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:2005-07-24
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:2005-07-08
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.
Member since:2006-01-02
English isn't as bad as people make it out to be. English speakers, being aware of all of the quirks it has, are quick to deride it as terrible and awful, forgetting that all the other languages out there have quirks and irregularities.
English does not make easy things hard or hard things impossible. I, as an English speaker, really have no trouble saying pretty much anything I need to say. What's impossible, exactly? What would be easy, but is hard in English, exactly? Irregular verb conjugations? Hahahaha. English is probably the best out of the European languages with respect to verb conjugations. Most verbs have four forms, e.g., live, lives, living, lived. For the vast majority of verbs, the pattern is exactly like the one above. A few verbs have five: sing, sings, singing, sang, sung. Most of these fall into a few common patterns based on rhyme, although the rest are truly irregular. Then there are a couple of truly irregulars: be, do, and the modal auxiliaries. These aren't generally regular in any other European language either, so English is no worse than its counterparts. But the verbs are special, so it makes sense that they don't follow the normal pattern.
Now, let's compare that to Latin with its multiple conjugations, containing myriad irregular verbs. Or to Spanish or French with 3-4 major conjugations, and then a set of irregulars. They still often have irregular past tenses, far more so than English. The less said about German, the better. Oh, and those languages have noun genders and inflected adjectives. English has invariable adjectives and nouns don't fall into any classes (except for a small number of irregular plurals, easily learned).
I could go on and on, but there's nothing particularly bad about English grammar or syntax (it's straightforward SVO language, compared, again, to German with it's strange V2 syntax, or French and Spanish with strange orderings of pronouns and weak elements). Why do people keep hating on English?
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.