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Thought provoking article about Esperanto | ||
Tags: Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6363 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 9 of 16 21 August 2007 at 1:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I'm not sure grammatical ease will ever overcome cultural penetration in terms of how difficult or easy a language is to learn. Right now, English is the closest thing we have to an international language simply due to the extent the culture of English speakers (mostly American ones) has penetrated the global...economy, if you will. If Chinese culture had been exported about the way that of the US had during the last 60 years (and the UK during its colonization period), Chinese would be the international language now, instead of English, and so on. The way I see it, if you want people to speak a language, it can't simply be easy; it has to be everywhere. Secondly, as Vlad pointed out, speakers of English in non-English countries aren't automatically wealthy or well-educated; it simply depends on the exposure they've received to the language, and their willingness to learn it. There are plenty of people with modest means in India who have learned, and are learning English, simply because they know how many doors the language opens for anyone who speaks it. People aren't going to learn Esperanto unless there's money in it, and right now, the language with the most money in it, globally speaking, is English. Unless Esperanto is adopted by the wealthiest nations on Earth, its chances of being learned by poor people will forever be *far* less than that of English, as poor people will have far less of an incentive to learn it. Why learn a new language with few job opportunities when there's already a global language with the potential to singlehandedly improve your living conditions? Finally, on the issue of neutrality, it's a noble idea, but ultimately an unnecessary one. If, somehow, the ability of humans of all nations to understand one another by a common language leads to an end to war and an age of peace and cooperation, it will occur regardless of which language is used as the template. If we can't agree to talk to each other in English, with the degree to which it's already become an international language, the chances of our agreeing to discourse in Esperanto is small indeed. If the goal of proposing a global language is to enable global communication, I believe we should take advantage of resources already in existence (like a language that's already won 80% of market penetration) rather than constantly trying to reinvent the wheel with languages that haven't had colonization, hegemony, and economic strangleholds behind them to aid their cultural penetration. Edited by FSI on 21 August 2007 at 1:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6772 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 10 of 16 22 August 2007 at 6:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
How does the saying go? "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'." At any rate, I have spent a week in China without meeting a single English speaker, and my experience in Japan has also shown me that those who don't need to speak English generally don't.
I agree 100%. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 11 of 16 22 August 2007 at 7:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think Marc Frisch has found an interesting issue that isn't easy to refute. Yes, it is thinkable that less people will learn the language of a foreign country they live in if they can already speak Esperanto with everybody. Already I know a few Americans living in Germany who never learned German because they work for foreign companies whose working language is English. However, I believe that Esperanto wouldn't make this problem worse because most jobs and most schools would still require very good knowledge of the local language.
I also believe that Esperanto would have the means of being spoken by more than just the people who speak a foreign language today; it would be learned by the average people. The thing is that most average people today do want to be able to speak foreign languages; it's not something they'd consider useless (the only people I met who declared language learning useless were British; even Americans usually take the attitude of "I'd love to but I can't"). The reason most average people don't actually speak a foreign language is not laziness or lack of desire to learn but one of the following: - lack of confidence in their ability to do it - lack of time to learn it - lack of money to afford classes or materials - lack of success in classes actually taken, especially at high school Most people actually do study a foreign language for at least 1-2 years at high school, it just doesn't normally have a good result: people are no closer to being able to speak the language and they are even more convinced that they lack the 'talent' to learn a foreign language or more. That's why I believe Esperanto would do better: Esperanto is very easy, doesn't take long to learn and can be learned entirely for free. After 1-2 years of Esperanto at high school for example, people should definitely be able to talk about anything and understand any book in Esperanto, except maybe for scientific terms. Then, the entire learning experience is very motivating and dispells any notions of not having the 'talent', not being able to learn a foreign language, so it is quite possible people will decide to study other foreign languages as well after they have learned Esperanto. Esperanto would play a supporting role, both by facilitating the learning (it is proven to have a similar effect as Latin) and by ensuring that people make more international friends - international friends are a very good reason to learn foreign languages, even if you could already communicate in a third language. This pattern of going from learning Esperanto to learning lots of other languages is very common in the Esperanto movement (except of course for those who already learned lots of languages before going to Esperanto). Esperanto helps foster the language bug. Why am I convinced that average people will take to Esperanto more easily than to Spanish or English? Because I learned Esperanto on my own, without help or encouragement from anybody except one online tutor, at the age of 14. My progress was so addictive it pushed me to continue studying when I didn't have the patience to study for any school subject (including English and Latin) nor to learn any decent amount of Modern Greek from a friend of mine. If you look into the language logs of those forum members who started studying Esperanto, you'll find it confirmed that Esperanto is fun and addicting to learn, unlike any other language I know. That's why awake issued that 6 Week Challenge ;-) knowing people wouldn't be able to stop learning Esperanto after that, even if they were rather critical about it before. Anyway, if a teenager can learn Esperanto like that, without Esperanto input through the media or friends, without even decent classes, imagine what adults with access to regular classes and intent on learning the language could do...
It's an interesting thought, but imho Esperanto is currently proving it wrong. There is much more "cultural penetration" of English in the PRC, but people who try Esperanto still develop fluency in Esperanto much faster than they do in English.
India isn't exactly a prime example as English has played a major role in India for a long, long time. The problem in poor countries is that learning English takes a lot of time and good teachers as well as native speakers are rare. In order to learn English well, you have to go to school for a long time (which poor people can't afford) and go to an elite school rather than a community college (which usually can't afford good native teachers). Being able to afford a stay abroad in an English-speaking country also helps a lot. Hence you will always find a particularly high percentage of the rich, influential and well-educated among people speaking English as a foreign language. There are of course exceptions, such as those kids that are so talented they were able to learn English just by watching English-language TV or something, but those are the exception and not the rule.
If there was more money in Esperanto, it would be the world language already, but of course the English-speaking countries have a very reasonable interest in the several billion dollars they make as a result of English being used as a world language. Of course English can "single-handedly improve your living conditions", but that doesn't make it any easier or cheaper to learn, so that alone is not enough to make everybody speak English or die trying to learn it. Esperanto is attracting more and more sponsors and for people interested it is much easier to be sponsored by an Esperanto organization to get a free trip or free language course than by an English organization ;-) Also, believing that there are quite a few Esperanto job positions but they aren't being promoted efficiently (usually people just write to all Esperanto mailing lists about them), I have myself created the Esperanto job portal http://www.eklaboru.com .
I'd agree that neutrality isn't as important a criteria for a world language as it was in Zamenhof's time, but I wouldn't call it unnecessary either. Can you see the French or the Spanish or the Chinese completely giving up their claims? Can you see an end to war if Arabs were expected to speak Hebrew? Mind you, they aren't too fond of English either, seeing that the USA loyally backs Israel. I'd say that if you want to find an international consensus on a world language, such as the UN or EU agreeing to use only one language as working language, it would have to be a neutral one. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6695 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 12 of 16 22 August 2007 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Nice post, Sprachprofi.
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| Quinn Senior Member United States Joined 6327 days ago 134 posts - 186 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Spanish | Message 13 of 16 22 August 2007 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think Esperanto was a great idea, but English has reached the point of critical mass that it has become the de-facto common language that Esperanto was created to be.
I appreciate the goal of having a culturally "neutral" language that is relatively easy for people to learn, but probably somewhere around a billion people speak English today, while Esperanto is spoken by probably 2 million at most. Of course, some might point out that even more people speak (some form of) Chinese than English and it's possible that at some point Chinese may supplant English, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. For one thing, most of the content on the Internet is in English and it's hard to see how any other language could overcome that advantage alone. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7148 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 14 of 16 22 August 2007 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I just want to compliment all the participants in this particular thread for an extremely interesting series of very thoughtful contributions.
Personally, I've never studied Esperanto, although I did get a bit interested a number of years ago, enough to buy a few cheap books and investigate the "movement" to a degree. The whole thing fascinated me, and struck me as very sensible, but I never progressed beyond a mild curiosity -- which I think also describes to a degree the situation in the world as a whole in terms of a constructed international language. In other words, it makes a lot of sense in a theoretical way from a number of standpoints, but there are a number of practical obstacles to its accomplishment -- especially, these days, the incredible spread of English as an international lingua franca -- so that despite the simplicity et al of Esperanto, it remains largely the province of a relatively small number of hobbyists and "enthusiasts". I liken it to the Dvorak typewriter/computer keyboard, which as I understand it is proven to be substantially faster and less tiring than the standard keyboard (e.g., the "qwerty" version in English), but because everyone learns on the standard version, it's only the relatively rare bird who takes the trouble to get accustomed to the Dvorak keyboard. Similarly, while there are any number of studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, supporting the idea that Esperanto could be learned more quickly and easily than English or the other candidates for lingua franca status, the fact is that in most parts of the world, it's easier to find speakers of English and other "major" languages than speakers of Esperanto. The English-language media, technology developments, tourism, etc., as well as the number of native or near-native speakers and the market they represent, seem to me to preclude Esperanto's gaining much of a foothold in the absence of some comprehensive international resolution to teach Esperanto in all schools, etc. In other words, I can accept that in some ways, Esperanto may be "superior" as an easily learned, politically neutral international language, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will ever actually play this role on a broad scale. So while admiring the idealism of the language's supporters, Esperanto still strikes me as likely destined to remain largely a hobby for an intelligent and open-minded, but nonetheless relatively small, minority, at least in the foreseeable future. I would never discourage anyone from learning it or denigrate its study, but think that, realistically, most people will probably find the study of other major languages to be more rewarding. Globally, English seems to have already become the lingua franca, and is continuing to solidify that role, while other languages, such as Russian or Spanish, seem to be playing that role on a regional scale. (Additionally, the lack of any cultural "baggage", allegedly one of the attractive aspects of the language, constitutes for me one of its biggest turn-offs; the specific cultural attractions of other languages, such as literature, music, food, scenery, etc., which help to awaken and sustain interest, are lacking.) As noted above, I've never studied the language, and I certainly wouldn't want to dampen the ardor of those who find it fulfilling, but it merely seems to me that, as an actual language of international communication, it's a wonderful idea whose time has never come, and probably never will, except for a relatively small number of people for whom the Esperanto vision outweighs its lack of "heft" in terms of number of speakers, etc. The above said, Sprachprofi and others defend the language very well, and provide a lot of food for thought. My above comments, as negative as they appear, aren't intended as criticism; they merely reflect my own sense of the language, and why I've never chosen to study it. I think they also reflect at least to some degree the opinions of others as well regarding the language and the utility of learning it, but I hope that the debate will go on, since I've found it very, very interesting to follow. Edited by daristani on 22 August 2007 at 8:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6363 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 16 22 August 2007 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I'm not denying that Esperanto is learned more quickly than English, but rather that this greater ease of learning alone won't be enough to supplant English as the foreign language of choice, due to that very ubiquity of English.
I've got to disagree. I really do believe the motivation to learn English outweighs the difficulties of learning it for poor people who decide to learn an additional language. Furthermore, I don't believe any of the things you described - long educations in expensive schools and overseas travels to immersive environments where English is natively spoken - are necessary to develop a working knowledge of the language. Certainly, the well-off will have it easier than the not-well-off, but the opportunities (and benefits) of learning English are apparent, if not ubiquitous, to both. People who want to learn it will learn it - badly, if necessary - but they will learn it, because even bad English is better than no English. Of course, I'm not implying everyone *wants* to learn English, but rather explaining why I think it would be a more logical choice for a non-speaker than Esperanto. Thinking of myself, if English were not my native language, and I lived in a non-English country, I would either learn English, or the strongest domestic language (in addition to my birth national language, of course). I doubt I would even have heard of Esperanto. In terms of financial viability, or time investments, it just wouldn't be on the map. Learning a language wouldn't be a hobby, but perhaps an issue of survival, of a chance to help my family or help myself. As a poor farmer in Chile, I would learn Portuguese or English - not Esperanto. As a logger in Russia, I would learn Mandarin, or English - not Esperanto. As a taxi driver in Morocco, I would learn French (if I didn't know it already), English, or the local Arabic dialect - not Esperanto. I wouldn't have time to have fun with languages, or to learn a language because of the ideals behind it. I would learn the language that had the greatest chance of earning me a better life.
Again, I'm not implying everyone in the world who doesn't speak English is either learning or dying trying to learn it, but rather that it is likely (and logically) seen as a more desirable choice for an aspiring language learner than Esperanto, due to its already-attained position as a global language. It doesn't matter how cheap or easy Esperanto is to learn if the economy behind the language remains insignificant. Again, this is speaking in terms of factors influencing language learners of modest means wishing to improve their places in the world, or in the context of developing global languages.
Yes, unnecessary might be an overstatement. But that's the very thing - if Hebrew became the equivalent of English in terms of cultural penetration, global distribution, and economic propagation, many Arabs *would* learn Hebrew for the same reasons many Arabs learn English - it would become a language of trade, commerce, education, opportunity. The same would occur in Israel if Egyptian Arabic became a global language, or anywhere else in the world with a given global language. I'm stating we have to work with what we have, and what we have is English at the moment. If and when another language replaces English to the degree English has been established around the world, you could "find+replace" that new language for "English" in both of my posts, and none of my points would change. If we can't make it work with existing languages (which are 80% of the way there, in terms of ubiquity), what chance do we have of making it with novel ones? Especially if the only way for one language to supplant another is for many powerful nations to start using it exclusively. I think we're going to have to disagree on the topic in general. I don't have anything against Esperanto; I just think English is far closer to achieving the goals of the language than the language itself, and is the best opportunity we've had in modern history of creating a fully global language.
I agree! These posts aren't criticisms of the language, but rather reflections on how I see its position in the world, relative to other languages. I do appreciate this discussion, and will continue to follow it with interest. Edited by FSI on 22 August 2007 at 8:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| breckes Triglot Groupie Belgium Joined 6803 days ago 84 posts - 89 votes Speaks: French*, English, Russian Studies: Italian, Dutch, Swedish | Message 16 of 16 23 August 2007 at 4:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
To come back to the initial question, I think that English will become a fully global language, with everyone speaking it fluently, only if it becomes a native language for everyone. It would then be a serious threat for the other languages. Esperanto, thanks to its easiness, could become a fully global language without encroaching on the other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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