In my experience, “universal languages” all suffer from the problem that very few people want to learn them. As a native English speaker, I have tons of information already open to me. As I can understand French to a limited degree, even more information is available to me. If I really want to open international doors, I’ll learn Spanish, Arabic, or Chinese. All of these languages provide far more oppurtunities than Esperanto or Gestuno. Why bother learning Esperanto, with a speaking group of a few million, when I can learn Mandarin, which is spoken by hundreds of millions?
In practical terms, learning Russian or Spanish or Hindi will serve me much better than learning Esperanto.
Ahem. I responded to this above. I’ve found Esperanto useful for lodging (and often meals) at no cost when I travel, and for literature translations which are often superior to those in English.
I speak Mandarin myself, but I can’t go to China and be treated as a perfect equal and have a place to stay automatically. With Esperanto, however, that’s entirely possible.
I’m with UnuMondo on that. Although there are plenty more people speaking Mandarin, they’re not as, shall we say, strategically placed as those who speak Esperanto are. For example, every single port-of-call I made while in the Navy, I got to speak to someone local who spoke Esperanto. There weren’t too many Mandarin speakers in Abu Dhabi.
If you’re interested in artificial or constructed languages – “conlangs” – check out http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html, which provides information on 310 of them. Most of these were never intended to be used as “universal languages,” but were invented as creative exercises or as part of a fictional universe (e.g., Klingon). Also see http://www.quetzal.com/conlang.html.
If the world has to have a universal language, why not English? It has the following advantages:
While it might not be the language with the largest number of native speakers, English is the language most widespread in its use, particularly as a language of wider communications in former British colonies, such as India.
English is probably the easiest major natural language for non-native speakers to learn. The spelling and idioms might be baffling, but the grammar is extremely simply – no noun cases or verb conjugations; what role a word plays in the sentence is shown by syntax alone.
My take on auxlangs, as expressed by someone who’s in the conlang community: farewell to auxiliary languages, by Rick Harrison. Basically, he says that nobody is willing to accept `flaws’ in auxlangs that would be easily swallowed if they were in, say, French, that auxlangers are so disorganized and mutually acrimonious that they’ll never create something they’ll all get behind (Hey, Esperantists, why don’t you support Ido instead?), and that the entire concept of an auxlang is so odious to the rest of the world that it can only sneak in through the back door, so to speak. Heh.
Hence Basic English: It’s already the international language of air traffic control, even among controllers and pilots who don’t speak English as a first language. In other words, a Bangladeshi pilot landing in Tokyo will speak Basic English to the tower. It gains from English’s huge popularity with the business world (outside of France) and from its pared-down simplicity, which allows it to be picked up rather easily as a simple tool of business.
In the auxlang world, English won. Second best doesn’t matter.
Didn’t (or do they still) Brazil experiment with using Esperanto as their diplomatic language? Granted I read that in my “learn Esperanto” book published in the 1950s or 1960s (!!!) but whatever happened with that?
Oh, I dropped any thought of trying to learn Esperanto myself as I started travelling the world and realized that I already spoke the one, universal language – English. I’m not trying to push buttons, either, as that’s a practical answer, and is even subject to change in the future of world events. I’m not an English snob (I did say I played around with Esperanto), and I speak other languages aside from English. But for practical purposes there’s not much need to, notswithstanding UnoMundo’s benefits personally
I’d be interested in hearing the numbers of Latin speakers vs. Esperanto speakers. Christianity is the world’s largest religion, so I imagine there are a lot of priests (and just classically educated people in general [of whom I’m not]) that could speak/read/write Latin. It could be argued as a contender for universal language status.
English is not easy in the least bit. At Defense Language Institute (the DOD’s language school, where Monty and I have both happened to attend), English is the sole language in the category 5 difficulty level. That means it is more difficult than Chinese, Arabic, or Japanese.
Anyway, the real problem with English as universal language is that it is not neutral. English remains strongly linked to American and British culture and foreign policy.
Furthermore, it puts native speakers at a greater advantage than people who had to learn the language, thus removing equality in communication. When an American and a man from Benin speak Esperanto, they are both at an equal level linguistically.
Isn’t that the whole problem? You can communicate with anyone who knows the same language…
And that doesn’t help the blind.
Which you could presumably get with some sort of other international society. Active Boy Scouts don’t often go to other countries, but can quite often find free lodging. Regardless, your missing the point - you only get that benefit because you are a rarity. If more people learned it Esperanto it would cease to have any advantage. In which case it would become like English is now. So your point is really quite silly.
Sorry to hijack, but could you list some category 1 languages? (I’ve always been interested in languages, and the easy ones seem like a good place to start.) Or, better yet, do you have a link to the entire list of categories?
I have a hard time getting to .mil sites from my current provider (I no longer live in the US, perhaps the US gov. blocks foreign access, I dunno), so you should do a search for DLI’s website. In any event, I remember that the most common cat. 1 languages were Spanish and French. Swedish (which is rarely taught) may have also been cat. 1.
Well, sure, which is why I don’t actively try to “recruit” as many new Esperantists as possible. I’m happy to recommend learning the language to people with similar interests as mine, and I defend its efficacy (as I’m doing on the Board now) but I don’t look forward to some sort of victory over the international language problem for all mankind. This has been a common sentiment since at least 1980, when the Rauma Manifesto was signed, a proclamation which emphasises the importance of creating a genuinely international culture instead of trying to amass new speakers.
Yes, but there’s the problem of fitting in once you get there. If you speak a national language, someone’s going to be more of an insider automatically and thus the visitor becomes the outsider. When Esperantists meet, on the other hand, they both feel themselves at the same comfort level. Indeed, I often feel cut off from other Americans because I have spent so many years among Esperantists (pretty much all my friends are Esperantists, my fiancee with whom I spend the bulk of the day is an Esperantist) that I have gotten used to Esperantist in-jokes, turns of phrase, and gossip to the exclusion of even my native people (who I don’t really miss anyway). This is what I mean by a genuinely international culture, you won’t often find this in the Boy Scouts (for which most people wanting to travel overseas are too old for) or other such organisations.
Regarding the difficulty level of the courses taught at DLI: Aren’t those levels presupposing the difficulty for a native English speaker to learn the target language?
From this website, it looks like French, Italian, Portugese, and Spanish are the Category I languages. Obviously this is because of their similarity to English (and each other), and not due to their inherent simplicity – i.e., they are the easiest for native English-speakers to learn. So the question now becomes, which language (natural language, not artificial) is the simplest or most logical/consistant in structure, with no consideration of native tongue, or are all languages pretty equally arbitrary/illogical/full of exceptions to rules?
I’m not sure the difficulty levels are specific for English native speakers or not. But because English is called a category five language, and DLI does publish a great deal on pedagogy for speakers of any language, it may be that they considered “universal difficulty” (if there is such a thing).
FWIW, I’ll try to list the categories, though it has been years since I was at DLI.
Category I:
Spanish,
French,
Italian
Category II:
German,
Swedish (might have been category I)
There are some other languages taught rarely or at DLI’s other location, but I cannot remember what category they were in. I remember looking at a bulletin board, when the novelty of Chinese had worn off a bit for me, and seeing all the “exotic” languages taught at DLI East. Hindi would have been neat.
Monty was near DLI more recently than I was, maybe he can correct me.
If it wasn’t for tones and a difficult writing system, I’d say Chinese is one of the more consistent widely-spoken languages. My class at DLI was told that it’d be category II if it wasn’t for having to learn ideograms, and the only substantial remaining difficulty would be the non-Western vocabulary. However, Chinese does have thousands of homophones (shi4 has at least 40 different meanings according to just a pocket dictionary).
So in other words, alienation is a “benefit” of Esperanto. Hiding away into a little cocoon where the bigger and wider world doesn’t exist is a “benefit”. No thanks. I prefer the hurly-burly of Babel to the suffocation of a language that I would never use beyond a tiny little circle. It’s more work, but it’s more fun.
In that case, you might as well call speakers of Icelandic and Welsh alienated, because they have ever fewer speakers than Esperanto and are much more geographically limited. :rolleyes:
Does it really matter how many speakers a language has if it’s already more than you’ll ever be able to know in a whole lifetime (i.e. not a “tiny circle”)? Once a language has so many speakers, the only thing that matters is if there are speakers wherever you want to go, which is the case with Esperanto.
The factual question, I think, has been answered. Those wishing to discuss Esperanto further may wish to continue in MPSIMS.
Dogface your opinions in this thread seem better suited to the BBQ Pit (or perhaps Great Debates if you care to defend them.) This is not an official warning, just a very strong suggestion you may want to take into consideration for the future.
