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Speakers of 23 different languages, I suspect. Which one do you chose? Would you presume to say that a single language is universal?

esperanto. Duh.

Well, linguistic reformers get, well, reformed by others who think that their constructed language is better - hence not only is there Esperanto but Ido, and furthermore Interlingua and Atlango (the latter being one that I quite like the look of, although Esperanto admittedly might be, overall, the best bet for both Intra-European and International commmunication). There's a host of 'universal languages' at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_language)

I would say that the TC-STAR project and 'universal' languages miss the point. It's sort of like saying that we should all communicate better using mathematical symbols or other abstract signs (such as BlissSymbolics), since these are at a higher level of thought, happily unconstrained by the cultural baggage that apparently causes such misunderstanding.

The problem with this in my view is that the relationship with the abstracted or universal languages is purely instrumental and detached.To learn Italian or German or French or Chinese or even for me, a Brit, Canadian or American English, is to learn and understand the very culture of living breathing people. There will not be an effective universal language the learning of which will bring natural understanding of others until we have an enforced global mono-culture and a system of enforced global ethics. Does that sound good to anyone?

If we spent as much time and investment in secondary and tertiary education on several already existent languages as we do on intellectual ephemera such as Media Studies or Post-Modernism, we would achieve a lot more real understanding of others than any language reform might achieve, 'neat' though the prospect sounds.

(Edited for typos)

Edited 2008-05-03 10:15 UTC

Esperanto? Only if you would like to ruin the whole EU as fast as possible...

It would take decades, maybe a century of active teaching and other work throughout the EU before enough people would speak the language fluently, and it would have to be a mandatory language taught at least in higher education (which would, of course, narrow the time that could be used for learning other languages). Too many people would protest that kind of spending of resources. Too few people already speak Esperanto.

Esperanto was a fashionable idea in the first decades of the 20th century but has since then lost a lot of its popularity. There are still some active hobby users of the language but only about 10000 people in the whole world speak it fluently and maybe 100000 can use it actively ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto ) It is also the opinion of many language experts that Esperanto has been replaced by more advanced, and easier international languages like Interlingua, just like Esperanto replaced the more primitive Volapuk before it.

Esperanto has many oddities that should have no place in a supposedly easy to use international language - like the use of many diacritical marks (breve, circumflex) above basic letters, increasing the amount of letters. Heck, I don't even know where to get a breve using my keyboard...It would be rather impossible to write esperanto using most current keyboards. The (odd) Esperanto alphabet: a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z.

Interlingua would be a far better, more easy-to-use artificial language but it would, naturally, still have many of the same problems with Esperanto.

Choosing a few major languages as the official EU languages could be a good idea if only people could agree on those languages (easier said than done...). English would be a natural choice, but what about the others? German and French? But what about Spanish and Italian that have lots of users too? Or the Scandinavian languages that are most closely related to each other making understanding between them easy? Why no Slavic and Eastern European languages? We would quickly run into political arguing.

Anyway, I think that using English as a kind of de facto international language may already be the reality in many international organizations, including the EU.

You dropped your credibility right there. It takes a hundred years to learn a language? Gee, what are we sub-centenarians to do? Mime?

While English is haphazard and irregular enough that it could conceivably take a century to master, languages like Esperanto and Interlingua are easy to pick up. It's all the many exceptions and irregularities in a language that are hard to learn.

A good natural language is like a good programming language. It makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. English makes easy things hard and hard things nearly impossible. And every time someone new takes on the task of learning it, yet more wasted effort is incurred memorizing huge collections of irregular verb conjugations, lists of irregular plurals, etc. Do you double the final consonant before adding this suffix to that word? How about this root and that suffix? 'I' before 'E'? Oh, that's unless it's after a 'C'... except here, here, and here, where it's not.

And all that so that they can "communicate" in a language which is inherently more prone to facilitating miscommunication. A language in which the word 'beg' has become its own antonym.

I am a native English speaker. And even I cannot recommend expanded use of that language. And I can only assume that anyone who does has loosed their mind.

Edited 2008-05-03 15:27 UTC

English is not universal but is the language a lot of people learn as a second language.

Though I would always prefer something spoken in my native language, I would prefer listening to a good English speech translated by a good human translator instead of listening a poor Spanish (my native language) speech translated by software... as the same article says, the software is far far from be near perfect.

The most practical suggestion, I would imagine. But good luck getting the French to agree - if Canada* is any indication, at least.

(A country where 100% of our population has to take 9 years of mandatory French classes - because 15% of the population is still unable get over losing on the Plains of Abraham 300 years ago.)

About that, I learned a very interesting thing a few days ago:
Until WWII, the most widely taught second language in Europe was French. Interestingly enough, the first reason why English gained preeminence was that one of the condition for a country to benefit from the Marshall Plan was to make English the most widely taught second language.

According to my source, the reasonning behind that was that if everybody spoke the same language, wars could be avoided.

Well, here we are, 60+ years later, and despite the huge effort, the great majority of Europeans are unable to really have a conversation in English.

I really wonder how things would be if it'd been Esperanto or another similar language that had been picked up...

I'm with you.

I'm Dutch, and I love my language, but the situation in the EU is bloody ridiculous. We should standardise on English. The end. I don't care what the French, Germans, or us Dutch think, I'm sick of hearing they spend MORE THAN ONE BILLION EUROS on translating alone. That's bloody retarded.

In fact, it's one of the two reasons why I consistently vote down anything related to Europe. The language issue clearly shows the inherent flaw of the EU: they pose as a supranational body, but in fact it's nothing more than a bunch of nation states acting like they like each other.

Standardise on English, and stop moving the EU government between Strassbourg and Brussels/Bruxelles twice a year. Then we'll talk.

It's a big number, but expressed as a fraction of the GDP of the EU, it's manageable. The IMF estimates that the EU GDP for this year will be 11.9 trillion Euros. The cost of translation is less than 1/10,000 of that figure.
If you think of the cost of translation as a tax on European goods and services, it is about 1/100 of one percent. And it gives a lot of people jobs.

Machine translation isn't even close to usable at this point: getting 70% of the words right means multiple errors in every sentence. The most it's good for at this stage is to speed up the work of a human translator, who can look at the original and the machine translation, fix the errors, and perhaps train the machine translation to improve (if the program allows for training).

So, you basically want that only highly educated people get elected?

Then there's the problem of giving one country a language advantage in negotiations because they're language is the "universal" lingua franca.

In my opinion Esperanto would work much better. First, not that many people do speak it well enough to start diplomatic and political negotiations in as many would like to think. second everybody has the same chances, a second non foreign language to negotiate in.

Esperanto is a joke. A bad one at that.

/me mostly can't stand listening to it spoken...

argh, my EARS!!

Edited 2008-05-03 03:39 UTC

Did you ever factor in the cost or retraining and teaching everyone who don't speak or understand english into your nonsense ?

If the easy solution was to make everything english it would have been done a long time ago , But you know some people don't understand , write or speak in english , that's the majority of people in the EU by the way not the minority.

Spending 1 billion in translation is so intelligent that all european armed forces have seen there armed forces budget decline and there as never been in all of history such a long peace time between European country , mostly due to people figuring out that the other's where not insulting them because of translations.

The language issue is nonexistent and is not an issue at all , except for some idiot and racist. Who are trying to destroy it and point at it's flaws.

English is taught all throughout the EU, starting in high school (and in my country, even in primary school, I've been studying English since I was ~8).. The infrastructure is already there - and let's face it, English already IS the de-facto standard language of the world. People might not like it, but that doesn't make it any less so. English is the only sane choice, not just from an EU perspective, but also from a world perspective.



Indeed, it would have been done a long time ago if it wasn't for the irrational nationalistic feelings in the EU's member states. As if making English the standard language of the EU government in ANY WAY threatens the existence of languages like German, French, or my own, Dutch. I'm talking about the EU government, not the people themselves.

As for people claiming 1 billion isn't that much - utter nonsense. I'd rather see that 1 billion Euros spent on something that REALLY matters, like fighting poverty in the EU, or improving the environment. That's a million times more important than catering to irrational and idiotic nationalistic feelings.

Look, I'm as Dutch as they come, and I'm proud of that fact. I'm proud to be where I'm from, and in fact, I support policies that improve the awareness of local langages, like Fries in my own country, or Scottish Gaelic in Schotland (I'm learning Scottish Gaelic myself). As a linguist, I understand more than anyone the importance of a language when it comes to culture, and feelings of identity, of belonging, of unity.

But to claim that mandating a single language IN THE EU GOVERNMENT and its documents and proceedings somehow threatens the existence of national languages is moronic. In fact, it just proves how insecure people are about their cultures these days - as also evidenced by the irrational fear towards the muslim culture.



Call me a racist one more time, Moulfijrgr, and you're banned for life on OSNews. I hope I made myself VERY clear. I demand a public apology.

DISCLAIMER: I speak, write and understand/read Dutch and English fluently, and I can understand/read German fluently (speaking and writing is slightly more problematic). I have a basic understanding of French (I can keep up as long as they speak slowly), Latin, and ancient Greek.

Edited 2008-05-03 15:53 UTC

I don't think that Mollinneuf was talking about you when he said that and I do find it funny that you took it so personal, especially given that English is not your mother tongue. After this rant of yours, I believe that he is the one that is entitled for apologies. Guess from who?

As for this language thing, I also happen to think that the native English speakers here are pushing their agenda again with the exception of sbergman27 - who gave a fairly detailed and reasonable explanation of why he thinks that it is a bad idea (although I still think that English is easier to learn than most languages out there, Steve!) - and the gentleman that is said to be an English teacher.

This stupidity has been raised once not so long ago by kaiwai and it was properly shotdown as the gibberish that it is. You can't just push a language onto millions of people like that: it doesn't work this way. And if, as you say, that only the EU parliament should use it as a common language, then I don't see any problem as long as everybody agree to that term. If they don't, fine, too. Try to push the international languages like Esperanto and others instead that were designed to be used in such cases.

And for the record, I agree that to try to push one language to someone who does speak other language and has no interest whatsoever in learning the former in the first place is indeed elitism. Feel free to ban me from your website if that pleases you, Thom. Anytime!

1)I did not call you a racist.
2)I appologize if my use of the word racist got you upset , because you misunderstood what I said because it's not written with a lot of explanation as to what I meant or even targetting you.

There are people who attack the EU because they are idiot and racist and there only intent is to destroy it. You oppose it and say what you don't like about it , it's not the same thing ... your objective is not destruction.

Look Thom , sorry on this your being completely unrealistic , sure the language of internationnal commerce is english , except the reality is most people don't work at the internationnal level but at the local level , In what language do you exchange the most with the people around you , not on the internet , but with people you meet face to face ? Just do the real experiment and stop talking or writing to everyone around you in any other language but english. You will see the real reality.

You say that the training center are in place , well how come the majority of those who come out of school from the Netherland don't all adopt English in there daily life ? Because they failed it / at it. But in your explanation your ommiting the fact that there is not just student who need to learn it , but everyone else who don't speak , write or understand it. The schools system is already at near maximum capacity imagine if it had to take on 2/3 of the rest of the populations.

You say that the biggest problem is nationalistic pride , when the fact is people are not created equals and that for the majority they barely are able to speak and write in there native language , they are unable to learn easily other language.

The EU governement is made up of people , why do you think they have translators during the sessions , because they like to spend money to protect the languages ? No because the majority are not perfectly bilingual or knowledgeable in all language used ...

Also your not alone at talking about this point and the majority of attacker ( do I need to point your not an attacker ?) are saying at all level.



Thom , some of us do have business that deals with translators. It's not cheap at all and with the numbers of papers that come out of the EU that need translation it's not even a percentage of a nano cent per all individual who are in the EU population.



People don't go to war over poverty and the environment , they do when they don't understand each others or think there rights and privilege are trumpled down. Your taking money that solve a problem of communication and want to divert this problem solving amount to direct it untargetted at other problems that are not economic in natures. If 1 Billion was the number needed to solve the environment and poverty problem there would be thousand of people with the money linning up to pay it cash ...



Moulinneuf is my real life name ...

Sorry Thom but your using a computer and talking in another language and went to school above the high school level. Your not like the majority of people.

Most people don't use computers because they don't understand them and a good majority of them can't afford them and a good portion of them are scared of them.

The majority of people have trouble communicating in there own language.

Example based on true events : There is an old lady who speak french who received her medication in english , the drugstore made a printing error , the old lady died , unable to read what was what.

A familly of four from Ontario ( mostly english speaking province ) came to Quebec as tourist some of the the road sign are in French only , missread an exit and panicked try to accelerate and take the next exit , they got into an accident , they all died.

There are tons of language based deadly accident happening everywhere around the world, from people who speak the language.

Your also creating this super governement individual who just don't exist in reality and cloning it multiple times to support your idea , we would be lucky if they had 1/10 of your good intentions or all your ability. They just don't exist in reality.

Sorry.

Edited 2008-05-03 21:02 UTC

Source...?

Surely at least some European countries include language information as census questions?

I'm very curious about the answer to this question, because understanding English is currently the key that unlocks the door to a vast majority of the Internet.

Apparently you understood nothing.
"Lernens Geschichte" [~ "Learn history"] as one of our politicans once said.

If you look at the facts a lot of people and countries of the EU profited. Countries that isolated themselves like Switzerland are falling behind.

When was the last war between members of the EU? Right more than 60 years ago, before there was even the EU. --> one of the reasons to found such body was that "incident".

Understanding each other is not retared, losing the connection with your citizens is.


What you are saying is that you want some kind of ancient Rome with one language, no matter if the people far away of Rome understand you or not. Imo one language would result in a system where everybody is "ruled" by "the EU", the perception would be worse than it's now.

Go on wasteing your votes without informing yourself.

Lets put it this way, all the new members of the EU have English as their official second language; so one can assume that they aren't the barriers. So basically it comes down to certain countries who speak a certain language who see 'sticking it to the English' as part and parcel with 'sticking it to the American's' by their refusal to speak English not only properly but at least put some effort into learning it in the first place.

Making English the standard for communication in business has already happened. Anyone remember in France the commotion made when a business leader said that English is a world language - get used to it? then in Luxembourg over the 'creeping in of English' into French? So I'm sure you can work out who the main instigators for derailing anything that resembles Anglo-Saxon.

One only need to look at the pathetic and juvenile reaction to economic reforms in France and labeling them as 'too anglo-saxon' to understand the immaturity one is actually dealing with. I can't believe that a country that spurred off the enlightenment with great thinkers is basically nothing more than a country of knee jerk reactionaries to anything from outside France.

Edited 2008-05-02 23:27 UTC

Let's see...

First, English is far from being the most widely spoken language in Europe: that'd be either French or German (Germany is now the most populated country in the EU, and French is spoken in four European countries, three of which are part of the EU).

Next, English is neither spoken by most people in Europe, nor easy to learn. In effect, making it the one official language in the EU would exclude most people from understanding what the various EU's bodies are saying. When such a thing happen, you haven't an union, you have an empire.

Having English the official EU's language has always been the wet dream of both the US and UK, and of a minority of people who can so put themselves above the unwashed masses.


Disclaimer: I'm French and an English teacher.

What you say is far from true, according to EU sources quoted on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union

13% of the EU population can speak English as a mother tongue. This exceed french, on 12%, but lags German, on 18%.

38% of the EU population can speak english as a second language, a figure that complete dwarves French (14%) and German (14%).

In total, a mighty 51% of the EU's population can speak english, which crushes French on a paltry 26% ad German on 32%.

So perhaps you should do some research before opining on what the most widely spoken languages of the EU are. English has twice the speakers of French and German and so is by far the least elitist. To make the official language either French of German would be pandering to an elite minority of bureaucrats. To make english the official language would be the popular democratic thing to do.

But don't let that stop you spinning lies and pretending it is still 1812 and french the language of culture, business, and statecraft.

Come on.

Those % don't change anything.

What is "speak English"?
The skill varies a lot so its close to useless imo to quantify how many people "speak" English as second language.


Personally I don't think that changing the language would help the EU, I rather think that it would be the first step into its destruction. As history showed a lot of nationalistic movements emerge if the culture of an ethnic group is "oppressed".
One very important part of culture is the language you interact with.

Heck, even the UK did not manage to have one single football team to represent their country and now you ask as to speak one language only, concerning at least the administration?

And no, the "business" example does not count. Companies are no democratic bodies, the stakes are not even close to evenly allotted

--> I oppose the "United States of Europe", but no the EU.

This is a poll, not a census.

28,694 citizens

with a minimum age of 15 were asked in the then 25 member-states as well as in the then future member-states (Bulgaria, Romania) and the candidate countries (Croatia, Turkey) at the time of the survey. Only citizens, not immigrants, were asked.

28,694 citizens where polled out of 497,198,740.

I wonder why that's even accepted and still there ....

Reminds me when I was at work, some French people were chatting, and I was able to answer their question in English. Their reaction, "oh, do you understand French" - my response, "well, when I was at high school I took a bit of interest in Latin. Since I know some basic Latin, I could work out the gist of what you were saying in your bastardised Latin" (btw, what is it with Eurotrash leaving their table like a tip - is it because their mummy and daddy look after them till the age of 28 or something?).

English is a morphing and evolving language that is easy to use, willing to adopt new words from other languages with no hesitation. New words are added on a daily basis, phrases and colloquialisms are being updated and created all the time. Its a living, breathing language when compared to the decrepit crap that is French, with its legalistic bureaucratic behemoth - because shock bloody horror, if you allowed the language to be controlled and moved forward by the dirty unwashed masses!

PS. Ask yourself, how come there hasn't been a descent French comedy yet using witty double entendre's, turn of phrase etc. etc.

Edited 2008-05-03 12:56 UTC

Even if I stay very conservative, if I take the UK, Ireland and Malta's population, they add up to about 67 millions. On the other side, taking a low 40% of Belgium's population and that of France, I get 68 millions of people.

I used the same source you did for these numbers: Wikipedia.
To know which language is spoken where: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union
UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uk
Ireland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland
Malta: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta
Belgium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium
Languages of Belgium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Belgium

Now could someone explain to me how this one million person difference in favor of French ends up in a 1% difference in favor of English?

Nobody?

Nevermind, I already know the answer. From the same article: "Special Eurobarometer 243" of the European Commission with the title "Europeans and their Languages"

I'll also quote: "This is a poll, not a census. 28,694 citizens with a minimum age of 15 were asked in the then 25 member-states as well as in the then future member-states (Bulgaria, Romania) and the candidate countries (Croatia, Turkey) at the time of the survey. Only citizens, not immigrants, were asked."

The same survey says that in a paltry five years, 9% more people are able to hold a conversation in a foreign language. As far as I'm aware, in that timeframe (2001 to 2006), no country has implemented a radically different way of teaching languages (whichever one). That is completely coherent with the fact we're talking feeling here, not facts.
Another point is that the number of surveyed people are the same in each and every country (about a thousand people). Considering, for instance, that France's population is close to six times the size of that of Belgium (and there are more extreme cases), I begin to doubt the value of said survey. One last point to consider is that this has been done at the behest of the European Commission, which is known for its willingness to favor English above any other language...

That said, you misunderstood me in thinking I'd favor teaching French or German in place of English. What I'd like would be for the first foreign language to be taught throughout Europe to be either Esperanto, Interlingua or some such. These are easy to learn, and don't put any country and its citizens above the others. In addition, I feel it absolutely necessary to keep translating any and all EU's documents in every EU's languages. It's the only way Europe can keep at least a semblance of Democracy.

Quite the opposite. As a Brit I can tell you the typical British person never thinks about the international penetration of English as a second language. It just happened, as if by accident. If French was in the position of English I would be only too happy to use it as a universal second language.

The problem here is not the accidental popularity of English, but the irrational national pride of some countries determined to block progress.

Aren't you really projecting the French "wet dream" onto English speakers ?

You misread me. I didn't say the US and UK's people, I said the US and UK.

This translates into:
- The ruling bodies and the people whose social/professionnal circles are somewhat to them explicitely want that to be achieved.
- Although they claim indifference, the population tend to expect everybody to be able to speak English. This last is especially true with Americans, but I've seen it often enough with Brits as well to know it's something pretty widely spread in the UK as well.

"Can't the EU simply mandate a common language?"

It's not part of the EU mandate and democracy as opposed to republic or monarchy can't impose on it's people from the top down , but rather the people must first mandate the EU to do so and they must vote in the favor of the application of a law on the subject.

"What's to stop them?"

The majority of the people in the EU. It's real easy to impose commercial and monetary changes , because it's the property of governement. It's another to try to impose languages most people don't know or use or understand.

Most of those who are against translations don't factor in that learning a new languages as a cost and that retraining all the people people into another languages is 1 trillion or more time higher then doing translations.

Good thinking, good thinking, my friend.. that would have to be German then, since it is the widest spoken language in the EU. We already tried to establish that ~60 years ago but the idea didn't exactly fly back then..

I personally volunteer to liaise with Hoshi on this project.

US English being obvious? Here in Poland we're usually taught British English in schools. I'd guess that's the case too in other european countries.

Even though I've picked up most of the new words in last few years from TV and other media (meaning that they're more likely to be US variations) I still insist on writing "colour" and generally prefer british spelling if I'm aware of both. They are more natural, US English spelling seems to be bastardized and not far from horrors like "how r u" and "your dumb" (given the adoption rate of the latter I wouldn't be surprised if it became a norm in 30 years ). I'm aware that I probably do a lot of mistakes like that myself though so feel free to correct me!

If we had to pick one language I guess people would be more comfortable with european one - although that's still very distant future (60 years? at best).

It truly is a shame that my own native language, English, has become such a world standard instead of something that would have made more sense, like Esperanto.

This idea is stupid, stop.

Let's say, why would we have thousands of gnu/linux distros??? let's wipe'em out!!! only Red Hat.

Boooh ya!!!

If you don't like Dutch, GET OVER!!!

I LOVE MY MOTHER TONGUE SPANISH

No. A standard language that makes logical, gramatic, and phonetic sense, is consistent and easy to learn, and is naturally extensible in a straightforward way is not a stupid idea. People always bring up the idea of how wonderful language diversity is. But it seems to me the concept pales next to the idea of any two or more of more of the 6.5 billion human beings on this earth being able to exchange ideas, rather than everyone being balkanized into small groups who happen to be able to communicate.

The Linux distros you refer to all share source compatibility, and in that way are more demonstrative of the advantages of a common standard than of the advantages of balkanization. And they are also exceedingly top-heavy... with language packs.

BTW, coincidentally, I have started self-studying Esperanto and am finding this site quite helpful for getting started:

http://en.lernu.net/

Edit: On Ubuntu Hardy an apt-cache search for the string "language-pack", which is hardly a comprehensive search, turns up nearly 1200 packages. Talk about wasted and redundant effort...

Edited 2008-05-02 23:24 UTC

but your post to this topic is in...english.

I agree. Esperanto should be the natural choice for the EU lingua franca. It has the following advantages:


1) It's not the native language of any European country (or any other country, actually), so there's little or no unfair advantage or privilege to any one country.

2) It's somewhat Indo-European biased, which is a minus for a prospective world auxiliary language, but a plus for an European one.

3) It's easy, small and regular, as only a constructed language can be.

4) It has been used in real-life speech for quite a long time, and it has proven to be sufficiently expressive for an artificial language.

Don't expect us Americans to join in. Most people here still consider the SI system of units to be a foreign language and refuse to touch it. When I first set up the Gnome weather applet on one of my users' desktop panel, they said they could not believe that Linux defaulted to all that "meters" stuff. When I pointed out that only a small fraction of the population of the earth use feet, yards, and degrees Fahrenheit, it seemed a genuine revelation to him. I think it will be a while before Oklahoma joins the Esperanto Revolution. Sometimes it feels more like the land that time forgot. But by God, we're proud to be Americans around here!

Edited 2008-05-03 00:43 UTC

Klingon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language ) works under that rule as well - doesn't mean I'd want to speak it on a regular basis though.

So, I'd go by Interlingua

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Interlingua_compared

it's nicer than Esperanto and "fixes several bugs" found in Esperanto.

Anyway, come on guys! we are people from different parts of the world and we are debating about what language the EU should use while we are already using the de facto standard: English. So, what does go wrong with it?

there are many good reasons why esperanto is not superior. Think of it this way: english is like linux and esperanto is like Hurd. Esperanto is a 'perfect' language that is very limited but english is always adapting to the needs of actual users.

English sucks up words from many other languages and comes up with new words to deal with all kinds of new concepts and ideas along with the old. It's a mess and complicated but then again so is life.

English is not all that hard to learn as long as you use a proper method. You don't want to memorize every single word. It is mostly phonetic but more complicated because it combines anglo saxon words such as "house" and "ball" with greek/latin roots. You have to know a few rules for example: ch in a greek word like chorus is pronounced 'k' but 'ch' in an a french word like 'chef' and 'chevrolet' is 'sh and 'ch' in an anglo word like 'chicken' is the regular pronunciation.

You have a strange understanding of Esperanto, and possibly of designed languages, in general. Esperanto is hardly static. It is a living language like any other natural language. Esperanto speakers receive organ enlargement spam ("spamo") just like the rest of us and create or adapt words from other languages to deal with the new concepts. (How could they not?) It is not the vocabulary, but the clean and extensible grammar and flexible and consistent system of word formation that are its strengths. English sucks up words from other languages, true, but has a poor and inconsistent infrastructure for integrating those words. Consequently, things end up as an irregular and unmaintainable mess. Esperanto speakers import roots, not gratuitously, but when needed, and there are very clear, consistent, and unambiguous rules for how they will integrate into the language.

Esperanto is designed from the ground up to be cleanly extensible. English just accidentally accreted and is still accreting in helter skelter fashion.

As to English not being difficult to learn... I live in a country brimming with life-long speakers of it who have little command of their native language.

Edited 2008-05-04 05:05 UTC

If anything, I'd say, English is like Windows (it has lots of legacy baggage, and it conquered the world for reasons other than its merits, despite what their users think), Esperanto is like Linux (a clean reimplementation of Unix/indo-european languages, far from perfect but a true, and better, alternative to the dominating OS/language). Ido and Interlingua are like the BSD's (perhaps cleaner than Linux/Esperanto, but with even less users/speakers and less adapted to the desktop/ everyday speak). Lojban is like the Hurd (it tries to be much more than a just another clone of the usual OS's/languages, it's massively redesigned and a bit overengineered, with lots of interesting concepts but also lots of implementation problems)



Mostly phonetic... I beg your pardon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_homographs

So you are saying that you don't have to memorize every single word, because you can just memorize the etymology of every single word, along with the applicable rules used by the (often dead) language from which the word derives. Of course, that doesn't really work, because there are plenty of exceptions which are not consistent with that method, since English cannot even follow its own confusing and needlessly complicated hodge-podge of rules.

In English, if you haven't looked up and memorized what is considered "standard" for each form of each word, you are making a guess, pure and simple.

Edited 2008-05-04 15:30 UTC

You can thank Noah Webster for the difference between English and British spellings. You characterization of US spelling as a "bastardization" is incorrect. Webster wanted to simplify and move spellings closer to pronunciation. For example, the "u" in colour" is not pronounced, at least not by speakers of American English. "Criticize" is actually spoken with a "z" sound, so Webster spelled it with a "z". The "er" sound is consistently spelled "er" in US English, while it can be "re" or "er" in British. We also truncated of the unnecessary "ogue" to "og", as in catalog, and got rid of the frenchy "que" as in "check".

I don't claim that any English spelling is particularly consistent or representative of pronunciation, but US Enlish spelling is certainly more consistent than British.

My own mother tongue (why isn't it "tong" in US English? ), Polish, has even weirder and more arcane rules that guide spelling than British English. People who are for simplification of Polish and removing "obsolete" characters that seemingly sound the same (rz and ż, ch and h, u and ó, ą and on etc) are the ones that are spelling them improperly.

Even my polish language/literature teacher gave me strange looks for saying that I can tell how to spell some words because I hear the difference. I don't know a single person that knows the difference in sound between u and ó but it is one of the easier ones thanks to rather simple rules and very few exceptions.

It's probably similar with US English and Americans did the right thing - USA population formed it's own way of pronouncing stuff so the spelling had to change. At the same time British English spelling fits people from the UK just right IMO.

Edited 2008-05-04 02:09 UTC

One of the more damaging influences upon English today are the speakers who pedantically insist upon continuing and extending the inconsistent aspects of the language, and counter the normal forces that would otherwise work to smooth out the irregularities. These are the people who insist upon using words like Unices, and "correcting" others when they use perfectly natural words like "radiuses" and "indexes", promoting the continued use of senseless irregular forms like radii and indices, often based upon historical etymological context which has little relevance today. Viewed objectively, people saying "Cobol is loosing popularity" rather than "Cobol is losing popularity" are helping English by introducing some much needed uniformity, and weeding out senseless cruft that native speakers are simply too close to the language to see.

English is far too broken to ever really be fixed. The cracks run all the way to the core. But I wish people would not get in the way of what superficial natural repairs are possible. As more people learn English as a second language, they are going to be exerting a normalizing influence on the language. Please do not fight against that positive influence out of a misguided sense of pedantry.

The US can't even standardize on a single language, what makes you think the EU can?