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: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:2005-07-24
You dropped your credibility right there. It takes a hundred years to learn a language? Gee, what are we sub-centenarians to do? Mime?
While English is haphazard and irregular enough that it could conceivably take a century to master, languages like Esperanto and Interlingua are easy to pick up. It's all the many exceptions and irregularities in a language that are hard to learn.
A good natural language is like a good programming language. It makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. English makes easy things hard and hard things nearly impossible. And every time someone new takes on the task of learning it, yet more wasted effort is incurred memorizing huge collections of irregular verb conjugations, lists of irregular plurals, etc. Do you double the final consonant before adding this suffix to that word? How about this root and that suffix? 'I' before 'E'? Oh, that's unless it's after a 'C'... except here, here, and here, where it's not.
And all that so that they can "communicate" in a language which is inherently more prone to facilitating miscommunication. A language in which the word 'beg' has become its own antonym.
I am a native English speaker. And even I cannot recommend expanded use of that language. And I can only assume that anyone who does has loosed their mind.
Edited 2008-05-03 15:27 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-09
esperanto. Duh.