3 ms·

Esperanto could save 25 billion euros a year

3 points by Borkdude 15y ago

Borkdude 15y ago
Reposted, because I first mistakenly posted the url in the "Text" textbox. The old post with already one comment is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339859 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339859
bdfh42 15y ago
English would save more - as it would require a much smaller education budget and most of the infrastructure is in place already.
- mhd 15y ago
  For the sake of the argument, I'll assume that it's actually possible (and desirable) to unify languages in Europe. A lot of the infrastructure could be used for any kind of language at all, as long as you've got text books. If Esperanto really would be an order of magnitude easier to learn, than that alone would make it much cheaper. You might have some initial expenses, but you'll make up for them soon enough. It also has the additional advantage of not being tied to a particular country. You won't get a whole country's support for free, but you won't hear people cry about cultural imperialism. But yeah, this isn't exactly new. A lot of these arguments were in existence when Esperanto was invented over a hundred years ago. Not much came from it.
  - bdfh42 15y ago
    The key point surely is that English is a living language that is adapting constantly to reflect a world culture as it develops. Plus there is a great body of existing English speakers in Europe matched by qualified teachers in most secondary schools. There might be cultural objections in parts of Europe to adopting the language of another country but in reality - English is already the dominant business language. Having said all of that it would be sad if other European languages were not maintained - you can say things in (for example) French that you just can't say in English - well not without a lot more words and it still would not be quite right. French is the second language of our family but I am sure this is true for all other languages.
    - mhd 15y ago
      And a while back, French was the language of international diplomacy, Latin the language of science and mathematics, Italian for music. An argument could be made for all of them. Probably even for German, as it has a lot of native speakers in Europe. I don't think anything will remove English from its throne as the de facto "lingua franca", but I think the chance of making it a true, unified de jure version is about as unlikely as seeing Esperanto seated there. And I don't quite get the "key point". We're not talking about Latin here, updating Esperanto shouldn't pose a problem. Although it's more likely to be in the French style, with a central committee.
tokenadult 15y ago
The definitive online analysis of Esperanto is Learn Not To Speak Esperanto by Justin Rye, http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ which is based on facts about how the language actually works. I recall that soon after the change.org website originated, a group of Esperantists proposed that Esperanto be made a mandatory second language in school instruction. It became painfully apparent as that discussion unfolded that such a government mandate was supported mostly so that the expensive hobby of Esperanto involvement could become paying work for Esperanto hobbyists. If a language is genuinely useful for human communication, it is possible to find paying work teaching the language without any government mandate in the free-enterprise system (as I have both as a teacher of Chinese in the United States and as a teacher of English as a second language in Taiwan and in the United States). There is NO WAY that there is any coherent economic analysis behind an estimate that Esperanto saves any money for any purpose. There is not even good neutral research (as contrasted with flawed studies http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html published in Esperantist publications) on how rapidly second-language speakers acquire reasonable levels of Esperanto proficiency. AFTER EDIT: As a metacomment on this discussion, I see the karma of this comment bouncing up and down wildly. That's okay. I've never objected to downvoting for disagreement, for reasons stated in a comment by pg back before I was a participant on Hacker News. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 But I suggest that if you disagree with my opinion that Esperanto (a language I have studied, among more than a dozen other languages) is not really very useful as a world international auxiliary language, then you may as well make use of the opportunity here to reply with thoughtful, verifiable reasons why Esperanto is really better than the other candidates for international communication, which happens every minute of every day in a variety of languages already. An important fact to note is that the number of NEW high-proficiency speakers of English (or Chinese) each year is greater than the TOTAL number of Esperanto speakers that there has ever been in any period of history, and that Esperanto is actually declining in use as a percentage of all world language use for all purposes.

3 points by Borkdude 15y ago

Reposted, because I first mistakenly posted the url in the "Text" textbox. The old post with already one comment is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339859 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339859

bdfh42 15y ago

English would save more - as it would require a much smaller education budget and most of the infrastructure is in place already.

mhd 15y ago
For the sake of the argument, I'll assume that it's actually possible (and desirable) to unify languages in Europe. A lot of the infrastructure could be used for any kind of language at all, as long as you've got text books. If Esperanto really would be an order of magnitude easier to learn, than that alone would make it much cheaper. You might have some initial expenses, but you'll make up for them soon enough. It also has the additional advantage of not being tied to a particular country. You won't get a whole country's support for free, but you won't hear people cry about cultural imperialism. But yeah, this isn't exactly new. A lot of these arguments were in existence when Esperanto was invented over a hundred years ago. Not much came from it.
- bdfh42 15y ago
  The key point surely is that English is a living language that is adapting constantly to reflect a world culture as it develops. Plus there is a great body of existing English speakers in Europe matched by qualified teachers in most secondary schools. There might be cultural objections in parts of Europe to adopting the language of another country but in reality - English is already the dominant business language. Having said all of that it would be sad if other European languages were not maintained - you can say things in (for example) French that you just can't say in English - well not without a lot more words and it still would not be quite right. French is the second language of our family but I am sure this is true for all other languages.
  - mhd 15y ago
    And a while back, French was the language of international diplomacy, Latin the language of science and mathematics, Italian for music. An argument could be made for all of them. Probably even for German, as it has a lot of native speakers in Europe. I don't think anything will remove English from its throne as the de facto "lingua franca", but I think the chance of making it a true, unified de jure version is about as unlikely as seeing Esperanto seated there. And I don't quite get the "key point". We're not talking about Latin here, updating Esperanto shouldn't pose a problem. Although it's more likely to be in the French style, with a central committee.

tokenadult 15y ago

The definitive online analysis of Esperanto is Learn Not To Speak Esperanto by Justin Rye, http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ which is based on facts about how the language actually works. I recall that soon after the change.org website originated, a group of Esperantists proposed that Esperanto be made a mandatory second language in school instruction. It became painfully apparent as that discussion unfolded that such a government mandate was supported mostly so that the expensive hobby of Esperanto involvement could become paying work for Esperanto hobbyists. If a language is genuinely useful for human communication, it is possible to find paying work teaching the language without any government mandate in the free-enterprise system (as I have both as a teacher of Chinese in the United States and as a teacher of English as a second language in Taiwan and in the United States). There is NO WAY that there is any coherent economic analysis behind an estimate that Esperanto saves any money for any purpose. There is not even good neutral research (as contrasted with flawed studies http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html published in Esperantist publications) on how rapidly second-language speakers acquire reasonable levels of Esperanto proficiency. AFTER EDIT: As a metacomment on this discussion, I see the karma of this comment bouncing up and down wildly. That's okay. I've never objected to downvoting for disagreement, for reasons stated in a comment by pg back before I was a participant on Hacker News. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 But I suggest that if you disagree with my opinion that Esperanto (a language I have studied, among more than a dozen other languages) is not really very useful as a world international auxiliary language, then you may as well make use of the opportunity here to reply with thoughtful, verifiable reasons why Esperanto is really better than the other candidates for international communication, which happens every minute of every day in a variety of languages already. An important fact to note is that the number of NEW high-proficiency speakers of English (or Chinese) each year is greater than the TOTAL number of Esperanto speakers that there has ever been in any period of history, and that Esperanto is actually declining in use as a percentage of all world language use for all purposes.