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English as the universal language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5488 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes  Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 57 of 206 04 November 2009 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Those who push artificial languages as a means of creating a neutral lingua franca often
forget that virtually all artificial languages are Western in nature. For example, the scripts are often Latin based. Esperanto and Interlingua may have claims of neutrality in a Western context, but not elsewhere. I don't have a problem with this; I just feel that we sometimes have to take a step back when looking for cultural associations and baggage. Edited by Paskwc on 04 November 2009 at 5:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6281 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 58 of 206 04 November 2009 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
Just some facts: * The catalog of the biggest Esperanto book seller contains more than 25,000 different books. This does not include out-of-print or small-publisher books, only readily-available ones that you can mail-order from anywhere in the world. * Vinilkosmo, a well-known Esperanto music publisher, has contracts with more than a hundred different Esperanto singers and bands. It is not the only Esperanto music publisher. * At the moment, the Esperanto Wikipedia boasts more than 100,000 articles, more than the Arabic and Hindi Wikipedias combined. Hardly "a few". * While a lot of the world's movies and TV shows come from the USA, its share is not as large as you'd believe, considering India, China, Japan, Egypt, Syria, France and Germany are also known as big movie producing countries. What's more, the vast majority of American movies have to be translated and usually dubbed to become a success outside the USA. Does it matter what language they were originally in if it's hard to find the original version shown in a cinema within an hour's drive of you? * English is only "spoken", in the vastest sense of the word, by half a billion people, non-native speakers included. That's a twelvth of the world's population. Shouldn't we all learn Mandarin, which covers twice as many people? * Esperanto can be learned in a sixth of the time it takes to learn English and a further multiple of the amount of time it takes for any of us to learn Mandarin. The entire world could save billions of educational costs (and loads of time) with a far superior result. For language geeks like us it may not matter, but for an average person it does. Finally, learning your main communication language quickly leaves more time to study the languages you're really interested in, and Esperanto encourages that. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5649 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 59 of 206 04 November 2009 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, this is a valid point. Interestingly it doesn't seem to bother the Chinese and Japanese much, but if it's to be WORLD language, then it should not be based on European languages, else non-Europeans would have a cause for complaint. (It's adifferent situation for an EU language though). There IS a big-ish conlang (forgotten which) that is based on ALL language across the world with a weighing depending on the number of speakers. A notable fact was that this language had a very high number of Indian words. In it's extention you might even argue - why Latin letters? And that would be a valid question too. But obviously some form of alphabet has to be used unless we were to create a new alphabet too... Frankly that seems OTT. Edited by cordelia0507 on 04 November 2009 at 9:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5332 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 60 of 206 04 November 2009 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
According to Wikipedia, 375 million people have English as their FIRST language: http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angla_lingvo Is it a reflection of your view on American English when you say that English is only "spoken" by this half billion? 25.000 books is quite a lot, for a private library. For an estimate on the total number of books in a language, it is not very impressive. It is slightly more than a tenth of the titles publishen in the UK each year... More importantly, very little orginial material is produced in Esperanto. Who learns a language in order to read translations? And 100.000 wikipedia articles? Congratulations, that's almost a third of what's available in Swedish, one of the tiniest languages around... It would be interesting to read the studies that show that you can acquire Esperanto six times faster than English. I wonder why that would be. Is the vocabulary that much smaller? It doesn't take very long to get a reasonable grasp on English grammar, so the time saving couldn't be there. Perhaps it's syntax? But is it even theoretically possible to construct a simple syntax that could still be as eloquent as that of English? More importantly, if you factor in reality - that there are infitite amounts of material available in English at any level about any subject conceivable - motivation and practice opportunities will make English easier to learn in any case. And let's be a bit realistic, the biggest obstacle is surely that the people who do bother to learn it are very seldom, if ever, normal everyday people, or business people or academics for that matter. They are idealistic language enthusiasts and politically motivated, left-leaning youths. That is a very poor base to build a world language upon. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5332 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 61 of 206 04 November 2009 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am totally against any kind of world language, and especially the constructed ones, but I still have to weigh in here. The case for English, both pragmatically because it already is the universal language of the world, and because it is morphologically quite simple, is obvious. Why should the universal language be "neutral" anyway, as if that were even possible? Surely it would make much more sense to base it upon, or choose, one of the Indo-European languages. That is by far the largest language group these days, and the so-called civilisation that has spawned the universal "culture" of today is based on the US and Europe to at least 95% anyway. And it certainly doesn't seem to bother the hundreds of million people that are trying to learn English as a second language that it is actually a real language, spoken in real countries. When normal people learn a language, they don't tend to bother too much about "post-colonialism" or "cultural imperialism". They just want to have a better life and happen to think that America, Europe or a multi-national firm can help them with that. It really is that simple. The case for a Latin based writing system is equally obvious. Most languages already have that, and it is by far the most recognised alphabet around. The constructed language you refer to is probably lojban, it's the most wonderfully crackpot language of all crackpot constructed languages. It's what happens when an über-PC computer scientist with an interest in languages and world peace goes mad. The language is so different from any real language that it is doubtful if it CAN be spoken at all. I wouldn't call it very big, though. According to their propaganda ministry, "a couple of dozen people are known to be able to converse in real-time, and several people are considered fluent". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5735 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 62 of 206 04 November 2009 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Regarding culture; for many people language and culture are often deeply connected and, as has already been mentioned by others in this thread, a language without a culture could seem boring. I think that if Esperanto is to become more popular; those who speak it must emphasize that Esperanto provides an opportunity to be part of a truly new and unique culture that is still being formed. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5649 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 63 of 206 04 November 2009 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Gustaf, you argue your case well and I respect that.
Just one thing - based on your other posts I got the impression that you are a real Swedish patriot (which I support, of course)! Hasn't it occurred to you that 50 more years of the kind of total annihilation onslaught of English language media, films, culture, language etc will KILL Swedish culture and language? I don't think I need to quote how many urban parents enroll their kids in English language schools and that many Swedish children are no longer familiar with fairly basic Nordic cultural traditions that were taken for granted only a few decades ago? While at the same time wanting to celebrate "Halloween" and being 100% up to scratch on Disney and American swearwords? The onslaught of English plus the governments misguided love-affair with "multi-culturalism" spells for the death of our language and culture. Or its renigation to the sidelines or rural backwaters. I for one do not want to see that happen. Esperanto has no political agenda other than to facilitate communication, and promote peace. It has no economic interests and has never attempted to colonise the world or force its worldview on anyone else. Therefore it is not a threat to existing language and culture, whereas English is. If you think that this threat is irrelevant or that the development of losing national identity is desirable, well then English is a great language. If not, we need to be very careful. Edited by cordelia0507 on 04 November 2009 at 10:24pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5845 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 64 of 206 04 November 2009 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
To sum up: English is evil, lets switch to Esperanto. Nobody really likes Esperanto (except the aforementioned Japanese sect) so there's no danger of being annihilated. But there is a critical flaw in your cunning plan - you underestimate the power of nihongo cultists. Imagine how devastating it would be for Sweden to invite a plague of religious zeal! Uh. Better stick to the subversive influences of English. It will be replaced by Chinese anyway.
They should enrol in Japanese language schools instead and learn to eat with chopsticks. Face the inevitable. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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