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> Myth: Esperanto is internationally neutral, Somewhat. It is a matter of degree, relative to what came before. > and is the best (some say the only) candidat

> Myth: Esperanto is internationally neutral, Somewhat. It is a matter of degree, relative to what came before. > and is the best (some say the only) candidate for an eventual world-wide auxiliary language. I'm not in a position to say what is best for such a purpose. > Reality: Esperanto is overwhelmingly European in design, content and aspiration, and has nothing in common with most non-European languages - such as Arabic and Swahili, two other languages which are widely used as linguae francae in other parts of the world. Sounds plausible, but I'll need to verify. > It is thus woefully deficient for world-wide auxiliary use - ... This does not follow. What are some convincing supporting arguments? >... a role which English, for all its faults, has been fulfilling perfectly well for decades. Perfect? This kind of reasoning is laughable.

msla 4y ago
English is the IAL as far as air traffic control is concerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English > Aviation English is the de facto international language of civil aviation. With the expansion of air travel in the 20th century, there were safety concerns about the ability of pilots and air traffic controllers to communicate. In 1951, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommended in "ICAO Annex 10 ICAO (Vol I, 5.2.1.1.2) to the International Chicago Convention" that English be universally used for "international aeronautical radiotelephony communications."[1] Despite being a recommendation only, ICAO aviation English was widely accepted.
- monocasa 4y ago
  To be fair, the greatest aviation disaster of all time was caused by a mutual misunderstanding from English's complexity and diversity, causing two 747s to believe they both had right of way on an air strip and then they crashed into each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    This is true, but the counterpoint is that we'll never know the converse - we'll never know how many accidents didn't happen thanks to using a single language universally.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      I guess the point I'm making isn't against using a single language, but that English isn't a great choice for that language since it's not simple nor standardized. Aviation's lesson from this was basically to invent their own dialect, that unfortunately isn't general purpose enough to be used much outside of aviation.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > To be fair you're not being fair, though. A common language was chosen for aviation, and nothing in that article suggests that a different language choice would have been better. In this case you had Dutch speakers communicating with Spanish speakers. English does offer a blend between romance and germanic languages (which of course could lead to "false friends", but no language will be perfect)
TulliusCicero 4y ago
> Perfect? This kind of reasoning is laughable. That's not what "perfectly well" means. It doesn't mean perfect, it means doing an acceptable job. Honestly you could just remove the adverb "perfectly" and the meaning of the sentence there doesn't really change.
- anon400232 4y ago
  Hard disagree. I haven't found any resources online to support your claim. I found several that support mine. Also, contrast "perfectly well" with "well enough". I'm curious why you see "perfect" as being demoted to "acceptable" in this phrase? Source?
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    Because that's how English works? "Perfectly well" has never meant literally perfect.
Sniffnoy 4y ago
You might want to read Justin B. Rye's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" for way more detail on all of this: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ Edit: also, as to this > > Reality: Esperanto is overwhelmingly European in design, content and aspiration, and has nothing in common with most non-European languages - such as Arabic and Swahili, two other languages which are widely used as linguae francae in other parts of the world. > Sounds plausible, but I'll need to verify. Like, just given the history of Esperanto's construction -- it was built from European languages -- this should be no surprise. How is it going to end up reflecting non-European languages, which vary heavily and include all sorts of features that are entirely absent in European languages, when it was built exclusively from European languages? I mean I suppose notionally it could happen, but it would be very surprising.
- anon400232 4y ago
  I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? Are you suggesting that an auxiliary language should have elements from as many languages as possible? That such a "balanced" or "blended" approach is better b/c it allows people from more linguistic traditions to feel a little more comfortable? Maybe a little, but such complexity would sacrifice learnability. English has been adopted as a common lingua franca though very different from Arabic and Swahili. The driving factors have more to do with geopolitics and economic power than linguistics or conceptual familiarity.
  - Sniffnoy 4y ago
    > I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? In general, it doesn't. The claim is not that being Eurocentric makes Esperanto a bad auxlang. The claim is that being Eurocentric means that Esperanto is failing at its design goals; Esperanto is a bad Esperanto. The myth this point is responding to begins with "Esperanto is internationally neutral". That's the problem -- a general auxlang doesn't need to be neutral (English isn't!), but Esperanto claims to be (remember, Zamenhof just called it "the international language") and fails. You're also correct that a blending approach is probably untenable. However, looking outside European sources gives one a wider range of options with which to optimize over. Some of those options people may realize without exposure to the particular languages, but others -- such as, say, ergative-absolutive alignment (not that I'm suggesting that's a good option to use) -- they won't. E.g., why isn't Esperanto an analytic language? That would probably make it the easiest. Zamenhof correctly recognized (if not in these terms) that making it agglutinative was better than making it fusional. Why not go further and make it analytic? Likely because he hadn't studied any analytic languages... Or look at the phonetic inventory; you're not going to get something good by somehow blending the phonetic inventories of the world's languages, but what you could do is look for something simple and minimal that few people will have trouble with. Instead, we get rare distinctions that will only be familiar to Polish speakers. Is having such distinctions in general bad for an auxlang? Of course not! But it's bad for one that claims to be the international language. Again, I suggest reading through JBR's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" and its appendices.

msla 4y ago

English is the IAL as far as air traffic control is concerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English > Aviation English is the de facto international language of civil aviation. With the expansion of air travel in the 20th century, there were safety concerns about the ability of pilots and air traffic controllers to communicate. In 1951, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommended in "ICAO Annex 10 ICAO (Vol I, 5.2.1.1.2) to the International Chicago Convention" that English be universally used for "international aeronautical radiotelephony communications."[1] Despite being a recommendation only, ICAO aviation English was widely accepted.

monocasa 4y ago
To be fair, the greatest aviation disaster of all time was caused by a mutual misunderstanding from English's complexity and diversity, causing two 747s to believe they both had right of way on an air strip and then they crashed into each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
- vikingerik 4y ago
  This is true, but the counterpoint is that we'll never know the converse - we'll never know how many accidents didn't happen thanks to using a single language universally.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    I guess the point I'm making isn't against using a single language, but that English isn't a great choice for that language since it's not simple nor standardized. Aviation's lesson from this was basically to invent their own dialect, that unfortunately isn't general purpose enough to be used much outside of aviation.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > To be fair you're not being fair, though. A common language was chosen for aviation, and nothing in that article suggests that a different language choice would have been better. In this case you had Dutch speakers communicating with Spanish speakers. English does offer a blend between romance and germanic languages (which of course could lead to "false friends", but no language will be perfect)

TulliusCicero 4y ago

> Perfect? This kind of reasoning is laughable. That's not what "perfectly well" means. It doesn't mean perfect, it means doing an acceptable job. Honestly you could just remove the adverb "perfectly" and the meaning of the sentence there doesn't really change.

anon400232 4y ago
Hard disagree. I haven't found any resources online to support your claim. I found several that support mine. Also, contrast "perfectly well" with "well enough". I'm curious why you see "perfect" as being demoted to "acceptable" in this phrase? Source?
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  Because that's how English works? "Perfectly well" has never meant literally perfect.

Sniffnoy 4y ago

You might want to read Justin B. Rye's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" for way more detail on all of this: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ Edit: also, as to this > > Reality: Esperanto is overwhelmingly European in design, content and aspiration, and has nothing in common with most non-European languages - such as Arabic and Swahili, two other languages which are widely used as linguae francae in other parts of the world. > Sounds plausible, but I'll need to verify. Like, just given the history of Esperanto's construction -- it was built from European languages -- this should be no surprise. How is it going to end up reflecting non-European languages, which vary heavily and include all sorts of features that are entirely absent in European languages, when it was built exclusively from European languages? I mean I suppose notionally it could happen, but it would be very surprising.

anon400232 4y ago
I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? Are you suggesting that an auxiliary language should have elements from as many languages as possible? That such a "balanced" or "blended" approach is better b/c it allows people from more linguistic traditions to feel a little more comfortable? Maybe a little, but such complexity would sacrifice learnability. English has been adopted as a common lingua franca though very different from Arabic and Swahili. The driving factors have more to do with geopolitics and economic power than linguistics or conceptual familiarity.
- Sniffnoy 4y ago
  > I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it? In general, it doesn't. The claim is not that being Eurocentric makes Esperanto a bad auxlang. The claim is that being Eurocentric means that Esperanto is failing at its design goals; Esperanto is a bad Esperanto. The myth this point is responding to begins with "Esperanto is internationally neutral". That's the problem -- a general auxlang doesn't need to be neutral (English isn't!), but Esperanto claims to be (remember, Zamenhof just called it "the international language") and fails. You're also correct that a blending approach is probably untenable. However, looking outside European sources gives one a wider range of options with which to optimize over. Some of those options people may realize without exposure to the particular languages, but others -- such as, say, ergative-absolutive alignment (not that I'm suggesting that's a good option to use) -- they won't. E.g., why isn't Esperanto an analytic language? That would probably make it the easiest. Zamenhof correctly recognized (if not in these terms) that making it agglutinative was better than making it fusional. Why not go further and make it analytic? Likely because he hadn't studied any analytic languages... Or look at the phonetic inventory; you're not going to get something good by somehow blending the phonetic inventories of the world's languages, but what you could do is look for something simple and minimal that few people will have trouble with. Instead, we get rare distinctions that will only be familiar to Polish speakers. Is having such distinctions in general bad for an auxlang? Of course not! But it's bad for one that claims to be the international language. Again, I suggest reading through JBR's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" and its appendices.