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From: miga0003@maroon.tc.umn.edu (Larisa Migachyov)
Subject: Re: talk & travel
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References: <elnaD3oBsD.IE7@netcom.com> <3hbj13$9b4@fido.asd.sgi.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 1995 18:32:15 GMT
Lines: 41

: In article <elnaD3oBsD.IE7@netcom.com>, elna@netcom.com (Esperanto League N America) writes:
: |> livesey@solntze.engr.sgi.com (Jon Livesey) writes in a recentposting (reference
: |>  <3h9fpn$lpg@fido.asd.sgi.com>):
: |> >
: |> >Esperanto must be a very strange language; it's always growing
: |> >by leaps and bounds, and yet it always seems to have from half
: |> >a million to a few million speakers.
: |> >
: |> >And if you don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, there's a
: |> >pretty simple explanation for this phenomenon, which is that
: |> >large numbers of people *begin* to learn Esperanto, and the
: |> >vast majority of them simply give it up as a lost cause after
: |> >a short while.  So Esperanto always looks to be in the verge
: |> >of takeoff, but never quite makes it.
: |> 
: |> 
: |> At the risk of reviving arguments of dialectical materialism (now
: |> out of fashion, it seems) let me point you to recent developments
: |> which have greatly changed the nature of international communication.
: |> 
: |> 1) inexpensive telephone linkage between nations.
: |> 2) satellite transmission of television programs.
: |> 3) ready access to intercontinental jet airliners.
: |> 4) breakdown of political barriers, esp. east/west Europe.
: |> 5) establishment of European Union.
: |> 6) citizen access to Internet.
: |> 
: |> This is all making the language barrier less abstract: one encounters 
: |> the real lack of understanding engendered by the lack of a common language.

True.  But there already *is a common language - English.  It is rapidly 
becoming the international language of choice.  If you look at history, 
you will see that there has always been an "international language", or 
the language of the dominant culture.  Now, the dominant culture is 
American, and the language is English.  I see no reason to invent another 
artificial language to fill this need.  English is easy to learn (I know, 
because I"m not a native speaker), is already spoken by a lot of people 
as their native language, and has a cultural tradition attached to it - 
literature, movies, etc., which Esperanto lacks.  

-Larisa Migachyov
