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:2005-08-15
What's wrong with English? Only a minority of people speak it well enough to really communicate. A lot of people recognise a lot of stuff when they hear it, but they have more problems creating their own English sentences. It may be that in Business it's the standard, but even there, it's mostly only the highly educated people that use this so called universal de facto lingua franca. So introducing it as a second language would be as artificial as introducing Esperanto, it would give advantage to one part of the EU when it comes to political negotiations, something one wouldn't want at all, and it is a lot harder to learn. Esperanto was created for just that, a language to use as a second language, not as a native one. This way every culture gets the same treatment and respect as it's neighbour culture.
Member since:2007-10-11
What's wrong is that apart from the native speakers, only a small minority can speak it with any kind of significant fluency.
Hence, declaring it the Official Language is excluding most people from understanding official dealings even more than they now are.
And I write this as someone who teaches English as a second language for a living.
Member since:2005-07-24
And of the native speakers, only a small minority can write it with any kind of fluency. Too many irregularities. Too many exceptions. It has grown like a wart and it shows. Languages and systems of measurement are too important to be trusted to a hodge podge system of hacks and inconsistent improvisation made standard after the fact.
Communication is a very serious matter, indeed. Miscommunication even more so, as this tragic passage so clearly demonstrates:
http://www.mostly-harmless.de/crllstlk.htm
Edited 2008-05-03 12:02 UTC
Member since:
2006-05-09
So, I'd go by Interlingua
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Interlingua_compared
it's nicer than Esperanto and "fixes several bugs" found in Esperanto.
Anyway, come on guys! we are people from different parts of the world and we are debating about what language the EU should use while we are already using the de facto standard: English. So, what does go wrong with it?