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So a poor Kalahari bushmen can somehow magically get access to a book?
Oh, first he needs an Internet connection.
Oh, before that he needs a computer
Oh, before that he needs electricity
OK...um...well..nevermind then

If your Kalahari bushmen get this book,
are they going to read it in English, do you think?

An international knowledge bank needs an international language that works.

Se via Kalaharaj vilaghanoj akirus tiun libron,
chu ili legos ghin Angla-lingve, vi pensas?

Internacia sciobanko postulas tiun internacian lingvon kiu funkcias..

So a poor Kalahari bushmen can somehow magically get access to a book?
Oh, first he needs an Internet connection.
Oh, before that he needs a computer
Oh, before that he needs electricity
OK...um...well..nevermind then

If your Kalahari bushmen get this book,
are they going to read it in English, do you think?

An international knowledge bank needs an international language that works.

Se via Kalaharaj vilaghanoj akirus tiun libron,
chu ili legos ghin Angla-lingve, vi pensas?

Internacia sciobanko postulas tiun internacian lingvon kiu funkcias..

There are practical advantages in problem solving which have been tied to the language used in mental formulation, for example the development of what is metaphorically called "logical circuitry" has been shown to diverge between native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers.

My expectation is that spoken language will eventually go the way of handwriting: creature comfort, dying art, what once defined the best of us but becomes in many cases an indulgent inefficiency. How?

Anybody who dares to at this point, has realized they can jam wires into the human brain and let it learn to control machines on the other end. It's already beyond that in fact, with embedded communication devices being the next step, stepping shoe now currently in air: you'll see in a few days in Nature how real the "Neurochip" already is.

People should stop pretending this is about helping paraplegics by playing Space Invaders or moving a cursor with mind control, or that we're only trying to help brain injury, stroke, or paralysis patients. This is about construction workers with better than human strength in their better than human limbs. We drive vehicles through obstacles on land at 10 times the speed human beings can run, and we fly vehicles at 800 times the speed we can biologically move ourselves. We are mentally capable of managing bodily abilities far beyond those with which we are born.

This is not only about helping the disabled, and it's not only about incredible speeds or strengths. It's also about perfectly able people who would rather control personal electronics with their thoughts than search for or decipher other remote control electronics. Personal electronics are going to be a lot more personal, too; these people will eventually prefer to have personal electronics embedded in their bodies and networked with their minds.

Don't worry about losing human language: we will only lose it when we'll be better off for it, when we communicate and think better without it. The translator here, with IBM and elsewhere is of course more narrowly focused, but with this we are converging on technological telepathy and obsoleting human language.

Human logic and good intentions have come at it from a more traditional, less technological direction, giving us Esperanto, Loglan, Lojban, etc. You've probably heard of only one of these, which you probably laughed at somebody for being Geek enough to know any of. Most of them have been great ideas and well executed, but despite inherent gains in efficiency or intellectual force they are nowhere near the markets and their returns depend on mass adoption. Technology is different, it's tied directly to markets and to private profiteering with immediate amplification of wealth among the wealthy. Human beings are not going to create a better enough language, soon enough, before we create a technology which in itself superior to all human language. BG

Yes, and one of those two languages is usually English. Esperanto is unnecessary. Its only "benefit" over English is that it's perported to not come with a culture and so it's not perceived as being quite so dangerous. The problem is that Esperanto does have a culture: it's only spoken by self-important intellectual snobs.

That was esperanto which has its own website. Read it in esperanto if you really want to bend your mind.

Unless you answered "yes", most of that time you spent "learning" a foreign language was wasted. I support the goal of foreign language fluency but it's pretty obvious that the methods used in most US schools are not achieving much.

There are better ways to learn foreign languages. Schools should be using them.

There is one such way which, surprisingly, isn't much of a departure from the way it's done right now but produces far better results: teach one year of Esperanto first, and then procede with the so-called "natural" languages. In one study, French secondary-school (highschool) students had one year of Esperanto and then three years of either English or German. At the end of the four year program, they were more advanced than the students who had gone through four contiguous years of English or German, and they could read and write fluently in Esperanto as well!

There are theories about why it turns out this way but the important point is that it works. Not only do the students progress further toward the original goal but they also gain another language to a point where they can use it for real-life correspondence. Even if the current system isn't ready to handle more efficient language-learning techniques (used by language schools and them military, for example), this system of teaching Esperanto as a "foreign language primer" could be implemented just as quickly as some teachers could learn it... which is to say, in only a couple years.

Just so you know I'm not pulling this out of my ear, consider that I've been teaching myself Esperanto for only two years now. Starting from a great web site called Lernu.net, I can already comprehend and participate in Esperanto-language meetings, read unabridged literature in Esperanto, and instant-message chat with girls, er, people all over the world in Esperanto. Some of my Esperantist net-pals use Skype and PalTalk a lot too, though I don't have that much time for that myself.

I think it would be better if everyone would speak the same language.

Something easy to learn, multi-cultural, like Esperanto...

They can.

The problem is that nobody uses the new languages, because nobody else knows them. It's even harder than getting people to change operating systems.

Ugh, the idea of Newspeak reinvented. The English language has enough problems without being forced through a strainer, too.

If you're going to go this route, I'd prefer to see a neutral language like Esperanto used instead.

The real issue to Valenti is intellectual property. The ham-fisted laws he's lobbying for are the only way he knows to preserve intellectual property the way he thinks it should be. What he needs is an example of how that way might not be such a good way in the first place.

The real issue is that the law should not be made to stop people from being able to do things which might infringe upon others' rights but rather should make certain that punishment and restitution (justice, if you will) can be had when someone actually does infringe someone else's rights.

Or maybe there should be laws against other things which might be used in rights-infringing ways? The classic example of how one has the right to swing one's fist but not into someone else's nose would have to be re-evaluated. Too many people seem to be taking advantage of that old-fashioned "right", and perhaps fist-swinging should be illegal for all but certified professionals? Just to be on the safe side, maybe they should outlaw making a fist at all?

The point again, is that a better way to make law is not to legislate what cannot be done but rather to make plain and sure the dire consequences should we choose to infringe others' rights or damage items of public trust.

And while you're at it, why don't you learn Esperanto and the Dvorak keyboard layout? You sheep obviously have nothing else better to do.

Mrs Thorp, who studied ancient Egyptian at university, said: "Tolkien never left a word meaning 'to love'.

Well perhaps a long-lived race as the elves did not have the concept of love or understood love in a far more abstract fashion than humans, dwarves or orcs.

Also serious queers speak la lingvo geja not Sindarin.

Esperanto?

"common, neutral ground. ... without one party being at a disadvantage ..."

But it's not common ground. The language uses Roman characters, for starters, and the roots are pulled almost exclusively from Western languages. How does this not place people at a disadvantage who grew up reading and writing CJK or Arabic?

Even if the script were something nobody'd ever seen before, and the roots were also completely invented, I would still argue that Esperanto has a strong Western bias. Its comprehension depends on phonetics, not pitches and inflections (as comprehension of Chinese does to a large degree), and Esperanto's pronunciations are much easier for a speaker of a Western language to pick up than, say, a native Japanese speaker (you've seen Lost In Translation, right? "Lip them! Lip my stocking!")

You can try to address these problems, but at the expense of making the language much harder to learn for people of any background, which (correct me if I'm wrong) essentially negates Esperanto's whole raison d'etre.

Not to mention that every language, even Esperanto, has evolved to express a certain range of ideas and a certain way of thought. You can stretch this (poetry anyone?), but the result is rarely elegant or intuitive. Western linguistic anthropologists have "discovered" languages in which there is no easy way to express the passage of time--present, future, past tenses simply aren't important for some people on this great planet. So even by assuming a familiarity with time, Esperanto reveals its bias. More broadly, this problem of relative cultural importance is a problem that I doubt any so-called "common" language can solve gracefully.

"It is, to a degree, misty-eyed idealism."

Yes, and that's the whole problem...

I don't know, I just find it worse than useless--downright counterproductive, even. This whole mentality smacks of condescension to me: "Oh, you poor noble savages," says the bearded Western intellectual, "we don't speak your language, and you don't speak ours; I'll invent a common ground and we shall meet halfway!" Then he goes and creates a language that is of course every bit as culturally loaded as every other language, but he is so thrilled at his own worldly generosity that he does not realize what an ass he is making of himself.

But, to each his own.

yours

I'm a nerd. All but one of the laundry-list assumptions are false in my case. And I'm considering learning Esperanto. Why? Because the reasons listed here are pretty good ones.

Esperanto is not meant to be a replacement primary language. It's meant to be a useful fallback, a common secondary language. Oh no! Increased communication abilities! Not here! Not on slashdot!

Well, it's hugely useful on the net, groups like soc.culture.esperanto and sites like gxangalo.com let you interact with users who do not speak English, which can give you a perspective on the world. There are plenty of real audio feeds of shortwave Esperanto radio broadcasts as well.

For practical uses in the real world, it doesn't get much more useful than the Pasporta Servo, a service of Esperanto-speakers who volunteer to welcome travellers from other countries in their homes--in other words, learn to speak Esperanto and you can travel around the world and get FREE room and board! (There are homepages around with the stories of people who've actually gone around the world like this, although I don't have the links handy.) Not only that, but when you visit a country you get to see how the people actually live, and to talk about life there with ordinary people, instead of getting a touristy hotel-centred kind of experience.

This FAQ may answer some of your other questions.

Before reading this post, I have only heard about Esperanto a few times. I always assumed it was some sort of Spanish dialect or something, not knowing any better.

So, I did a bit of research and found that Esperanto is actually a very interesting language. Apparently it is an "artificial" language, created by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof and published in 1887. The concept was to to be a "middle ground" language, facilitating communication between people of different backgrounds or cultures. Esperanto is apparently much easier to learn than many national languages and was designed to be a straight-forward neutral language. Surprisingly, there are an estimated 2 million Esperanto speakers in the world.

Check out some of these interesting links that I found:
Esperanto FAQ
What, why, who and where info about Esperanto
Previously mentioned educational Esperanto site with the little green goblin, "Zam"

For those of you wanting to learn a language that is spoken by approximately 2 million people around the world, start learning Esperanto today!

Hell yes, English is viral. Not because you will speak it to a native, but because English speakers tend to expect others to learn their language, instead of going halfway and learn something themselves.

Granted, this has happened with French and before that (c. 1500) with Spanish. Maybe we could all give Esperanto a try...

I've never discovered the reason why Esperanto is supposed to be so good. I have a suspicion it's based soley on Mexico's proximity to the US. For countries with few spanish speakers, it doesn't make much sense at all...

You're confusing Esperanto with Español, the language of Mexico and Latin America (excluding Brazil). Esperanto is based on a mixture of several Western and Eastern European languages. Think Italian mixed with Polish mixed with the agglutinative structure of languages such as Finnish, Japanese, or Turkish.

Esperanto!

Does no one know about this?

We Esperanto speakers have Pasporta Servo. You can find hosts all over the world who will house you for free.

Damn, we need to do a better job of getting the word out. Anyway, it's fairly easy to learn. If you want to see the world on the cheap, give it a shot.

What we seriously need is one common language that borrows terms and ideas from a variety of languages, which could (in theory) assist people in learning that language...

For basic communication, try Toki Pona. 120 words, no hard inflections to memorize; however, it doesn't work well for technical material.

Or take a step up and learn Esperanto.

Here's a Newspeak dictionary.

Newspeak may have been inspired by Basic English or Esperanto. Contrary to the opinion of some, Toki Pona was not inspired by Newspeak.

Absolutely. However, there's a lot of visceral inertia (I can say that in public, can't I?) to overcome before most people will consider learning any other language. It's tied up pretty deeply in their personal and cultural identity. Witness the vitriolic attack by the (clearly under-informed) AC who replied to you first.

Personally, I think it's just fear. Fear by people who are used to being very competent at what they do, of being put in a situation where they aren't the Alpha for a while. I lucked out, picked up Esperanto in high school because I found it very geeky and I was a stone geek. All the other kids laughed, which was nothing new. I'm very glad I spent the amazingly short time to learn the basics; now I'm reading translated literature (some of it from Chinese!) at a fairly advanced level, with ease.

As for the attacker, sigh ... I don't have the energy to form a proper rebuttal. I guess I'd note that Esperanto is the single biggest success story in the constructed-language world, the longest-lived, and its speakers have increased in numbers pretty steadily since the beginning. But don't take my word for it (and if geeks are reading this, they won't), see for yourself. Those links were good; here are some others:

• La Multlingva Inform-Centro ... bet you find your native tongue represented!
  
• Esperantic Studies Foundation ... some formalism for a change
  
• An examination of some of that "visceral inertia"
  
• For you Canadians
  
• And the Britons
  
• Aussies, too
  
• The misleadingly-named Esperanto League for North America, which really means "The USA" here
  
• And finally, for fun, just when you thought Shatner had done it all ...
  

Iru. Jenu. Lernu. Ghuu.

Somebody will have to draw me a diagram here as to how adopting a foreign language word somehow diminish the parent language. Must be something like software "piracy".

this is actually kind of common with some older langagues; i know the french and the spanish currently have programs to help keep their languages "pure" (the french with more..uh..zeal than anyone else, afaik--to the extent that certain contractions and bastardizations of phrases are considered a Bad Thing, e.g. the ubiquitous "cool" and the short form "mel" (for mail-electronique, i believe, but i'm not 100% on that). afaik, the spanish are more concerned with keeping their language from dying out.) priests did this with latin as well, and until the lutheran split, reading and interpreting the bible by anyone other than a trained cleric/priest was Frowned Upon.

it is tempting to draw parallels between "closed" languages like this and closed/open source software. mutt languages, that draw from various sources, seem to last the longest and seem to be more pervasive than their counterparts. draw your own conclusions.

it was, in fact, the french who got the UN to fuxor the "universal language" of esperanto, which sucks, since it is a totally neutral* and easy-to-learn-beyond-belief language. their reason? french was the language of science, and therefor would never fall out of vogue.

http://www.esperanto.net for those interested.

*totally neutral in the sense that there are no Esperanto speaking nations and the largest majority of people who learn/speak it do not do so as their first language.

-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces

Esperanto kaj Dvorak? Oni povas fari tion chiam, sen Libertarianoj! Estas facila, jhus faru "loadkeys dvorak"... Ho, ankau lernu Esperanton! Iru al esperanto.net...

Esperanto advocacy groups say that almost every day. And almost every time they say it, they get shouted down. The world will take to Esperanto when it's ready for it, not before. You can't force people to change a belief this fundamental. Esperanto advocacy groups know that beliefs about language border on the religious--strongly held, not logic-based, and seldom changed by external pressure.

I keep hoping that the 'net will help people realize that their own language isn't universal, but judging from most of the posts on this story, that will take, um, quite some time. I'm fairly certain that an international auxiliary language will eventually be adopted; whether the world chooses to take advantage of the work already done on Esperanto, or decides to start afresh, I cannot say.

In any case, go here or here for some starting points in learning about La Lingvo Internacia.

Cannot say. Saying, I would know. Do not know, so cannot say. -- Zathras.

Sorry, forgot to include these links in prior message: Esperanto.org, the Multlingva Inform-Centro, and the Esperanto League for North America, three good starting places. Now go do some research!

Basic English is a headache and a half. It's about as tough as English, for a non-English-speaker: it has just about all the irregularities and plenty opaque idioms from English. And it's a pain for English-speakers too, who have to remember that 90% of their vocabulary is missing. So it's unnatural for them as well, when they have to remember they can't say "selfish" but must instead say "having no thought for others."

Basically, it suffers from just about all the deficiencies of English (as perceived by non-native speakers), including English's famously arcane spelling system, and also is a pain for the native-speakers!

Maybe that's good, at least it's fair... but if that's your logic, you might as well be fair and pick a language that's not native to anyone (or hardly anyone), like Lojban, Esperanto, Klingon, etc...

Hell, if William Shatner advocated it, its gotta be cool, right? right? kidding...

Case in point: Americans have this perception of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Claudia Schiffer, and Nina Hagen as being dumb; this perception may or may not be accurate, but much of the perception is due to the fact that these people speak imperfect english, or speak it with an accent. The native speaker always has a psychological edge.

Esperanto has 16 grammatical rules, and no exceptions. It is highly regular, avoids noun genders, and all verbs are conjugated exactly the same way. It is very easy for Westerners to learn, and easier than any Western language for Easterners. There are, at last count, over 2 million Esperanto speakers, although this estimate is admittedly optimistic, as most "Esperanto speakers" have limited experience actually speaking the language. This means that about one in every 3000 people has some working knowledge of Esperanto.

Esperanto needs much wider acceptance before it can became a linga franca; English, at the moment, enjoys that status. However, as most Slashdotters would agree, just because something is the de-facto standard, doesn't mean either that it is the best choice, or that it should remain the standard, eg. Windo[(ws)(ze)].

Esperanto can be learned so rapidly, that if you have any interest at all, I recommend that you check it out. You can get a working knowledge good enough read the usenet groups or participate in the IRC rooms within a couple of weeks of regular study (an hour). There is even a free 10-lesson email course with tutors which provides all of the foundation you need to start communicating. The Esperanto community is, in a lot of ways, much like the Open Source community, and I'm constantly suprised that I don't see more cross-polination between the two groups. You will notice, however, that KDE comes with fairly extensive Esperanto language support.

Even TravelLang has an English/Esperanto translator, and some of their translation software uses Esperanto as the medium language, much as XML can be used as a many-to-many point of translation.

More information can be found at:

• Free Esperanto Course
• Esperanto Access
• Esperanto.com
• Esperanto.net
• Esperanto League for North America (ELNA)
• The FAQ for the Esperanto Beginner's mailing List

Cool list. It is interesting to note how Esperanto stacks up against your criteria. Check it out for yourself and see.

... I think English has already become this universal language ...

I know you are wrong. Good guess, and one shared by a lot of other folks. It has been shared down through the ages by a lot of people about a lot of languages--Latin, French, Russian, and so on. But it was wrong then, and is wrong now. Also, your assertion that English "has a very simple grammar" is quite wrong. As is your assumption that "Sooner or later most of the world's population will acquire this international English as a second language." English usage is actually on the decline worldwide.

But you don't need to continue guessing and getting it wrong--these issues have been studied pretty extensively, and there's a lot of hard data and experience to back it up. Do some reading and speak from a position of strength next time, okay? A good place to start is on one of the many Esperanto sites around the net. Those folks have a strong interest in comparative linguistics, and have good links to the straight poop.

... wouldn't it just be much easier to teach the world English?

Spoken like a true English-speaker. Probably from the USA, right? Sigh.

For every mod hip progressive netizen who thinks that English is the obvious World Interlanguage, and oh, wouldn't it be better if all those misguided little multi-colored and warring peoples in those places with unpronounceable names just stopped using that yip-yap jibber-jabber they call a language, at least in public, and start speaking The Obvious Choice, English, there's another person who thinks roughly the same thing about French, or Chinese, or Russian, or any one of a hundred other of the world's languages.

As for what would be easier, Esperanto would be a good candidate. The Esperanto community has some pretty convincing data that it's actually easier to learn than most other languages, even for those whose native tongue is not derived from the same Latin that Eo is. But hey, that'd mean that you would have to bend your poor little brain around something new, and we couldn't have that, now, could we? Better that the wogs learn to talk proper, eh?

Sorry, you probably deserved only about half of that. I'm calmer now. On the odd chance that you or others would care for some facts in place of my ranting, see esperanto.net for some actual details about a real alternative.

surprising, since one would expect that esperanto, with its more regular and simplified grammar, would give them an extra language on their list with less effort than the others there...

-duncan

a previous project, the Distributed Language Translation (DLT) project, based in the netherlands if i remember right, used a similar idea, using a de-ambiguised esperanto as the bridge language. as i remember, as a text was typed in a source language, it was translated into and stored as this bridge language. when ambiguities arose in the interpretation of the source, a query was sent to the typer as to which meaning was meant (eg: "i love her more than you"), and this distinction was preserved in the bridge language. when the text was required in a different language, this bridge language was translated into the destination language. since the bridge language was intentionally chosen and further designed to be more easily machine parseable and less ambiguous than the original, the translation work was made easier. searches for DLT and esperanto should turn up some references to the project, although a brief summary may clarify further. as far as i remember this was in the mid/late eighties. -duncan

Excellent post. Wish I had moderator points today, so I could move it up! Esperanto just works.

I have come to believe that, in the human brain, the language center is tied somehow to the emotions, because people start acting irrationally whenever you start suggesting language alternatives. It's like asking them to change sexual orientation or something--their language is too strongly tied into their concept of personal identity to permit approach. So in an open forum, I seldom see anyone who is not already an Esperantist discuss the language objectively. Sad, really.

But hope springs eternal. I post this URL every time, in hopes that it may someday be of interest to someone: If you are interested in Esperanto, the world's most popular constructed language, try the Esperanto.net web site for starters.

As for the UNL, most Esperantists have been aware of it for some time. We wish them well, most of us, really we do. But most people who know more than one human language hold limited hope for such a project's success.

What's evil about these projects, of course, is that they don't let people just talk to one another. It would be neat to be able to have access to the literuture of other countries, but that pales in comparison to having access to the people in other countries. If you just learn Esperanto you can really converse with people without needing technology or anything. It just works.

Esperanto was not invented for that purpose. Esperanto's purpose is to be the one foreign language everybody in the world would study. That way any two people would have a spoken and written language they could use to communicate.

Esperanto is alive and well on the Net. Use your favorite search engine to find links. Here are some:

• Newsgroup (in Esperanto)
• Esperanto-League for North America
• Esperanto FAQ
• Free Esperanto email course

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