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I’d have thought they would have kept English as it’s effectively a neutral language at that point - it would be convenient to avoid accusations of German or Fr
by Tsiklon 5y ago
I’d have thought they would have kept English as it’s effectively a neutral language at that point - it would be convenient to avoid accusations of German or French dominance should either push for their’s in English’s place
- Apocryphon 5y agoShame there's no real-world interest in the powers that be to officialize Esperanto.
- mannerheim 5y agoWhat would be the point? Might as well make Klingon an official language.
- tdeck 5y agoEsperanto is considerably easier to learn than Klingon.
- ben_w 5y agoOne is designed to be easy to learn, to be regular and logical and use roots familiar to European ears, the other is designed to sound alien. (Does Klingon have a word for bridge-of-a-ship and not bridge-over-water, or is that just an urban legend?)
- bawolff 5y agohttps://www.kli.org/about-klingon/new-klingon-words/date/# https://www.kli.org/about-klingon/new-klingon-words/date/# says that QI is klingon for bridge over water.
- ben_w 5y agoQI? Curiously, that’s the name of the TV show where I think I heard the claim. I wonder if it was added and given that form as a direct result of that appearance on that show? (The timing is plausible, but I don’t have a detailed enough memory to find which episode).
- chillacy 5y agoIf Klingon were invented in Europe and designed to be a pan-european easy-to-learn language, sure. Otherwise, Esperanto has some desirable attributes as a universal second language.
- mannerheim 5y agoThere are other, better-designed conlangs than Esperanto. Nobody speaks them, sure, but nobody speaks Esperanto either. And if we're going by popularity, might as well pick English anyway.
- leke 5y agoEsperanto has a pretty big, organised and active community. But you're right. I also think popularity should be the decider. If Esperanto thinks it should be the chosen auxiliary language, it will have to earn it. Personally though, I prefer Ido over Esperanto.
- mnouquet 5y agoDefine "pretty big".
- akvadrako 5y agoAround year 2000 there were about 2 million speakers. It's way above any other conlang.
- mannerheim 5y agoThat's akin to being the biggest fish in a fishbowl. There are minor dialects of minor languages with more speakers.
- akvadrako 5y agoThe question was about conlangs, which have the advantage of being designed to be easier to learn. Esperanto is so easy it can be learned in negative time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto#:~:text=The%20propaedeutic%20value%20of%20Esperanto,explore%20other%20cultures%20more%20successfully https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Espera....
- kergonath 5y agoQuenya would be a much better sounding option.
- Semiapies 5y agoToo many people actually speak Klingon, and it was invented in the US. Non-starter.
- Apocryphon 5y agoIt would be a cool sci-fi reference, yep.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ben_w 5y agoSi. Esperanto havas problemojn, kaj tio estas la plej gravan.
- leke 5y agoOr Ido.
- mumblemumble 5y agoDoing so strikes me as being impractical in the extreme. English would still be the the lingua franca in every other domain, so it would just mean that Europeans would have one additional lingua franca to have to learn. It doesn't matter how easy that language is to learn, it's still an extra, and almost certainly redundant, effort. I'm not going to bother finding the hyperlink for the relevant xkcd comic, because we've all seen it before.
- w0de0 5y agoA language with no literature or culture has no business in the halls of state. Such a language is arguably not even a language in the real sense, but a code. A vernacular is needed - language must live and evolve.
- mannerheim 5y agoEsperantists have tried, creating a pale imitation of the real thing, as if culture were something you could bootstrap by mixing the right ingredients as you would some sort of cake.
- Koshkin 5y agoNo... We don't deserve this (not yet).
- saati 5y agoThat would be even less practical, as almost no-one speaks esperanto.
- twic 5y agoAre the Irish a joke to you?
- smcl 5y agoIt's worth remembering that in addition to not being one of the two historic mainland European powers whose languages happen to be the other working languages of the EU (and therefore unlikely to be jostling for supremacy in a post-Brexit EU), Ireland has been famously neutral during its existence as an independent nation. So I don't see what the problem is with characterising English as a "neutral" language in this context.
- occamrazor 5y agoEvery country in the EU can choose one language as the national language. Ireland chose Irish.
- Tsiklon 5y agoI _am_ Irish. Due to its small size, its small population, and comparative recency on the world stage, Ireland does not hold the same level of prestige or historical political clout in the EU as France, or Germany (or even the UK when it was a member). You also forget about the Maltese. The combined population of the two would still make it a middling region of France like Grand Est or a somewhere between Rheinland-Pfalz and Hesse in the case of the German Länder.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoBear in mind, this kind of French bloodymindedness is why we have "UTC" - because if they couldn't have "temps universel coordonné" (TUC) then we damn-sure weren't going to have "coordinated universal time" (CUT).
- mywittyname 5y agoUTC works out better anyway. TUC and CUT are both terrible choices. With UTC the focus is on Universal Time and nobody cares what the C is for.
- anticensor 5y agoUniversal Time as Coordinated
- pyuser583 5y agoI did not know this was a thing! Fascinating!
- billyruffian 5y agoThe UTC abbreviation was made as a compromise between french and english[1] rather than bloody-mindedness from any one nation. This was back in the day when such compromises could be reached without rancour. For an example of the daft amounts of human life expended on examples of such trivialities, look at the amount of effort spent on arguing if the Concorde airplane should terminate with or without an 'e'.[2] [1] https://www.space.com/what-is-utc.html https://www.space.com/what-is-utc.html [2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinet-office-100/the-supersonic-airliner/concord-or-concorde/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinet-office-100/the-s...
- toyg 5y agoAs others said, this is just a French stunt during their 6-month presidency, which is being amplified in the Anglo press because of post-Brexit tensions. The actual working languages will stay the same. Half the Union would probably leave tomorrow, if French really became the dominant language. One of the marvels of the EU institutional cathedral is the way they can manage effectively more than a dozen different languages. Yes, there are a handful of preferred ones, but in the end everything has to be translated to even the most obscure lingo. Sadly, instead of celebrating this epic taming of Babel, the French insist in narrow-minded cultural imperialism (as a reaction to Anglo-american imperialism, many of them would probably retort...), so they periodically pull these stunts. Nobody really cares, but if it keeps them invested in the Union, I'm happy to let them play king for 6 months.