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:2008-05-04
irbis, you seem to have a positive view of the benefits of a neutral international language for Europe. Although I don't think anybody is denying the political difficulty implementing this, hopeful people like you can make the impossible possible. The fall of the Berlin wall seemed impossible, as did the creation of the European Union, the adoption of the Euro and the metric system, yet with time they have been widely adopted (although admittedly the metric system took a lot longer). So keep your hope alive!
I think it is absolutely critical that international communication in Europe respects the linguistic diversity within Europe. It is not fair that the language of 12% of Europe's population becomes the lingua franca for all. Additionally, the number of people who speak English as a second language (and the highest estimates put this figure at less than half the population) would include only the intellectual elite in Europe, that is business people, academics, politicians, diplomats, high-ranking public servants etc. This figure is higher in urban areas than in rural areas.
With regards to your estimation of the number of Esperanto speakers, Linstedt's estimate might be nice and round (1000 native speakers, 10,000 fluent speakers, etc.) but it's certainly not based on much more than a guess. It's certainly not true that 10% of fluent speakers of Esperanto are native speakers, and my experience is that native speakers comprise only a tiny proportion of Esperanto's speaking population - we are talking about an interesting phenomenon, but certainly nothing more. While there is little doubt that there are around 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto (it wouldn't be hard to form a rough list), there are far more than 10,000 fluent speakers of the language, and far more than 100,000 who can speak it actively. Esperanto speakers are concentrated in Europe (especially Eastern Europe), China, South America, the Middle East and parts of Africa, so the proportion of speakers would be higher in Europe.
I agree that it doesn't matter whether Interlingua or Esperanto is widely used in Europe, if it is to be a neutral language. Unfortunately, Esperanto is the only non-ethnic language to have gained speakers in the hundreds of thousands. There would be only a few hundred fluent speakers of Interlingua, a thousand at the most. Volapuk never gained a wide following either, and it took only a few years for most of the Volapuk clubs in Europe to adopt Esperanto (Volapuk being an a priori language). Having attempted to learn both Interlingua and Esperanto, I am fluent in Esperanto but I found Interlingua harder for a range of reasons (admittedly, I only spent about ten hours trying to learn Interlingua). My basic comparison is that Interlingua has many irregular verb forms, declensions, a more complex alphabet and other irregularities that Esperanto does not have. It's main advantage seems to be that clever native speakers of Latin-based languages can understand the language without having to learn it (and this is true, I am a native French speaker and could understand Interlingua fairly well). On the other hand, learning to speak and write the language is more difficult than Esperanto. Additionally, native speakers of Germanic, Slavic, Finno-Yugraic languages and so on do not have this advantage. I would recommend Interlingua and Esperanto to anyone, but they have different purposes - Interlingua is useful to communicate widely to speakers of Romance languages, whereas Esperanto is useful as a universal second language. Having said that, if Interlingua for some reason became more popular than Esperanto, I would probably support Interlingua instead of Esperanto.
Ideas don't have to have a good chance of success to be worthy of support, but if they promote economic and social justice, language diversity, understanding between people, respect for cultural diversity and harmony then I will certainly support them.
Member since:2006-01-10
I think you have summed things up neatly. The only case for not using English, at this point in time, as a second language is petty nationalism rather than common sense. I am sure the average European has enough self worth not to be culturally corrupted by choosing English as a second tongue.
Really I don't understand why anyone would be bothered what the source of their second language is whether it's German, French, or the "Great Satan" - English !
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.
Member since:2006-01-09
Member since:2006-01-02
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.