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English, Conlang, and world language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 17 03 March 2010 at 8:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know about the judgment part, but the strong reaction probably comes from the fact that English phonology being what it is, it's non-trivial for English speakers (in most cases) to develop a good accent in a new language. So that makes you very visible, and distinct also from other accents. Moreover, the impression is that among the not-so-serious learners there is often little effort made to sound authentic or even care about this. Edited by numerodix on 03 March 2010 at 8:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5679 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 10 of 17 03 March 2010 at 8:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'd just like to say that I meant to write that I think English people deserve some
sympathy. My original posting said I didn't, but that was a typo. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5531 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin | Message 11 of 17 03 March 2010 at 9:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
In fact, supporters of Esperanto see the adoption of Esperanto as a universal second language precisely as a way to preserve multilingualism. If the standard international language is difficult to learn then (as English, Spanish and Mandarin are for most people) there is a real motivation for parents to raise their children to be, for example, native English speakers - to give them an advantage in life. This is already happening in parts of the world. If Esperanto was adopted there would be much less reason for communities to abandon their own languages in favour of English, or another big international language. As Esperanto is so much easier to master than a natural language, an Esperanto native speaker will have little advantage over someone who has learned the language in school or as an adult. A learner of English on the other hand will almost always be in an inferior position when communicating with a native English speaker.
To say that there is an entire world of people using English is something of an exaggeration. Perhaps 10% or so of the world's population speak English.
As any Esperanto speaker can tell you, Esperanto is anything but lifeless, and does indeed have a real body of literature, music, history, idioms etc.
Is it really? To me, such an ambition is pure cultural imperialism, and creates an unfair situation in international communication. What English speakers are effectively saying with such an ambition is "I don't want to invest any time and energy into learning another language, so because of my culture's economic power I'm simply going to expect everyone else in the world to invest massive amounts of time and energy in learning my language." If everyone learned Esperanto, the overall investment of time and energy needed would be much less, and that investment would be much more equally shared. At the moment, most English speakers don't bother to learn any other language, whereas people in other cultures have to spend thousands of hours learning English if they want to make progress in their careers. Is this really fair? Is this the best solution? Learning a language such as English, Spanish or Mandarin takes a huge investment of time and energy, and not everyone in the world has the capacity or the opportunity to do that. Esperanto can be mastered in a fraction of the time, which would mean that were it adopted as an international second language many more people would have a realistic chance of being able to learn it. As I said above, only 10% or so of people in the world speak English, even after centuries of imperialism followed by decades of aggressive promotion of English as THE international language. I think probably the only way the goal of having a single world language will be achieved is by adopting an easily learned language like Esperanto that most people can master as a universal second language, or the adoption of one culture's language as everyone's native language, and the end of multilingualism. Edited by davidwelsh on 03 March 2010 at 9:47am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Muz9 Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5526 days ago 84 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Somali | Message 12 of 17 04 March 2010 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Never thought of it this way! You Anglophones can't even have (private) conversations in public places anymore when abroad, theres always somone eavesdropping! One of the things I like about my own language is that nobody will ever understand you abroad, so we Dutch folks can easily have private conversations outdoors. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 13 of 17 04 March 2010 at 1:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know about you, but I've always found that the best way to preserve multilingualism is to DO IT. The presence or absence of Esperanto is largely immaterial to the endeavour. Multilingualism as well as language death has been around for as long as history traces it. Etruscan, Pictish, Beothuk, Polabian, Tangut among many others have been extinct before English established its current preeminence or before Zamenhof published his "Lingvo internacia". For myself, I strive for multilingualism just because I find it fun. Others do it for practical reasons, but the result or striving toward multilingualism is hardly different. You yourself are practicing as well as preserving multilingualism with knowledge of several languages and the willingness to learn more. These could be rhetorical questions, but what does Esperanto have to do with the cultivation of multilingualism? In other words, if you were to have the same language profile (minus Esperanto) and desire for multilingualism as you do now, how would it detract from your desire to be multilingual or support for multilingualism? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5424 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 17 04 March 2010 at 5:25am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5531 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin | Message 15 of 17 04 March 2010 at 9:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It wouldn't I suppose - but my comment was really in the context of English vs. Esperanto as a universal second language. If you have English (or any other natural language that's difficult to learn), there is a real temptation for non-native English speaker parents to bring their children up with English as their native language in order to give them an advantage in life. I believe this is becoming quite widespread in Singapore for example, and I think that if English continues to gain a greater role in international communication, this trend will only increase. If the standard international language was something relatively easy to learn like Esperanto, there wouldn't be the same kind of advantage to be gained by bringing up your children as native Esperanto speakers, so parents would be much more likely to teach their children their own language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 16 of 17 04 March 2010 at 10:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's controversial among Esperanto speakers - some think that any universal language, including Esperanto, would kill language diversity. I tend to think it would. If Esperanto is the language you can talk to everyone in, there would be huge network effects for using it (more interesting content, for instance). There are already quite a few people on these forums who use English more than their native languages; if English were to become a universal second language in their country and this persisted over a few generations, their local language situations would probably be comparable to the Celtic ones today. There's nothing magical about Esperanto that would prevent this - being easy to learn as an adult doesn't mean that no one would pick it up as a child, or use it to the exclusion of their native language as an adult. A presentation at an Esperanto conference a few years ago estimated 5 generations after universal second-language status to mass language extinction. Esperanto has minor advantages over national languages in terms of language diversity (it takes less time to learn well), but it's not a panacea, and I believe it would lead to language extinctions, just as any other universal language would. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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