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From: brg@netcom.com (Bruce R. Gilson)
Subject: Re: Single European language: *NOT* European english
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Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 14:38:50 GMT
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In article <55deir$bjq@news.alaska.edu>,  <71064.332@compuserve.com> wrote:
>Although I agree in general with John Grantham's skepticism about
>the adoption of Esperanto (or any other constructed language) by the EU
>or other supranational governmental entity (and this despite the fact
>that I speak Esperanto fairly fluently and use it on virtually a daily
>basis!), there are a couple of points in his post that I find less than
>convincing.  I don't think we have a very good handle on the number
>of speakers of E-o, or whether it's increasing or decreasing, and at
>what rate.  Citing "The Story of English" as a source is not very
>convincing to me!  The only study I know which was even _close_
>to being rigorously scientific was the one done by Dr. Sydney Culbert
>of the Univ. of Washington, which came up with a figure of roughly
>1.6 million speakers of E-o of at least Level 3 in the system used
>by the U.S. State Department (presumably there were some additional
>millions with abilities at Levels 1 and 2), and it is now some years
>old, and never addressed the question of growth or decline, AFAIK.

Culbert's survey, which apparently is the source of the 2 million figure I
see regularly quoted, contrasts with Andrew Large's figure of 50,000. Of
course they may be measuring different degrees of ability: Large's figure is
the number of "organised (sic; I reproduce Large's spelling) and effective"
speakers of E-o. But Edmund Grimley-Evans, hardly antagonistic to E-o, gave
me figures of 1 million for those with SOME knowledge of the language and
100,000 for those who use it regularly and fluently. 

I might say that the task is much harder than to determine the number of speak-
ers of a geographically-based language. If one wants to know the number of
speakers of Hungarian, say, you start with the population of Hungary, add an
estimate of the number of Hungarian speakers outside Hungary and subtract an
estimate of the number of Hungarians who do not speak the language. The latter
two are going to be rather small, so even if the estimates are off by 50 to
75%, the effect on the total number of Hungarian speakers is going to be
minor. For English it is rather more complicated, because you need to consider
the UK, USA, Canada (excluding Quebec province), Australia, New Zealand, ad
a few other smaller countries as your base. But for Esperanto there is no
comparable procedure. Unlike other languages, very few native speakers exist
(a dozen? a hundred?) so one has to base one's estimate on a way of determin-
ing how well people, originally speakers of other languages, have learned it.
By some people's counting methods, I might be considered toward the Esperanto
count: I know a few words, some of the most important affixes, and enough to
make sense out of 20-30% of an Esperanto passage. But by that standard I
might be counted toward the count of French or (even better) German. Yet nobody
would really count me in THAT total, because a higher degree of fluency is
demanded when we talk of languages that HAVE national (or at least regional,
such as Welsh or Scots Gaelic) territories.


                                Bruce R. Gilson
                                email: brg@netcom.com
                                IRC: EZ-as-pi
                                WWW: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3141
                                (for language stuff: add /langpage.html)
