4 ms·

This is my dream project to try ;-) It seems that the "way to win" in the twenty-first century is going to be "who can outsource white collar work to the cheap

This is my dream project to try ;-) It seems that the "way to win" in the twenty-first century is going to be "who can outsource white collar work to the cheapest country, and coordinate to get the best quality out of the workforce" -- an echo of the late twentieth-century which was "who can outsource blue collar / manufacturing work to the cheapest country and coordinate it best with regard to the logistics and manufacturing quality". I sat in a conference call with 50 other people, where the majority were not English speakers, where the presenters were not native English speakers either, but it was all conducted in English anyway. (It was a USA-based company.) I presume that Chinese-based companies will end up similar. The conference call of 2035 will have people from dozens of countries stumbling through understanding a barely-tonal, barely-comprehensible Mandarin presentation. Maybe there will be a Swahili bloc of countries and an Arabic-speaking bloc too. And I remember calculating the number of hours wasted in that one meeting, and how much time would have been saved had Esperanto been part of the company onboarding. I still wonder whether there's room for an intentionally Esperanto-speaking company to be able to work more efficiently across more countries than any native-language-first company. Maybe it fits in with face-to-face company culture (in a location, so therefore basically mono-lingual) vs remote company culture (spread across the world, so needing a lingua franca).

schoen 7y ago
> And I remember calculating the number of hours wasted in that one meeting, and how much time would have been saved had Esperanto been part of the company onboarding. One thing I'm not sure of is whether someone who doesn't speak a Romance or Germanic language natively can get better communicative skills in Esperanto with 100 hours of good instruction than in English with several thousand hours of bad (or informal) instruction. I think it's possible, but very far from certain. Remember that vocabulary is still an issue¹, and also that Esperanto will contain some phonemes that non-Europeans will likely have trouble with. Those bad English speakers in your conference call are already coming in with a lot of prior English experience, which the company in most cases didn't have to pay for. It's just experience that wasn't especially helpful at making them good at using English the way the conference call demanded. Another challenge is whether the Esperanto lessons for your hypothetical company will be available in all of the prospective employees' native languages (which will make the training a lot more expensive), and still another is whether employees will follow the policy and use Esperanto regularly even in offices where 90% of the staff are native-level speakers of some other major world language. ¹ It's true that it's far simpler to learn -i -as -is -os -us -anto and -j -n -jn than the dozens (or more) of verb and noun inflections in a typical Indo-European language. But your new colleagues will still have to learn thousands of new morphemes in order to have a fluent conversation, and if they're not already fluent in a European language, they won't have any easy mnemonics, nor easy cognates to use to guess at meanings.
- schoen 7y ago
  > to learn -i -as -is -os -us -anto and -j -n -jn Oops, I forgot -u!

schoen 7y ago

> And I remember calculating the number of hours wasted in that one meeting, and how much time would have been saved had Esperanto been part of the company onboarding. One thing I'm not sure of is whether someone who doesn't speak a Romance or Germanic language natively can get better communicative skills in Esperanto with 100 hours of good instruction than in English with several thousand hours of bad (or informal) instruction. I think it's possible, but very far from certain. Remember that vocabulary is still an issue¹, and also that Esperanto will contain some phonemes that non-Europeans will likely have trouble with. Those bad English speakers in your conference call are already coming in with a lot of prior English experience, which the company in most cases didn't have to pay for. It's just experience that wasn't especially helpful at making them good at using English the way the conference call demanded. Another challenge is whether the Esperanto lessons for your hypothetical company will be available in all of the prospective employees' native languages (which will make the training a lot more expensive), and still another is whether employees will follow the policy and use Esperanto regularly even in offices where 90% of the staff are native-level speakers of some other major world language. ¹ It's true that it's far simpler to learn -i -as -is -os -us -anto and -j -n -jn than the dozens (or more) of verb and noun inflections in a typical Indo-European language. But your new colleagues will still have to learn thousands of new morphemes in order to have a fluent conversation, and if they're not already fluent in a European language, they won't have any easy mnemonics, nor easy cognates to use to guess at meanings.

schoen 7y ago
> to learn -i -as -is -os -us -anto and -j -n -jn Oops, I forgot -u!