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Does international language work? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Aquila Triglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5486 days ago 104 posts - 128 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, German Studies: French | Message 9 of 91 12 January 2010 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Esperanto could be very useful (and I think it's already useful for several purposes), but unfortunately there are not very much speakers of it, compared with the big languages English, French, Spanish and so on. And there are different reasons why it's not such a big language as Sprachprofi already mentioned a few of them. I think it's evident why a more neutral language is a better and more honest solution. There are many examples, but then I recommend you to read the tekst behind the link. Or to read other threads in this forum about Esperanto. Edited by Aquila on 12 January 2010 at 4:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5590 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 10 of 91 12 January 2010 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If it's completely language neutral, how would we go about making such a language? Could we make one EASIER than esperanto?
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| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6664 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 11 of 91 12 January 2010 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Other than Esperanto meet-ups, it doesn't seem possible to go anywhere and find a majority of Esperanto speakers.
The fact that Esperanto is highly irregular and neutral doesn't seem to be as much of a seling point as Esperantists might like. Consider Mandarin, a language that many posters here might reasonably claim is a particularly difficult language for native speakers of English. If I study Mandarin, I can go to Beijing and reasonably expect to find lots of other people who speak Mandarian and plenty of original material in the language. If I study Esperanto, the nearest speakers of Esperanto are people who speak English. I already speak Esperanto, so I don't gain anything by speaking to them. The countries where there is a comparatively high percentage of Esperanto speakers seems significant. Brazilians speak Portuguese, and relatively few people who aren't native speakers of Portuguese learn Portuguese. The same is true, and perhaps even more so, for Bulgarian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5526 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 12 of 91 12 January 2010 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, it COULD be useful (so could a chocolate teapot - if you drink ice tea), but the vast majority of the world population doesn't have any time for or interest in spending time to learn something that COULD become useful in the future. And even then, it would have to take several hundred million people learning it before it comes even close to the usefulness of English. Most people are pragmatic, they really only care about making life better for their families. It is only a lucky few that can learn languages just for fun, and even fewer that can afford to worry about whether they are "neutral" enough. That group of people is certainly not big enough to make an artifical language universal, which is why only government orders could ever make it happen.
Solution to what? I don't even know what the problem is, but as I said, non-neutrality certainly hasn't stopped English; I am pretty sure it hasn't even slowed it down. Actually, the opposite is true. That many states in Africa and elsewhere have adopted English as a second, or even official, language is largely because of its prestige, which is of course connected with Britains (former) glory. If you ask someone on the street or a fancy office in India or Tanzania if it bothers them that English is so British, do you really think they would say yes? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5860 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 13 of 91 12 January 2010 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think one of the problems that make it impossible for international language to work is that there aren't any cultural recognition associated with the language. Culture is an important element for lerners to feel 'closer' and comfortable to adapt the new language. The soft power projected by some countries have make others learn the language of the country, even though the language can be very difficult( Think about Japan or Korea).
On the other extreme end, culture is also often mixed with nationalism. And since language is so tightly linked to culture, any move to change the status of the 'ethnic' language will result in unpredictable reaction. In some countries, it is considered unpatiotic for not learning the national language well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aquila Triglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5486 days ago 104 posts - 128 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German Studies: French | Message 14 of 91 12 January 2010 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
Of course. And Esperanto as a world language is more an ideal, because there are comparatively not many speakers of it. But it’s therefore not immediately a bad and unattainable ideal.
The problem that still much people in this world cannot understand each other. Simple answer. English is not as easy to learn for us, as for others. And native speakers are always in a better position. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 91 12 January 2010 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Not neutral" = "easier for some people than others".
Because Esperanto uses a lot of Latin roots, it's easiest for Europeans. A de jure international language needs to be neutral as no country's government is going to actively promote something that puts their citizens at an educational and economic disadvantage. Yes, English puts a lot of people at a disadvantage, but it's a de facto international language and as such it's not that governments promote it, they simply support the existing demand. (The fact that English is the first language of the UN is a different matter -- this is the language of communication within the UN, so relates to a vanishingly small part of the world's population.) The problem as I see it is that the only people who actively want an international auxiliary language are people within the conlang ("constructed language") community, but the majority of the conlang community want it to be Esperanto. Their arguments that Esperanto is easy to learn and neutral are hard to justify: more recent conlangs are more carefully structured to be easier to learn and more neutral. The argument then falls back to "but there are more Esperanto speakers than others" and "there is more material available in Esperanto" -- but these arguments can be used to support the use of English as an international language, because English has a huge number of speakers and there's lots of material available, and if that outweighs complexity.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5500 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 16 of 91 12 January 2010 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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People who speak English don't need to learn other languages. Yes, I know what you're
thinking. There are indeed many instances where an Anglophone can benefit from speaking a foreign language, but this is not true for the majority of people. When an English speaker can in fact benefit (by benefit I mean job related, which is more important to most people than say, increasing the amount of world class literature available to one's self) from learning another language, 99% of the time he chooses to study French, Mandarin or Castilian or another economically beneficial language. (Of course we polyglots can find a million reasons to defend why we need to learn other languages, but I'm talking about regular monolingual people). On the other hand, non-English speakers can be divided into two groups a) those who don't need English; and b)those who do need English. Someone in France doesn't need to speak English. While it will be very limiting for him in many respects to not speak English, he will get by fine without it. Yes there are exceptions, but he'll live a good life only ever speaking French. The other category I have proposed consists of those who do need to be able to communicate in English. A young bright Chinese student will want to learn English, so he/she can find a job or perhaps enter grad school in the Anglosphere. I doubt that many Chinese are studying Castilian (please inform me if I am wrong) because the only rich, Western, non-developing, country that speaks the language is Spain. In conclusion, few have any incentive to learn Esperanto et al. because there is no practical reason. Sure, Esperanto speakers can communicate amongst themselves at special meetings and associations, but they must search out speakers. Most monolingual English speakers don't learn other languages except occasionally the most practical. Non-English speakers usually learn another language to immigrate or for work related reasons, and of course English is the most sensible language for them. Esperanto will never become a highly spoken and studied language in the world because only people like us (and not even most on here) study the language. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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