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From: markxx@garnet.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Global Cultural Prototype
Summary: Brief digression on Esparanto
Message-ID: <1989Oct12.055740.6297@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 89 05:57:40 GMT
References: <3366@ccnysci.UUCP> <2145@avsd.UUCP>
Sender: markxx@garnet.berkeley.edu
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 88

In article <2145@avsd.UUCP> childers@avsd.UUCP (Richard Childers) writes:
>GLOBALCP@UVVM.BITNET (Melcir Erksine-Richmond) writes:
>
>>... should compulsory  education  curricula, by the  year 2000, be taught
>>in only the  world's major spoken  and written languages  (English, Mandarin,
>>Hindi,  Russian, Spanish,  German, Japanese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili
>>and Italian)?
>
>No. I think that would impose an inappropriate burden upon the majority of
>the world, which do _not_ speak any of those languages. 
[etc.]
>
>>For discussion of global issues, a single lingua franca must be selected.
>
>Agreed. I submit Esperanto as the only logical choice, as it is equally
>strange to all, and thus allows nobody to gain an upper hand or occupy a
>position of superiority without having earned it, independently of his or
>her culture and language of origin. I think that is _very_ important.
>

	Esparanto is *not* equally strange to all. Consider its rather
european liguistic biases.  For someone coming from a tonal language,
such as Thai or Chinese, it would be very different than someone who came to
it from a linguistic background that includeds a relationship, however
remote, to Latin.  I don't want to start a flame fest over the merits/
etc. of Esparanto, but it is not really as linguistically unbiased as it
may at first appear.  While in theory a language that is "equally strange
to all" (in my opinion an impossibility) would be a good idea, there are a
large number of hurdles to get over that Esparanto or any other constructed
language would have to deal with. 

	The biggest of these is the installed base of users (to borrow
a term :-).   While Chinese may be spoken by the largest number of people,
it is not as widespread as the use of English.  Esparanto is (unfortunatlly
or not) an obscure language primarily used by people interested in linguistics
etc.  In the part of your posting that I deleted before this thought struck
me, you mentioned evolution, which may take care of a lot of this.  

	It seems that natural selection has chosen English as the
de-facto standard language in global communication.
While I agree that other solutions would probably be more optimal, only
English has a distribution wide enough (geographically etc.) to consider it
the global communication language.  While this fact is due also to the 
historical legacy of American, and British (to a lesser extent) hegemony in
the developing world and elsewhere, it is a fact of life.  Go *anywere* in
the world, and with a wide enough sample, you are more likely to run into 
someone who speaks English than any other language.  I have run into people in
remote areas of the Himalayas, Africa and Thailand who all spoke English to
one degree or another. Admittidly the sample is small, but serves to
illustrate my point.

	It will be interesting to see if with the decline of American dominance
in world affairs, both political and otherwise, if the English language will
begin to be divorced from its origins as a "tool of imperialism."  I would
hazard a guess that this is already happening to some extent.  At many 
international conferences, the participants usually end up speaking English in
the discussion sessions, because that is the most common language.   In spite
of an historical legacy which is more than enough endowed with imperialism,
cultural and otherwise, it seems that the de-facto standard that is emerging
is English, however unfortunate that may be.  

	Of course in the future the incorporation of loan words from 
Japanese and other languages may make the common internationally spoken
English very different than what it is today. Oh yeah, it should go without
saying from the content of my post, but this being the net let me make myself
very clear. I am *not* a pro-English/English only etc. fanatic, and in point
of fact consider it imperative that people (especially Americans) learn a 
number of different languages to better communicate with others, even if the
person you are talking to may speak English.  It represents not only common
courtesy, but an attempt to break out of the "I'm an American so you better
damn well speak English with me" syndrome, which, to say the least, makes
me gag.  So don't waste time preaching to the converted by flaming me about
English imperialism/the need for bi-lingual education etc. (I guess the above
would count as "flame retardant" :-)


>
>-- richard
>
>-- 
> *	A CITIZEN:   "Who might you be ? Samson ? --"                         *
> *	CYRANO:      "Precisely. Would you kindly lend me your jawbone ?"     *
> *                    from _Cyrano de Bergerac_, by Edmond Rostand            *
> *        ..{amdahl|decwrl|octopus|pyramid|ucbvax}!avsd.UUCP!childers         *

Mark A. Ritchie
Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
markxx@garnet.berkeley.edu