Scary. Esperanto enthusiasm has died down in recent decades, but who knows what may yet arise from the good-idea factory in Washington DC. Maybe some day, we’ll all be required by law to speak it. The central planners even had a movie made in Esperanto:
I’m curious what you find scary in the YouTube film. Watching it yet again, I still fail to see anything more than a description of a language that purports to be easy to learn and yet as rich and expressive as any other, and the advantages that would come of widespread learning and use of such a language. Perhaps your fear is due to your misunderstanding of Esperanto. If so, I’d like to clear up a few misgivings.
Esperanto actually isn’t centrally planned. It started out that way 122 years ago, but within just a few years, its creator released it to the then-nascent Esperanto community, relinquishing all claims. It has since evolved and filled out freely at the whims of the community of speakers, just like any other language, to become the complete, living natural language it is today.
Esperanto has actually been picking up steam in recent decades, especially since the advent of the Internet, with no help from and no thanks to Washington – or any other government, for that matter. The Esperanto community I know abhors language imposition of any kind; instead, it aspires for Esperanto to become, not a One-World-Language to replace all others, but rather an easy-to-learn universal second language for voluntary use between people who do not share a common native language.
No central planning committee had anything to do with the production of Incubus. It came about like any other Hollywood production: a private investor (a producer) put up funds and hired the necessary people to get the movie made. It then stood or fell on its own merits, without any government assistance of any kind.
If you’re interested in knowing more, a good Website to visit is Esperanto.net. If you’d actually like to try your hand at it, Kurso de Esperanto is a good introductory course, and Lernu.net offers lots of additional learning material.
Thanks for the comment and the clarification.
I certainly wouldn’t ever want authorities to prevent anyone from making up a language or learning a language of their choosing. That would fly in the face of everything I stand for.
The fear I expressed requires a small act of imagination, but I think it follows naturally from our government’s behavior, at least for regular readers of blogs like this one. Let me explain.
I was startled that something as fundamental as language can be centrally planned. (I stand by this term, as that’s how the language came into existence.) To my knowledge, all other languages simply arise from the ground up. All government has to do is NOTHING, ie leave people alone, which is difficult for governments to do, especially ours, which directly employs 22 million people (1/7th of the labor force).
The act of imagination which scares me is this: if anything CAN be done top-down, those 22 million bureaucrats looking for meaning in their lives will TRY to do it top-down — whether creating a language or imposing one.
The fairness aspect of Esperanto discussed in the video clip bears a scary resemble to the veneer of virtue, which government uses to justify all its abominations – all it’s obscene expansion, all the wars, all the destruction of our liberties, all the invasions of our private lives, and all the dominion it claims over, well, whatever it can.
I’ve got nothing against the Esperanto directly or the people who learn it. My fear is the possibility it creates. I’m terrified of it’s appeal to 22 million bureaucrats who want to “help” me.
Thanks for the explanation. I can certainly see why you would be concerned. However, I believe there is actually somewhat less cause for alarm than appearances might suggest.
Esperanto indeed started out as one person’s invention, as a centrally planned project. However, it did not stay that way for long. Its inventor soon realized that for the language to gain any traction, he would have to let it go. He did just that: he released it to the community, requesting only that a small core vocabulary and the basic grammar remain unchanged to help maintain a measure of stability. From that point forth, Esperanto belonged to the community, subject to all the natural evolutionary forces that impinge on all other languages. It ceased to be an artificial planned language, becoming instead a living natural language. The inventor’s suggestion of an unchangeable core was adopted voluntarily by the Esperanto community, and remains a recognized part of the language to this day.
Another planned language, Volapük, which started about a decade earlier, suffered a different fate. It gained an initial following, but its inventor made several mistakes, probably the most fatal of which was that he would not relinquish control of his language. When Esperanto came along, people defected en masse. Today, literally only a handful of people speak Volapük, compared to 2,000,000 or so Esperantists.
My point is that long-term iron-fisted central planning of a language will probably doom its existence. Some degree of planning is present in many so-called natural languages, such as Hebrew, French and Spanish. Central acadmies publish specifications of the “proper” form of these languages, but they actually have relatively little sway: people speak and write Hebrew, French and Spanish essentially as they please, and the academies serve as much to observe and document what is considered “proper” language by the community as they do to define “proper” language.
Modern Hebrew is a particularly interesting case, along with other languages like Bahasa Indonesia and Norwegian Bokmal. What these languages have in common is that they all started out centrally planned, the product of one person or a small committee with one agenda or another. However, these languages did not really take off until they were adopted by and essentially taken over by their respective communities, at which point they ceased to be centrally planned, or at least remained no more centrally planned than any other language.
The fairness feature of Esperanto merits a bit of explanation. It’s not the type of fairness that cuts everyone down to the same level, but rather that creates a level playing field with an open sky. Esperanto is easy enough that everyone can learn to speak it competently, yet expressive and rich enough that nothing need be sacrificed in going from one’s native language to Esperanto. It is several times easier to learn than any other language, so that it is actually much cheaper overall for two people to both learn Esperanto than it is for just one of them to learn the other’s native language. Esperanto makes it possible for two people of different languages to meet halfway in a linguistic handshake without any loss of communicative ability, rather than requiring one to come all the way over to the other without ever really mastering the other’s language.
Your point about some bureaucrat attempting to seize control is nonetheless well taken. It may come as a surprise that a significant number of Esperantists are actually apprehensive about Esperanto becoming too popular, and more especially about its gaining official recognition somewhere. One fear is that some do-good government agency, upon officializing Esperanto, will get the brilliant idea of improving it, tearing it apart and destroying it in the process. Another is that, upon officializing it, a government will attempt to impose it in some way, destroying Esperanto’s vaunted political neutrality. Some Esperantists would be happy for the language to remain as it is today, relatively obscure, safe from the attention of self-appointed government crusaders. Your fears are not entirely without sympathy in Esperanto circles.
Hope this helps. And if I have managed to elicit just a bit of curiosity about Esperanto :-) the links in my previous response will provide access to good informational and learning resources.