great majority of Europeans are unable to really have a conversation in English.
I really wonder how things would be if it'd been Esperanto or another similar language that had been picked up...
Member since:
2005-07-07
Speakers of 23 different languages, I suspect. Which one do you chose? Would you presume to say that a single language is universal?