Newsgroups: talk.politics.european-union,sci.lang,alt.language.artificial
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!rutgers!news.sgi.com!news.mathworks.com!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!elna
From: elna@netcom.com (Esperanto League N America)
Subject: Single European language: *NOT* European english
Message-ID: <elnaE049q1.3C1@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <3273663A.3C0A@pp.inet.fi> <846555209snz@vision25.demon.co.uk> <32768243.4C65@hildesheim.sgh-net.de>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 01:34:49 GMT
Lines: 52
Sender: elna@netcom22.netcom.com

jgrantha@hildesheim.sgh-net.de writes in a recent posting (reference <32768243.4C65@hildesheim.sgh-net.de>):
>
>Though this sounds nice, and is quite idealistic, it is also very
>unrealistic. How many people are there in Europe who speak, say,
>Esperanto, as a proportion of any given country's population?
>Practically nil--the chances of any Esperanto speaker meeting another at
>random somewhere in, say, Boston, Britsol, Berlin or Bordeaux are
>virtually nonexistent.
>
This is a non-issue. At the beginning of *any* mass-scale effort, the
numbers are low. This same argument was used aginst the telephone in 
1905. "Why buy a 'phone? Nobody else has one!"

>There is a further problem: how do you propose to actually encourage
>everyone to speak this proto-language, especially when the short-term
>benefits seem so miniscule? 

Education can dispel such uninformed false opinion! 

>          Granted, if all were to learn Interlingua or
>Esperanto, we'd get along just swimmingly in the long term, but that
>would require such an enormous investment of resources that it just
>isn't practical. 

Printing and distributing a few million textbooks is not an enormous
investment of resources, especially compared to the *truely* enormous
investment of resources currently wasted in a failed effort to promote
universal communication via national-language polylingualism. Vision and
will to action are wanting, not educational resources!
 
           [snip...]

>My girlfriend's mother puts it this way: she thinks that, one day,
>people will look back and say, "Es gab mal eine Sprache, und es hiess
>Deutsch." There was once a language, and it was called German. All other
>languages in Europe face that fate.
>
This is one of the best reasons to support a truely neutral artificial  
language, like Esperanto. National languages interfere with each other in
ways which can be avoided by a shift to an international language. It is
like the battles between nations, and the lack of friction between the UN
and any sovereign state. Germany can overrun and absorb Czechoslovakia,
but the UN cannot. English can attack Gaelic, Dutch, Hopi, etc; Esperanto
cannot.  National-level conflicts are defused by international bodies.



-- 
Miko SLOPER              elna@netcom.com              USA  (510) 653 0998
Direktoro de la          ftp.netcom.com:/pub/el/elna   fax (510) 653 1468 
Centra Oficejo de la     Learn Esperanto! Free lessons: e-mail/snail-mail
Esperanto-Ligo de N.A.   Write to above address or call 1-888-2-ESPERANTO
