Which CONLANG should be the international auxiliary language?
That was a question that was posted on Duolingo and after a long discussion I finally was
talked into weighing in on what my opinion was on that question.
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Hi, my name is Tomaso and this is the Esperanto Variety Show.
This is a channel that is about Esperanto.
There's content *in* Esperanto and *about* Esperanto.
I've been speaking Esperanto actively for 20 years, and for 10 of those years I was involved
with a mailing list (discussion forum) called AUXLANG and spent a lot of time talking to
people about different aspects of this idea of inventing a language to be used as a universal
language, and different solutions to that problem.
Ultimately I decided that it was a big rabbit hole.
While there's lots of interesting things to do with constructed languages, trying to get
a brand new constructed language out there in the world - for which everybody is going
to say "hey, this is a wonderful language, let's all learn it"...
That's not going to happen.
You can just keep on going down levels and levels and levels of...
.. insanity, quite honestly.
Anyway, that's what we're going to talk about today.
Another thing I want to say is that I don't have a problem with people learning an auxlang
project because of their own sense of aesthetic value, or the value they find in that project.
Esperanto is the only constructed language that has a large community of people speaking
it.
But there are people you can speak with in these other languages, and it can be a lot
of fun.
I've spent a fair amount of time speaking Interlingua with people online.
I've had fun with Ido, and I have some books in Ido.
And I've played around with some other languages.
Other language projects and had some fun with that.
The question was posted by someone named Xasybean.
He says that he thinks Esperanto would be the best contender.
Regular viewers of this channel will know what Esperanto is.
Esperanto is an invented language.
It was invented 130 years ago, and it was designed to be a universal second language.
An auxiliary language in that sense.
A language that helps people communicate with each other.
It's not going to replace their main language, but it's going to be a helping language.
Before I get too deep into this, I do want to point out that from my point of view, the
value in Esperanto is not necessarily... ... in fact not even "not necessarily."
It's NOT in this dream of being a universal language some day.
It's in the use we have for Esperanto today as you and I speak.
The fact that you can learn Esperanto now and make friends around the world.
That you can use it to communicate with people on the same level.
(Level playing field.)
Rather than trying to speak as a foreign speaker to a native speaker...
... trying to "speak uphill", you can be more or less equal in terms of both coming to this
language fresh.
It also allows you to become more fluent.
That's been my experience.
You can attain a higher level of fluency as a second-language learner - with Esperanto.
THAT is the value of Esperanto.
Alright.
So when Xasybean asked this question, one of the things he did kind of say is that he
hopes people will not just say "Oh, Esperanto, of course, that's the best choice."
You'd expect Esperanto speakers to say that on a board dedicated to Esperanto.
And there was a lot of input into the discussion.
And I tried very hard not to answer the question.
Because I don't think there is an answer to this question.
Let's consider the vocabulary, for example.
One of the complaints that comes up again and again about Esperanto as far as being
a universal language is "well, what about people who don't speak European languages?
Is it fair to make them learn all these root words that are familiar to us as English speakers,
or French speakers, or German speakers, or Russian speakers, but would not be familiar
to somebody who speaks Swahili or Japanese or Mandarin or that sort of thing?
It's a legitimate question.
Ultimately I personally think there is no solution to that problem.
There are 6000 languages in the world.
If we were to take one word from each one of those languages we would have a vocabulary
of 6000 words.
And I can't imagine that some speaker of... ... Farsi ... Sard ... pick a language...
... is going to go learn this language and say "Woah, that language has one word from
my native language - that's SO much easier now", right?
There is no solution to this.
Either it's going to be easy to one group of people, or the vocabulary going to be universally
difficult.
And I had an idea which I thought would be fun.
This was actually before Google Translate.
If we would come up with a language - like Esperanto, and to which extent "like Esperanto"
could be up for discussion.
In this hypothetical idea, we would come up with three vocabulary zones, and within those
groups we would come up with different vocabulary items.
By the way, in my discussion on the Duolingo forum, lots of people misunderstood my idea,
so I'm going to try to explain it a little more carefully this time.
So what we do is we come up with zones, alright?
The details are up for discussion.
You could say there's an African zone, a European zone, and an Asian zone.
And then within those zones, then we come up with vocabulary that would be familiar
to people from those areas.
So for example, the European word for bird could be "birdo" - which also happens to be
the Esperanto word for bird.
And then we could have the Asian word for bird could be "torio".
And then the third word could be - I think I picked this from Swahili, I don't remember
at this point - "ndego".
So birdo, torio, and ndego, right?
And we would declare that these three words mean exactly the same thing.
The grammar of the three languages would be the same.
The word order would be the exactly the same - the endings... everything ... the meaning
of these three words that are linked together.
And what we would do this then have a computer go through and essentially change the vocabulary
of the language.
So, I could write something in a European version of this language, and then have it
... "copied"....
... I avoided using the word "translate".
I came up with the word "translexify'.
So you literally replace each word - word for word / lexeme by lexeme - by computer.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
And Xasybean came up with some of his own criteria.
He said there should be no contradictory rules.
It should be consistent.
The design should be innovative.
You should be able to say whatever you want.
The language should be simple and easy to learn.
And it should be an aesthetically pleasing language.
He and I actually went back and forth.
Again, if you're interested in the whole discussion, it's all out there.
And I was trying to get him to specify what he meant by these various details - because
it made sense to him he thought it should make sense to me.
The problem with this approach is ultimately when it comes to this idea, these words all
mean different things to different people, and that's why you find people that get really
into all these different details.
Certain things are important to them, so it's important from the beginning to know what
we're talking about.
But in any event, here we go.
So after a long back and forth with Xasybean, he finally asked me:
"Please, may you suggest a conlang and a justification?"
So, I decided I would go ahead and I would answer that question...
... as best I could... ... because he asked so nicely.
After discussing the answer we said - you know what, let's do a video on that as well.
So as much as the question makes sense...
What is your answer, Tomaso?
The way I put it in my post was - the best IAL is the one that people are actually going
to speak.
And whatever that means, we'll see.
I think Esperanto has shown that people are willing to speak it.
Someone named TheRealMastro spoke about Esperanto's two main advantages.
These two advantages are Standardization and Inertia (momentum.)
By standardization, we mean that you can learn Esperanto and then come back five or ten years
later and still expect Esperanto to be the same as it was when you learned it before.
If you learn French in high school, you can go out when you are 50 years old or whatever
and still speak French with people... ... assuming you remember how to speak it.
Some other projects, some other invented language, people always like to tinker with them, and
that's why I call this a rabbit hole.
People can't even agree on what the criteria are, let alone how to apply them.
And people who have come up with a project, they can't let it go.
They can't stop tinkering with it.
I'd gotten interested in a language called Intal.
I'd found a description of the language and from that description of the language, I started
writing texts in Intal.
Some years later I discovered that somebody had found some more material and put it online
and it was from a DIFFERENT REVISION of the language.
So, you've got 4 people in the world who speak Intal, and all four of them speak a different
version.
So that's NOT standardization.
On the other hand, we talk about inertia (momentum.)
Inertia is this idea that people have started learning it.
There are people who speak Esperanto.
Well, there are people who speak Ido too.
There are people who speak Interlingua.
There are people who speak High Valyrian, right?
But we're talking about hundreds of people or thousands of people,
not 10's of thousands or 100's of thousands or millions of people.
So of these speech communities, Esperanto has the most inertia.
Between the fact that it has standardization AND inertia, it gives it its most value.
So that's one answer to the question.
I think Esperanto has will be the "best contender" in this sense...
... for this HYPOTHETICAL international language ...
... which does not ... ... which may or may not impact ...
... Which will never come as far as I'm concerned...
... and does not impact Esperanto's value...
.. Esperanto is, in a lot of ways, the "best contender"...
... at least for showing this idea that such a language is possible.
And what I mean by that is that there really is no sense of "best" or "perfect".
This idea finding the "perfect solution" to this problem is really the rabbit hole.
So, speaking of standardization and inertia.
Intal has no inertia, but had some interesting solutions to that problem.
The coolest thing about Intal is that you don't need an Intal dictionary to write it.
You can write it using whichever IAL dictionary you have on hand.
(For most of the world this will be an Esperanto dictionary - but it really doesn't matter.)
I think this demonstrates that this whole question is silly.
That is the whole question of vocabulary and which language is better.
It's kind of a silly question.
If you can come up with a project like Intal ... and what's cool to me about Intal is that
it had a series of vocabulary transformations basically.
Saying - this sound should be spelled this way.
These sounds from Esperanto should be pronounced this way.
These sounds from Interlingua should be spelled this way.
These sounds from Occidental should be spelled this way .. and pronounced as they're spelled.
And so, if you follow those rules, no matter which dictionary you pick, it almost always
is the same in Intal.
There are some fine differences.
That would be another video - All About Intal.
But anyway, the point is - it doesn't matter which dictionary you pick, your end result
(in Intal) is going to be more or less the same.
So that was kind of neat.
The fact that Intal didn't have its own dictionary was an interesting solution to the problem
of inertia.
So you could pick whichever dictionary you wanted.
You didn't need to wait for someone to publish a big Intal dictionary.
The problem was Intal had no standardization.
If I ever get into it again, should Iearn the same version that learned before, or should
learn one of the other versions that are out there?
Who knows?
And then I talked about the Machine Translexified Language.
I think that's kind of a cool idea.
I'm surprised more people don't speak about it.
And maybe in 30 years machine translation will be so much better to the point that my
idea is a silly idea.
Time will tell.
But this is what I wrote in my post.
So, in summary - As much as I can make sense of the original question.
I think I've already answered that Esperanto is the best choice because of standardization
and intertia.
That is, Esperanto has the Fundamento, and it has 130 years of history.
If you learn Esperanto, it will be the same language in 10 years, so you have some confidence
that the effort you're putting into learning it will be able to be redeemed later in your
life.
I also like the idea of a zonal "translexifiable" language.
That is the best choice because there's no other solution to the vocabulary problem.
Intal is the best choice because it demonstrates that it's not all about the dictionary and
that differences don't matter.
So, what do you think?
Do you think that Esperanto's value is in some future dream of some "fina venko" where
it can be the universal language?
Do you think it's value is in what we do with it now?
Do you have interest in Occidental, Latino Sine Flexione, or Ido or these other languages?
What do you do with them?
Do you like these languages because you want them to be the universal language or because
you find something appealing in them now or in the communities of people who speak them.
I'd like to hear what you have to say about that.
If you have any questions about what I said about all this, I'd be glad to try to clarify
it.
I'll have a link to the original thread so you can see some more detail about all that.
And don't forget this video right here.
It's another good one.
I hope you'll like to hear more about Esperanto and more about international languages, constructed
languages, so check out this one right here... and also...
... that's about it.
For more infomation >> Thursday Morning Video Forecast 1/31 - Duration: 3:39. 
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