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The Forum > Article Comments > World language needs planning not power > Comments

World language needs planning not power : Comments

By Stephen Crabbe, published 2/2/2006

Stephen Crabbe argues we need a world language and pushing a language like English upon other nations will not work.

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The Miller,

Have you visited Sydney suburbs lately?
Whether you like it or not, Chinese will impact on the English language. Further, Esperanto has been around for at least 30 years and it hasn't caught fire. Why is that? I have given the answer and you stick your head in the sand and wait for your pet puppy to find its way home. Ooops ... roadkill!
Is it Esperanto training that has dulled your comprehension to what I said about gently infusing chinese characters into English subjects, principally the sciences? Each subject could start from basics and make their own accepted vocabularies. Its a start, but more important it is in line with the majority of the world's peoples.
And REMEMBER that as Mark Twain said " Every picture speaks a thousand words ". The mind learns faster in pictures than words.
Further I explained why English IS the 'world' language. I did not and do not dispute contributions from other languages. As I said they are all part of the human fabric.

Enrique,

Over half the world population is ASIAN. Their progress has been hindered by dialect isolation. The Internet generation has made that flaw null and void. You do not have a choice. Esperanto has had its chances. You need to look at why it is not competing with the natural evolution of English that I am prescribing. Just writing a book and wishing you were king for the day to pass a law that we all speak Esperanto is not enough.
*
Posted by KAEP, Friday, 3 February 2006 4:59:03 PM
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Much as it would give an immense warm glow to the doe-eyed egalitarians if the world suddenly decided to learn Esperanto, it isn't going to happen.

After more than a hundred years, the best estimate of Esperanto speakers that I could find is two million - around .03% of the world's population.

Also, it is already more than fifty years since UNESCO officially "recognized" the language.

Exactly how long does it take for it to be acknowledged that the experiment, however worthy its objectives, is a failure?

The basic flaw in the equation is not the logic: of course it would be neat if everybody could communicate more easily and accurately, and a lingua franca would surely help.

But in order for Esperanto to become ubiquitous, there needs to be a network effect. In the same way that the first fax machine was useless until the second was bought, and email relies upon there being a recipient as well as a sender, Esperanto requires a growing body of users in order for it to catch on.

This almost invariably happens as a result of demand, not supply.

The only examples of a successful supply-side network effect come through monopolies, either state driven (you will all drive a Zil), or through market manipulation (Microsoft).

There are clearly insufficient intrinsic advantages of Esperanto to generate a demand-side revolution, and it is highly unlikely that we will see it government-mandated, in our lifetimes at least.
Posted by Pericles, Friday, 3 February 2006 6:09:53 PM
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The problem with Esperanto is that whilst it might be simple to learn, it is only in the context of being a speaker of Germanic or Romance languages. It would be interesting to see how easy Esperanto is to someone that speaks, say, an agglunative language to begin with (like Turkish) -- and would be easy to test.

It might also be noted that, unlike Esperanto, the majority of the world's languages do not use such fixed word orders and the majority do not use a SVO order either (only 42% if I remember correctly). In addition, there are lots of things missing in Esperanto that are very common, like productive compounding, tones in phonology (used by the majority of the world's speakers) and so on. If the language starting to get used by any great number of speakers, it seems more than likely, that, like every other language, these sorts of things would start to infiltrate it
Posted by rc, Friday, 3 February 2006 7:25:54 PM
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Excellent article.

I can confirm that learning Esperanto is far easier than learning English. After only a few weeks of learning Esperanto alone on the Internet, I could already correspond in that language. It was a rewarding experience. It took me years the reach the same level in English. Furthermore, it is a fun language to learn because of its flexibility and word construction rules among other things. Being easy does not mean it is not a powerful language. In fact it is just the opposite: it is possible to express ideas with precision, elegance and concision. Critics often come from people who have no idea what Esperanto is (fear of the unknown) and yet feel that they can comment about it (it has no culture, no literature, no native speakers...). Those assertions are uninformed: Esperanto has a culture since it has been spoken for more than 100 years in many countries, books are published in Esperanto and yes, there are native speakers. The Esperanto community on the Internet is dynamic: wikipedia in Esperanto for example (http://www.vikipidio.org) already has more than 35,000 articles. There are also several great free lessons to learn Esperanto on the web. http://www.lernu.net is excellent for anybody who wish to discover and learn the language.

-- Dominiko
Posted by dominiko, Friday, 3 February 2006 8:25:29 PM
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As someone who knows nothing about Esperanto, perhaps I'm not really qualified to say anything. However, I've had a quick look at one of the sites and it seems to me that Esperanto is a kind of Pidgin-English, with bits of Southern European languages thrown in. In fact the name of this language suggests "hope" in French.

So why should speakers of vastly different languages be prepared to settle for what appears to be an English/Southern European hybrid? If you're going to learn Pidgin-English, then you may as well learn standard English, which is what many people from non-English speaking countries are already willingly doing.

And if we're just looking for a language which is much easier to learn than English, then the world already has such a language and it's spoken by hundreds of millions of people, many of whom also have their own very different languages. I'm talking about Indonesian. But I'm not of course suggesting that Indonesian should become the world language.

If there really was a push to have a world language, I would be inclined to favour the very logical Latin. Without really knowing, I would presume that the world's scientists would already have some working knowledge of Latin, so that would be a good start.

As much of this is presumption on my part, I hope that the more knowledgeable posters will not be too hard on me. I'm just putting a few comments forward for debate.
Posted by Rex, Saturday, 4 February 2006 12:04:54 AM
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Rex,
I for one find myself in your boat, you are qualified to express an opinion, if you have an opinion, in a decocracy, whether or not anyone agrees or disagrees.

Many of Earths languages have already been lost, and as far as I can tell the main language of the world today is USA. It has hijacked English, Australian and most western countries, "hey guy" this contorted ugly beast of a language permeates nations, as cigarette smoke does clothing, the end result, it stinks..

I support a situation whereby people could be multi-lingual, in my case I only speak Australian, and do not wish to change my heritage by using the old yankee drawl, and expressions. I am quite comfortable with my own Australian history, and believe it is a disgrace that children leaving schools today know all about Billy the Kid, but have never heard of Ned Kelly.
Posted by SHONGA, Saturday, 4 February 2006 2:44:07 AM
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