Newsgroups: talk.politics.european-union,sci.lang,alt.language.artificial
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From: brg@netcom.com (Bruce R. Gilson)
Subject: Re: Common European Language *not* Single European language
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Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 22:17:10 GMT
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I probably ought not to get involved in this because I am (1) not in Europe
and (2) actually sympathetic to Phil Hunt's idea of a common European inter-
language (though I don't think Eurolang is the best way to go; but just as
my first choice, Novial, was stated by him to be acceptable, I would say that
Eurolang is certainly a reasonable choice.)

However I must take issue with this statement of Phil's, that the EU would
incur no additional cost by adopting a common interlanguage, but instead save
money by reducig the need for translations. In the long term, this may be so,
but WHILE the thousands of Eurocrats and diplomats are learning EL, Novial,
Esperanto, or any other CL that may be decreed, it will still be necessary to
produce translations for the benefit of those who have not yet mastered it.
And the cost of these translations will be about the same as the present 
system's costs, because it takes just as much effort to produce a translation
that will be read by, say, those French-speakers who still have not learned the
CL as it takes to produce a translation for ALL the French-speakers.

Eventually, of course, every country would have a large enough resource of
persons who have learned the CL to have them in all the roles that involve
interfacing with EU documents and other EU nations' personel. But since ALL
necessary people will not start training from Day 1 (especially if the language
is one that does not have a lot of trained teachers from the start; the only
advantage Esperanto might point to over the other candidate languages) we need
to consider that it will take a lot longer to train enough people than it takes
one person to learn the language with the necessary fluency.

(Suppose, for argument's sake, it takes 4 months to learn EL and a year to
learn E-o. Because E-o speakers proficient enough to teach it already exist,
a year from Adoption Day we could have E-o speaking Eurocrats emerging from
the school. But training teachers is harder than training people just to
read and write it. So it might take 8 months to get enough EL teachers to
begin the classes for the Eurocrats, and the EL speakers would emerge at the
same time they might have if E-o had been chosen. Obviously, if those numbers
changed slightly, the one or the other would be favored.)

From what I've seen of EL, I think the estimate I gave of the relative speed
of learning is probably accurate, but it is just that, an estimate. E-o,
with its rather strange use of the accusative, its agreement rules (which may
be familiar enough to a German, but not to an English speaker), and a vocabu-
lary that is not as international as EL, is definitely going to be harder to
learn than EL, but whether my 3-to-1 ratio is appropriate, or whether my guess
that training a speaker of a language to teach it takes as long as training
someone to speak and read the language originally, is a good estimate, I'm
not about to take as proved. These figures are just estimates.

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