Constructed International Auxiliary Languages are languages created to facilitate communication between people of different native languages. They are created to be easy to learn, and not to replace the first language, instead to augment the speaker's ability to communicate with other peoples. If IALs were used in places with high language density, where people are forced to learn several languages in order to communicate with their neighbors, an easily learnable language could facilitate communication. IALs have failed to become popular, and have received little research outside that of constructed language enthusiasts. There exists no way of knowing how willing the average person in a high-density language area (or anywhere else) would be to learn an IAL. For an intergovernmental organization such as the European Union, an IAL could be helpful with conducting the business of the organization. The EU claims that all 23 member state languages are equal, but English is the most commonly used IAL, except for in the court, which uses French. This creates problems because English is a notoriously difficult language to learn, full of exceptions to grammar and pronunciation rules.
In order for IALs to aid with communication, many people would have to learn one. Why have they so far failed to become popular, and therefore useful? Would the average person be willing to learn an IAL if it was endorsed and used by his or her government or intergovernmental organization? People tend to avoid learning languages until they find it completely unavoidable... or maybe people simply feel silly learning a non-natural language, or speaking a language that someone created.
Perhaps the real problem is that it's silly to learn a language spoken by so few people. Esperanto, spoken by approximately 1.6 million people, is the most widely-known IAL, and has about the same number of speakers as Klingon (a language from the TV show Star Trek). Esperanto, while the most popular IAL, is widely criticized and has a number of flaws. Critics say it is difficult to pronounce, not easily adaptable to the digital age because of the diacritic marks used, and unfairly similar to European languages, especially Romance languages. This similarity is seen as nationalist and would diminish the ease of learning for peoples from Africa or Asia. There are hundreds of constructed IALs, however, that have no relation to any natural language. The idea that constructed IALs are unhelpful and unnecessary because people already communicate using certain international languages, citing English as an example, is misguided. The biggest problem with a natural IAL is that the language will change in popularity with the influence and power of the culture to which the language is native.
The concept of a constructed IAL has three parts: the language must be easy for people of all language and culture backgrounds to learn, must be usable in both mundane and technical conversation, and be culturally neutral. Governments and intergovernmental organizations could use IALs in several ways, but the first step would be to determine which IAL to use. If travel, business, cultural understanding, and general communication could be aided by a constructed IAL, why have they failed to become popular? I, as an individual, would be delighted to learn an IAL to communicate with people all over the world. How would you feel?
Currently there is a large online survey that is actually testing the number of speakers of different International Auxiliary Languages, such as Interlingua, IDO, Esperanto, Volapuk, Novial, etc. So far Esperanto is ahead of all others by at least 1000, but that can only change if people participate.
http://www.publicstudies.com/lang_survey/
Thanks,
Webgovernor, IDO/Esperanto/Lojban/InterLingua speaker.
(So far Esperanto (or IDO) are my favorites).
If there is going to be a universal language used globally...it really should be Esperanto. Klingon is just a feeble attempt made by t.v. fanatics to make Star Trek more popular among normal folk. *chuckles*
Also...I just bloged on Esperanto. Perhaps you should take a look.
~Astroaction149
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/astroaction149
Doesn't seem to be a problem displaying the diacritics on your blog.
Eĥoŝanĝo ĉiuĵaŭde = Every-thursday echo-change. A nonsense phrase with all 6 diacritical letters.
Erika asks the reasonable question: why have IALs in general and Esperanto in particular failed. Esperanto may or may not be a failure, but it is certainly true that Esperantists have not attanined their ultimate goal, which is that everyone in the world continue to speak his native languages and additionally learn one (just one!) auxiliary language in order to be able to communicate with everyone outside his own language community.
Big ideas take a long time to implement. Consider the metric system. The _idea_ of a decimal measuring system had been around for more than 200 years before it finally _implemented_ in Europe in the late 19th century. It has still not conquered the US, although it will.
Humans are naturally wary of schemes which sound wonderful but may not work in practice. People with no practical experience with Esperanto can reasonably worry about whether it is a practical solution to the problem of international communication. There is, however, empirical evidence. Esperanto has been around for 120 years, there are thousands of literary works which have been written in Esperanto or translated into it, there are thousands of websites in the language, and there are thousands of people who speak it effortlessly with a high degree of expressive power.
English, on the other hand, is a proven quantiy. It works. The great advantage of Esperanto is efficiency. It takes far less time to attain any given degree of proficiency than in English, although English, in comparison with other natural languages, is not particularly difficult.
Esperanto is not perfect. A team of modern linguists and communication experts could do better, but its defects are minor. It is interesting that you mention the criticism that the 6 letters with diacritics make the language unadaptable to the digital age. This is a particularly vacuous criticism (but easily findable on the Internet) which says much more about the criticizer than the language. In the digital age these characters are a total non-problem. Remember than almost all languages apart from English use letters with diacritics
Erika said:
>"Why have IALs failed to become popular?"
>This is an exploration of failure, and nothing more.
I cannot speak about IALs ...
I only learned and used Esperanto.
Esperanto did not fail. The number of its speakers kept growing since the day it was published. I have used Esperanto during more than 40 years (starting in 1959) and it works perfectly. How can I think that it failed?
I lived in New York City during many years. While there, I met Esperanto speakers ... tourists and businesspeople visiting NYC. That is a fantastic experience ... for them and for me.
Many times I walked the streets of Manhattan with people that had seen the city for the first time ...
When I took my boss to walk the streets of Tokyo ... he couldn't believe I was talking to this Japanese lady. She showed us many different parts of Tokyo, traveling by subway from one neighborhood into another. I spend the whole time talking to her, while the only thing my boss could do was to take pictures.
Esperanto is not a language that failed.
Once again, I ask all readers, please start learning Esperanto.
You will be asking yourself ... Why I didn't start before?
On Internet you will find a lot of Esperanto. Somebody wrote all those pages. Google gives many million hits on the word "Esperanto". That doesn't count most of the pages written entirely in Esperanto which generally don't mention the word Esperanto. (on most English pages you don't find the word "English")
In many languages, the word Esperanto is spelled the same. Some other languages have different words to translate the word Esperanto. Other languages are written with different alphabets or other ways of writing. All the Esperanto pages in these categories aren't counted in a Google search.
All this means that Esperanto is a language very much used. It didn't fail. Of course, many people failed to learn it. That is not the language's fault. Why don't these people learn Esperanto?
They can do it.
Best wishes to all,
Enrique
Enrike (at) aol (dot) com
(I answer all my e-mails)
This post is not exploring the pros and cons of IALs or Esperanto in particular. It is asking the question "Why have IALs failed to become popular?" while under the assumption that they could be helpful. It is an exploration of possible reasons IALs have failed and so if I had listed explanations of why Esperanto is a great language, it would not be appropriate in this post because that's not what I'm talking about. This is an exploration of failure, and nothing more. If you want to advertise Esperanto, go ahead, but it doesn't mean I should have -- it's not what I was talking about.
--Erika
Some comments on Erika's comments. Erika writes: "As far as the number of people who speak Esperanto (and Klingon) these are impossible to know, and are not consistent on being defined by how well one speaks the language."
As far as Esperanto is concerned, this is not correct. The figure of 1.6 million that you earlier quote would likely be based on the researches of Prof. Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington, the man who was for many years responsible for the table of most-spoken languages in "The World Almanac and Book of Facts". Culbert spent years doing on-the-ground research in a number of countries regarding who thought they could speak Esperanto and how well they actually spoke it, and came up with a figure of between half a million and one and a half million speakers of Esperanto in the world — a figure he quoted as "one million" because of the structure of the table. After doing similar research in mainland China in 1986, in 1988 Culbert kicked the figure up by one million, with the same proviso that this actually meant a possible range of numbers. To him, "an Esperanto speaker" was quite well defined — someone who could speak the language at U.S. State Department level three.
Culbert's figures have often been questioned. It is possible that there are problems with his methodology that would invalidate the values he came up with, but I have never seen that criticism made in actual practice; instead, doubts about the number of Esperanto speakers are invariably based on "I won't believe that!" Not a very good argument, IMHO.
As far as Klingon is concerned, the idea that there is a large number of Klingon speakers originated with an article in The Onion, not a publication noted for the accuracy of its statements. In an article about Klingon, The Onion stated (jokingly) that there were already more speakers of Klingon than there were of Navajo (though this was later, and commonly, misquoted as "than there were of Esperanto"). As to how many Klingon speakers there actually are, no, we can't know that exact figure, any more than we can know the exact number of speakers of Esperanto or English, but we can estimate from participation in Klingon-speaking get-togethers, from the amount of publication in the language, from statements by authorities about the language, that the figure is likely in the dozens or low hundreds, not the millions.
You also state that "the criticisms I mentioned are well documented all over the internet". Unfortunately "widely declared" is not the same thing as "well documented", particularly for something that can't be documented since it's simply erroneous; if I pointed out to you two hundred sites that stated that "the world hatched from a giant egg", would you consider this idea as being "well documented"? Let's take a look at the criticisms that you originally quoted.
"Critics say [Esperanto] is difficult to pronounce"
Every language, of course, has some pronunciation feature that somebody from some other language family is going to have to adapt to; for myself, I found Esperanto's occasional initial KV- problematic (a lip-twister) when I first learned the language, though a little practice resolved that problem quickly enough. But Esperanto's general pronunciation is at least as easy as that of any other language, and considerably easier than most. (Imagine if Esperanto had been invented by somebody from Anhui Province and involved tones!) One extremely nice feature is the one-to-one correspondence between written signs and phonemes, which makes it possible to go from a purely reading knowledge of Esperanto to a speaking capability not in a matter of months or years but in a matter of minutes or at most hours.
By contrast, the pronunciation of English is so difficult for many peoples that in Korea and China a couple of years ago parents were taking their children to doctors to have the phrenum — the membrane at the base of the tongue — slashed so that their children would be able to learn to speak English properly in later life. This was apparently based on a supposition that if so many people in Asia could not learn to pronounce English properly, the fault must lie somewhere in Asian anatomy, not in the language itself. (Evidently these parents had never watched a U.S. news broadcast in which some native-born American lady of Asian descent spoke in perfectly normal, colloquial English.)
"[Esperanto is] not easily adaptable to the digital age because of the diacritic marks used"
The digital age is the best one for Esperanto (and other languages written with "non-standard", i.e. non-English, characters, which basically means all other languages than English) since the era of handwriting. When I was a boy, my parents had to buy me a special typewriter from Sears with the Esperanto supersigns; but today you can write in Esperanto using nothing more than Wordpad and a piece of free software running in the background.
"[Esperanto is] unfairly similar to European languages, especially Romance languages. This similarity is seen as nationalist and would diminish the ease of learning for peoples from Africa or Asia."
An argument that's been around for a long time. Strangely, we hear it primarily from Americans and Europeans, obviously troubled for the potential problems facing their Little Brown Brothers who are apparently incapable of worrying about this problem for themselves. Even more strangely, if you query these people about possible alternatives to Esperanto, the answer is generally "English", which is somehow less European and less imperialist than Esperanto.
Asian and African speakers of Esperanto themselves will make two points on this subject: (1) While the structure of Esperanto is no more foreign to Asians and Africans than it is to Europeans, (*) the core vocabulary of the language (though not the much larger derived vocabulary) is easier for Europeans to learn than for Asians and Africans, and so Esperanto is indeed somewhat more difficult for them to learn than it is for Europeans; and (2) Nonetheless, Esperanto remains infinitely easier for them to learn than any European language. As far as questions of nationalism or imperialism are concerned — who cares? If this were a problem, nobody outside Great Britain would be learning English.
(Which might be a blessing for many. I remember one very competent speaker of Esperanto from Korea who once toted up all the time he had spent failing to learn English and decided that, had he devoted that time to more constructive pursuits, he could have earned one or two extra doctorates.)
---
(*) As Hiroyuki Tani pointed out years ago, while there are features in Esperanto that are easier for Europeans than for Japanese (prepositions, for instance), there are also features that are a shoo-in for Japanese while Europeans are still scratching their heads over them (the accusative, the participles, the direct conversion of adjectives to verbs — there are European students of Esperanto who insist that the last of these is an impossibility, though it's a standard feature of many Asian languages as well as Esperanto). The same holds true for other languages.
Erika:
I would like to know why did you start research on this subject. I congratulate you in your way to present the result of that research.
>This post is in no way taking a stance on Esperanto.
Don't worry ... I can do that for you.
>The criticisms I mentioned are well
>documented all over the internet,
I have red that kind of comments on the Internet. That doesn't mean that they are well documented. Generally those comments are made by people that had not
studied Esperanto and thus, are not qualified to comment. In my previous posting I showed a few facts about those comments.
>For all of you who speak Esperanto,
>good for you and I hope it opens
>doors for you and enriches your lives.
Thank you! Esperanto did enrich my life, and the life of most Esperanto speakers. You can find some testimonials on my page at
. http://esperantofre.com/book/index.htm
This is a long page. You may start it at
. http://esperantofre.com/book/index.htm#piron
If you like what you are reading, you can go to the beginning of the page and read it whole.
>The infighting between IAL
>and constructed langauge
>enthusiasts is one of the
>biggest hindrances to success.
You are partially right. A lot of people fight about that and sometimes manage to get the attention of some Esperanto speakers which loose their time in discussions,
especially beginners. Most people that enjoy the use of Esperanto, don't care about that kind of discussions.
>As far as the number of people
>who speak Esperanto (and
>Klingon) these are impossible
>to know,
I agree with that. I will never mention a number. But I know that I can find Esperanto speakers willing to meet me in most countries. I will not say "in every country".
It is also interesting when the count refers to other languages. When the language is English, they add to the count the whole population of the USA as being English
speakers. In USA live a lot of people that cannot speak English. Many of those that can speak it, including natives, don't speak it well, cannot write it, or cannot
understand instructions written in English.
>Even Esperantists agree with this,
>although their numbers of how
>many people speak Esperanto
>tend to be higher than other
>estimates.
Unfortunately, many Esperanto speakers (but not all of them) give numbers with great variations ... from low estimates to huge estimates. (Many times I saw the
number 10 million). Many years ago, a University professor, who researched number of speakers for many languages, using accepted methods, estimated the
number of speakers in 1.6 millions. He was working for a University, and his estimates were published in a popular "Almanac" during more than 20 years. As far as I
know, nobody rejected his estimates for the other languages. But ... I wouldn't be sure that the formulas that work well for ethnic languages, could be trusted for
Esperanto. I will never refer to this estimate as exact.
This 1.6 millions is al old estimate. I suppose that after that, the number of Esperanto speakers kept growing. For sure it grew a lot during the last years thanks to the
impulse of Internet. As you can see, Internet permits the connection between people from all parts of the world ... Esperanto permits the understanding between
them.
I will never mention a number. That is impossible to estimate. I used Esperanto in many countries including Japan, Korea, and China. In Korea and China I stayed at the house of Esperanto speakers.
>I will remind you, however,
>that one doesn't need to be
>an avid Esperantist to know
>something about constructed
>languages.
Even if I am an "avid" Esperanto speaker, I know very little about constructed languages. That is a subject that never interested me. When I was young I "discover"
Esperanto and since I have steadily used it. I don't need more constructed languages. Esperanto gives me all that I may want from a constructed language. But
people that did not studied Esperanto are not qualified to comment about Esperanto. (Would you like to hear comments about football or baseball from people that
don't know the game?)
Remember: Esperanto is easy to learn. Esperanto can be used in most countries.
Easy is a relative word. Esperanto is easy compared with other languages. To learn Esperanto you must study. You have to dedicate time to that. But ... 50 hours
should be enough to read almost anything written in Esperanto with a little help from a dictionary. Another 50 hours of practice should give you some fluency
speaking and writing Esperanto.
Very often I read messages from beginners saying, in Esperanto, "I want to correspond with other beginners to improve my Esperanto. I started to study it last month
..." (or 2 month ago, or 2 weeks ago ...) About how easy is/isnot Esperanto, please read my page
. http://esperantofre.com/eroj/ilo04a.htm
To all readers: Please start to learn Esperanto. Everything you need is on the web. Write to me and I will help you. My e-mail address is
Enrike (at) aol (dot) com
Best wishes to all,
Enrique
Fremont, California, USA
This post is in no way taking a stance on Esperanto. The criticisms I mentioned are well documented all over the internet, I didn't say whether I share them or not. I think Esperanto is a fine IAL and the search for a "perfect" IAL is, of course, impossible and rather pointless. For all of you who speak Esperanto, good for you and I hope it opens doors for you and enriches your lives. The infighting between IAL and constructed langauge enthusiasts is one of the biggest hindrances to success.
As far as the number of people who speak Esperanto (and Klingon) these are impossible to know, and are not consistent on being defined by how well one speaks the language. Even Esperantists agree with this, although their numbers of how many people speak Esperanto tend to be higher than other estimates. Unfortunately, I can't remember exactly where I found this figure but I found it when researching a paper I recently wrote on the topic and I do not feel very inclined to go searching about for it again. I will remind you, however, that one doesn't need to be an avid Esperantist to know something about constructed languages. Thanks, and I hope this clears some things up!
--Erika
Erika,
Actually, Esperanto hasn't had much competition as an IAL since 1914. Disputes about IALs and conlangs are hardly a obstacle.
The real obstacle, as pointed out by Caude Piron (formerly a translator, now a psychologist) is the psychological "threat" that people seem to perceive. Reactions to Esperanto are often similar to a psychotic fear response. Very irrational.
For example, people are eager to publish false information on their blogs that Esperanto is only spoken by a handful of people or that it suffers from in-fighting...
The actual number of people who could speak Klingon conversationally is so small, that when they have a get-together, they can comfortably chat over dinner at the same table.
However, the annual "Universala Kongreso" of Esperanto typically draws around 2300 esperantists. They meet in a different place each year. This summer it will be held in Yokohama and a separate youth conference (IJK) with around 400 attendees will be held in Hanoi.
It really IS easy to learn. Try it!
http://lernu.net/
La efektiva nombro da homoj kiuj povus paroli Klingone konversacie estas tiom malgranda, ke kiam ili kunvenas, ili povas komforte babili dum vespermangho che la sama tablo.
Tamen, la chiu-jara "Universala Kongreso" de Esperanto tipe tiras chirkau 2300 esperantistojn. Ili kunvenas che alia loko je chiu jaro. Je chi tiu somero ghi okazos che Jokohama kaj aparta junulara konferenco (IJK) kun chirkau 400 cheestantoj okazos che Hanojo.
Ghi vere estas facile lernata. Provu ghin!
http://lernu.net/
Sal Erika / Hi Erika
Despite a few innaccuracies already pointed out by other readers, this is a pretty good and interesting blog entry, on a subject that interests me.
Esperanto is not easy to learn. Every language require effort. But it's certainly an order of magnitude easier than natural languages. After a few weeks or months of studying Esperanto, it was easier to express myself better than in other languages that I had studied for years. Learning fast and being able to quickly use the language is rewarding and encouraging. Web sites to learn Esperanto are well done (I learned almost everything thanks to http://www.lernu.net which I recommend).
> Esperanto, spoken by approximately 1.6 million people, is the
> most widely-known IAL, and has about the same number of
> speakers as Klingon
This is clearly incorrect. The number of people who can express themselves more or less fluently in Klingon is very small as far as I know (a dozen of hobbyists perhaps?). The number of Esperanto speakers on the other hand is probably in the hundred thousands. I do not believe myself that they are 1.6 million speakers but nobody can really tell. To get an idea, we can try to find metrics to compares. We can compare the number of articles in wikipedia in the 2 languages for example:
- wikipedia in Esperanto (http://eo.wikipedia.org) 67.402 articles
- wikipedia in Klingon (http://klingon.wikia.com) 106 articles
This is only one metric. Every metric is debatable of course but the difference is telling. The number of people who gather in Esperanto events is also much greater than for Klingon events. Many softwares are translated in Esperanto (openoffice, GNOME, etc). Popular web sites unrelated to Esperanto are available in Esperanto (Google, LiveJournal, ...). I have not seen this in Klingon.
> Critics say it is difficult to pronounce
I did not find Esperanto difficult to pronounce. Perhaps the word "scias" is a a bit is tricky at first (sounds like /stsias/). But the same sound exists in English (in the word "casts" for example). I'm not a native English speaker and Esperanto was a lot easier to learn how to pronounce to me. Of course, one letter being one sound only, without exceptions whatsoever, helps greatly.
> not easily adaptable to the digital age because of the
> diacritic marks used
I do not find this to be a problem in practice today. One can either use Unicode with most software today or several alternative spelling systems exists to write with ASCII characters only. The accentuated letter look good to me but it's a matter of taste.
Perhaps what I found most motivating in learning Esperanto was that it is a logical language and it's fun. The agglutinative aspect of the language saves memorizing many root words, yet allowing to create a vast quantity of words.
Esperanto is a fairly simple language to learn, it does not mean that it is less expressive than other languages. In fact, I found it to be quite the opposite. Natural languages like English, French (etc) have arbitrary constraints. In Esperanto, the mind is free to express itself precisely and in many different creative ways.
-- Dominiko
Erika:
I did read your very interesting posting. Please allow me to make a few comments based on the fact that I have spoken
Esperanto during more than 40 years.
>Constructed International Auxiliary Languages
>They are created to be easy to learn,
Some of them, like Esperanto and Interlingua, were created to be easy to learn. Languages like Volapuk and Klingon do not have that purpose.
>Why have they so far failed to become popular,
>and therefore useful?
Esperanto is useful ... As with all languages, it is useful only to the people capable of using it. Failed? 120 years ago only one person knew it. Since, it kept growing
almost all the time. I said "almost" because it had a big set back during the second world war.
>Would the average person be willing to learn
I suppose that any one that understands the value of Esperanto will be willing to learn it, specially knowing that they could start using Esperanto with less than 50
hours of training.
>if it was endorsed and used by his or her
>government
In that case, I believe everybody will learn it. (at least people inclined to learn new things)
>People tend to avoid learning languages
>until they find it completely unavoidable...
I know a man that learned Spanish when he was a teenager, just because he liked Spanish-speaking girls ...
Lots of people start to learn a language for different reasons ... only to abandon the studying after long time and no progress. With Esperanto you get to use the language before getting into that stage.
>maybe people simply feel silly learning
>a non-natural language, or speaking a
>language that someone created.
Once that you can speak it, you will never think of it being silly. Esperanto is a very natural language after 120 years of use and development like any other language.
>a language spoken by so few people.
Out of 6000 existing languages, Esperanto is within the 100 with more speakers.
>Esperanto, spoken by approximately 1.6
>million people has about the same number
>of speakers as Klingon
As far as I know, there are less than 20 people capable of speaking Klingon.
>Esperanto ... is widely criticized and has a
>number of flaws.
I believe that English have more flaws ... Most of the criticism comes from people that aren't Esperanto speakers.
>Critics say it is difficult to pronounce,
I was talking Esperanto two months after my first encounter with Esperanto. It took me many, many years to get an understandable pronunciation in English, which
will never be good enough.
>not easily adaptable to the digital age
>because of the diacritic marks used
Most alphabets of the world use diacritic marks. Others use entire different alphabets, and languages like Chinese and Japanese don't even use an alphabet. They
are very well adapted to the digital age. I have seen hundreds of Chinese girls on the streets of Beijing, sending text messages with their cell phones.
>and unfairly similar to European languages,
You are partially right. The way words are formed in Esperanto are closer to the Chinese language than to any European language.
>This similarity is seen as nationalist and
>would diminish the ease of learning for
>peoples from Africa or Asia.
It will be impossible to assembly an easy to learn language taking parts from each of 6000 languages. For Asian people, learning Esperanto is more difficult than for
some Europeans, but never as difficult as learning English.
I know about many complaints about Esperanto being more difficult for Asians ... All these complaints come from Europe and the USA, from people than never tried
to learn Esperanto.
I visited Japan, Korea, and China. Most of the time there I spoke Esperanto. None of hundreds of people that talked to me complained about that. Many of them said
they had studied English during many years, and they were incapable of speaking it. They had studied Esperanto during much less time and they were talking to me.
But what people say criticizing Esperanto is not important. Important are these 2 facts:
Esperanto is easy to learn.
Esperanto works.
>The concept of a constructed IAL has three
>parts: the language must be easy for people
>of all language and culture backgrounds to
>learn, must be usable in both mundane and
>technical conversation, and be culturally
>neutral.
Esperanto agrees with all these.
>why have they failed to become popular?
Because people that have influence and the media, speak against Esperanto, without knowing what Esperanto is, without studying it.
The best place to implement Esperanto should be the United Nations or the European Union. All the people that can make decisions in those places, are there
because they speak English. If Esperanto were the language of choice there, these people would loose their advantages.
>I, as an individual, would be delighted to learn
>an IAL to communicate with people all over
>the world.
And what is stopping you from doing that? E-mail me and I will be very glad to help you. Everything you need to learn Esperanto is on the web.
My e-mail address: Enrike (at) aol (dot) com
http://esperantofre.com
http://en.lernu.net
Best wishes to all readers,
Enrique
Fremont, California, USA
Do you think you could provide the facts? I would like to know more about Esperanto. That's why I blog- because I know that there's a good chance that someone knows more about something than I do. However, I think a better approach would be to provide better information, rather than calling someone's blog "drivel" (a word that I didn't know, and looked up to find out means "saliva flowing from the mouth, or mucus flowing from the nose").
-Alex Kovash
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. -Albert Einstein
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
-Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.
erika, you wrote: "Esperanto, spoken by approximately 1.6 million people, is the most widely-known IAL, and has about the same number of speakers as Klingon (a language from the TV show Star Trek)."
Would you care to document the last part of that sentence? When last I looked, the most popular work about Klingon, Mark Okrand's The Klingon Dictionary, had sold a quarter of a million copies — nowhere near the number needed to produce 1.6 million Klingon speakers, even if you assumed that every purchaser actually learned the language from a dictionary, and didn't simply use it as a conversation piece or doorstop, which seems unlikely.
The annual global Klingon get-together, which usually occurs in Pennsylvania, draws a total of between 15 and 30 participants, mostly from the United States. The annual World Esperanto Conference, held in various cities around the world (this year's will be in Yokohama, Japan; the three most recent were held in Beijing, China, Vilnius, Lithuania, and Florence, Italy), generally draws between two and three thousand participants from around sixty different countries. This year everal hundred younger potential participants will instead go to the International Youth Esperanto Conference in Hanoi, Vietnam. The contrast is hard to ignore.
As far as I can tell, while your figure of 1.6 million Esperanto speakers is at least a reasonable ball-park figure, actual speakers of Klingon number in the hundreds — the low hundreds. I believe that it was Dr. Laurence Schoen of the Klingon Language Institute who once stated that "all the fluent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together" (quoted by Gavin Edwards in "Dejpu'bogh Hov rur Qabllj!", Wired, Aug. 1996).
You said:
Esperanto, spoken by approximately 1.6 million people, is the most widely-known IAL, and has about the same number of speakers as Klingon (a language from the TV show Star Trek). Esperanto, while the most popular IAL, is widely criticized and has a number of flaws. Critics say it is difficult to pronounce, not easily adaptable to the digital age because of the diacritic marks used, and unfairly similar to European languages, especially Romance languages. This similarity is seen as nationalist and would diminish the ease of learning for peoples from Africa or Asia
Please check the facts before you print this drivel.
EoGuy (Esperanto Guy)
Mesa AZ
Please enlighten us, then. I've personally never heard of Esperanto before.
~C
Visit my blog.
I think that a language is such a critical part of a culture, and I would love to learn as many different languages as possible. But, if there were some common ground language that EVERYONE knew, then not only would we be able to communicate, but we'd also be able to learn the other language more quickly. I'm more than willing to.
There are just many people who quite frankly could care less about people who speak other languages.
-Alex Kovash
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. -Albert Einstein
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
-Holocaust Museum Washington D.C.
You said:
But, if there were some common ground language that EVERYONE knew, then not only would we be able to communicate, but we'd also be able to learn the other language more quickly.
There IS such a common language and its name is La Internacia Lingvo - The Inter-national Language, better known as Esperanto.
EoGuy
Mesa AZ
Yes... I know. I could have gathered that from the blog.
I didn't say that there isn't a common language. I think that it would be extremely helpful if we all were required to learn this language so that we can learn the languages that already exist from each other.
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. -Albert Einstein
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
-Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.
awesome!! but i believe us humans have tried this in the past.. the tower of babel.. god wasn't too happy with this.
God wasn't happy with the Tower of Babel because they were trying to create a staircase to heaven. He created the different languages to confuse everyone and make it impossible for the builders to continue.
On the article, is sounds like a good idea, but I wonder how long it will take to really snuff out other languages. I doubt it'd be intentional to kill other languages, but people would become so reliant on it, that they wouldn't bother to learn a second language.(I'm a little paranoid too, the whole "new world order" thing...)