Happy Esperanto Day: A Timely Treatise on Auxiliary Languages and Why You Might Want to Learn One

A Brief History Lesson

About 130 years ago it was all the rage for scholars of varying levels of education to experiment in language construction; at a time when the shadows of rationalist philosophy resurfaced in the form of the Enlightenment and universalization and algorithmitization emerged as the ideological waves of the future, it became a fashionable if not overly ambitious undertaking to vie for the title of "author of the universal language."

The results are a hot mess of academic warfare; radical/unfounded/premature claims to victory, fallacious arguments, and institutionalized egotism of international levels abound in the history of the craft. Everyone thought they laid waste to the work of their predecessors with incremental "improvements" to a formulaic structure. Often its flesh consisted of something like a lexicon pulled largely from Latin (with minor modifications to words here and there), with a few loans from modern Romance and sometimes Germanic languages -- English at the very least -- and its skeleton of an Indo-Europeanesque morphology and affixing system that promised full commitment to the principles of formalized logic, a burgeoning industry in mathematics and philosophy at the time, but was often demonstrated not to deliver. Whether nouns broke convention with the affixing system, verbs failed to mark for transitivity, or gender treatment was considered unbalanced, nobody ever seemed to 'get it right' in the expected sense.

The Current Snapshot

So goes the argument for the declared 'failures' of such linguistic engineering feats. But even putting the philosophical squabbles aside, this is a case where the question of success is relative and, certainly, difficult at best. Natural languages have a wide range of appeals for interested learners. We have a well-developed sense of the gains they offer: a firmer foundation for the ethnic roots we claim, financial gain, strengthened bonds with friends or family, even an expanded gamut of potential mates. It's one thing for a long-lived language like Italian to attract 24 million non-native speakers*, what with its rich literary corpus, historical ties to Catholicism and a rich culture of its own, and its allegedly inherent sex appeal; it's quite another for a constructed language of any kind to attract 2400, or even 240, when seemingly nothing so palpable is to be gained.

Nonetheless, several auxiliary languages have managed to maintain a pulse up through the present age... or, at the very least, they came to be revived with the advent of the internet. Likely among the best known of these languages is Esperanto, with literally at least several thousand speakers, but claiming respectable numbers of their own, Ido (a major reform project based on Esperanto) and Interlingua (a sort of modernized, simplified Latin) follow relatively closely behind. Honorable mentions go to Interlingue-Occidental, Idiom Neutral, and Novial among this generation of auxlangs, which, while not ostensibly claiming the same numbers as the latter, have each maintained a stable and even growing following if we take the size of, say, mailing lists and Facebook groups as a decent barometer.

More interesting is the fact that 'auxlanging' continues today as an artistic expression of science, with attempts being made to accommodate drastically new models which purport to dispel not only the minor failings of previous projects, but the perceived larger-scale shortcomings of a grammatical structure complicated by non-universal features of the Indo-European language family, an even more pervasive sense of Eurocentrism fostered by the choice of a pan-European lexicon, and a model which, for all its staying power throughout various incarnations, has simply never shown itself to work on the level it was designed for. One can make the case that auxlang projects haven't 'failed,' but if they were ultimately meant to take over internationally, they certainly haven't 'succeeded,' either.

On the less extreme end, such new projects include Mondlango, a reform of Esperanto which makes minor grammatical changes but also skews the lexicon heavily in favor of English. Latinate languages like French having been largely dethroned by English in the course of history between L. L. Zamenhof and now, He Yafu's creation represents an attempt to re-tailor an essentially good idea for the needs and shared knowledge of the modern world. Pandunia, a new auxlang which attempts the perfect marriage of a truly global lexicon and a particularly simple morphology, represents projects on the further end of the spectrum, incorporating a strong influence from non-European language families and a meticulous, semi-democratic creative process (at least judging by Risto Kupsala's careful documentation of his own ideas on this list). Lingwa de Planeta is a lively project based on similar principles. Still in the middle lies Lingua Franca Nova, reconciling the traditional Latinate lexicon with the morphological propensities of creole languages to break the inflection heavy-mold of the old schematic. Perpendicular to this continuum, and representing what is often touted as a more realistic ambition for facilitating communication across national borders, are zonal auxlangs, representing a new fad by which languages are constructed to meet the needs of speakers of natural-language subfamilies which remain largely cohesive but not mutually intelligible. See Interslavic and Folksprak for the two most exciting examples.

But the undertaking of international languages, for all the grandeur in scope and alleged urgency of need it represents, is one still largely unheard of by the public at large. There are reasonable arguments for why; for one, the majority of the public have very few dealings internationally, even in this age, and international relations remain largely a matter of state politics, large-scale business, and academics. There's simply no reason for most people to preoccupy themselves with any foreign language at all, let alone a "made-up" one, when that's the case. For another, the design of international politics has made it difficult for auxlangs to make inroads in arenas where language is quite literally everything, such as interpretation in the courts. One cannot legislate on language when questions on the bounds of meaning on certain words remain open. And of course, if one reads the history on auxlang projects, and often especially their respective authors, the rhetoric in such circles is so overblown as to willfully, even earnestly, invite academic suppression; it's almost as if some auxlangers refuse themselves the chance to be taken seriously. I refer you to Mark Hučko's invigorated and disturbingly personal smear campaign in defense of Slovio for a canonical example. (A response from the community working on Interslavic, Hučko's targeted rival, can be found under the heading of "Disclaimer" in this memorandum.)

Through the dross and debris of this sordid saga, however, there are linguistic gems, nuggets of wisdom, and well-founded idealism to be found in the craft. The idea of an auxlang is at its core both noble and pragmatically sound. Where two or more parties of sufficiently disparate linguistic (or even national) backgrounds gather, the probability that a language is shared between all parties seems to drop at a drastic rate with each such addition. It's not unrealistic that all parties might hold some command of English, and for most dealings a common ground of even intermediate-level English will ensure the job is done to satisfaction. But in many cases there will be matters of comprehension at stake, and more so the ability of all parties to communicate their thoughts, desires, or needs.

The Intuition at Work

Picture a conversation at a coffee shop in Buenos Aires. You're a first-year student of Spanish who got overzealous and decided to book that study abroad trip in the spring of freshman year. You can conjugate present-tense verbs, talk at length about household objects and their various properties, and drop just enough slang not to seem like the biggest gringo your friends have ever met. Say the conversation shifts to something simple, like a concert that your friends want to go to. It's benign enough at first, and you're excited because you love all things music anyway. But then one of the guys starts talking about the guitarist and his array of instruments. Being passionate about guitars, you'd love the chance to jump in, ask questions, offer thoughts, and opine like a true elitist snob on the pretentious nature of Fender's 'relic' line of custom-shop Telecasters. On the other hand, the conversation is in Spanish, where you can conjugate present-tense verbs, talk at length about household objects and their various properties, and drop just enough slang not to seem like the biggest gringo your friends have ever met. Oh, and your friends? No hablan inglés.

Most of us who've ever taken a serious go at learning another language can find a similar situation from our own lives, with "Spanish," "coffee shop," "guitars," etc. replaced accordingly. This is an oversimplification of that kind of encounter, to be sure, but it's not hard to develop an intuition for the frustration involved. It is this kind of situation that auxlangs are designed to alleviate.

So...?

Why all the fuss about this now? Well, it's a discussion that I think is as much worth having now as any time, but right now, it's particularly timely. The 26th of July is World Esperanto Day; this year it is endowed with the theme of "justa komunikado" (fair communication; see the UK Esperanto lobbyist blog for a quick rundown). This expounds on the celebrated motivation for Esperanto's creation by L. L. Zamenhof. To put it in terms relative to the above example, Zamenhof didn't want any more conversations like the coffee shop in Buenos Aires. The idea was that Esperanto should be simple enough for a person to learn to assured fluency after, say, just 6 months or so of serious study (i.e., as long as it took our naive hero to decide it was time to go abroad). Hence for any two speakers of Esperanto who'd put in the time (which should ostensibly be not much), conversation returns to being what it is in anyone's native language: an art, and not a slow, arduous science. This is to say nothing of the bonuses which accompany such a paradigm; within bounds of reason, one can never be said to speak with the 'wrong' or 'non-native' accent, for example. With the semantic extensions of words being so narrow and precise as to be almost axiomatically defined, the question of whether one is using the proper phrasing to convey an idea practically reduces to a logic problem. A constructive morphology makes it a stretch to ever lack for words, even when one is not precisely defined for a particular object or idea. In short, Esperanto makes international communication fair by making it much easier.

This year's Esperanto Day theme draws inspiration from the theme of the World Esperanto Congress currently taking place in Rejkjavík, Iceland: "Insuloj sen izoliĝo: por justa komunikado inter lingvokomunumoj" (Islands without isolation: for fair communication between language communities). A beautiful illustration (in Esperanto) of what this means in practice, and a sketch of how to implement it in a sense-making way, can be found here. (Assuming you don't speak Esperanto, it may surprise you to know that Google translates it.) The model under discussion takes a realistic approach to the current language situation, but also attempts to idealize it. Certainly not every mother tongue gets the serious treatment it deserves politically, nor it is its usability always practical outside of, say, a single village. (For a surprising example from modern-day Europe, check out the history of the Elfdalian subdialect of Dalecarlian Swedish.) The more widespread, official regional languages have a great deal more sway in this regard, often drastically influencing, suppressing, or simply decimating local languages, which in many cases raises tensions over culture distillation. At the international level, the influence of a few choice languages -- English above all -- is unquestionable. Imagine the Buenos Aires example in Chicago, where you're a native-speaking friend instead of the student; it's frustrating enough to have friends we can't communicate well with. Now imagine that that's the case -- that our communications are encumbered by conversation partners who don't speak English natively, and not necessarily well -- of the personnel staffing many of the institutions we frequent; that's what we risk far and wide with the situation of English. Yet those people, regardless of their expertise or lack thereof, cannot take the tack of our Spanish student and simply keep mum when it is their job to, say, chauffeur tourists, delineate the demands of a merger, or mediate the situation between a doctor and the English-speaking family of a patient. Both parties are in a perilous position in each example; the employee runs the risks of discomfort, miscommunication, and causing trouble for herself and all others concerned. The party being served risks not having needs met by failing to be understood. These are scenarios in which precise communication is necessary, but the reality of English education in some parts of the world is such that you are apt to find definite bounds on that precision. Here again, it is this kind of situation that auxlangs are designed to alleviate.

An Appeal

Given that tomorrow is Esperanto Day, I could just close this out with a valiant sell for Esperanto and gush on about why I learned it and why you should. I'm not really interested in doing that. I will give one last appeal that you consider *an* auxlang -- there are many to choose from, and in writing they're hardly distinguishable in any significant way -- but to try and direct you towards a single one at this point seems silly from my perspective.

My reasons are thus:

• This is already a hard sell. You likely didn't have a reason to consider an auxlang before today; even if you do, it's probably either because you already had a vested interest in international communication and/or conlangs, or because something I've said touches tangentially on your ideals or interests. That's still not really enough to push someone further than to consider the general idea.
• Auxlangs are largely mutually intelligible via the medium over which they're most used: written internet correspondence. This is a bug in some respects and a feature in others, but a fact of their design, nonetheless. A beautiful example of this in action is the posta_Mundi forum at Yahoo. They represent multiple auxlangs by design, and they foster productive, interesting conversations about a variety of topics. They also publish a bi-monthly journal that celebrates the diversity of auxlangs they represent.
• If you do see my plea through, you're likely going to check out the various auxlang communities anyway. Eventually the curiosity strikes every interested auxlanger. Every community is different, and full of individuals of all stripes: brilliant, eccentric, pedantic, friendly, trolly, (a)religious, (a)political, etc., but always interesting. it's up to you to find a community in which you can make friends and meaningful contacts if you are seriously interested in learning an auxiliary language. Where else are you going to use it, after all? This leads to my next point...
• The race isn't over. Esperanto speakers want to claim that they've got the lead in numbers, and almost certainly they do, but this by and large doesn't make them a lock for the title. Just as I've described the other auxlangs as merely having "communities" of speakers rather than a truly widespread international reach (i.e., that spans governments, business, and the like), so too does Esperanto. It just happens to have a particularly large community at that. (That's not to say that that won't be a justifiably decisive factor for many; Esperanto's community is full of all kinds of awesome people, and lots of them!)

Dave McLeod† has remarked that all auxlangs win when even one gets attention; there's some logic to that. As I said above, the effort of international languages has yet to even take hold in the public sphere. As they gain more attention, they pose the potential to gain more speakers; public attentions will become focused on one or a few particularly successful languages, and so a solution to the "problem" will theoretically come in time (so goes the reasoning). For now it's enough to represent the ideal by whichever means a person sees fit.

The landscape of auxlangs from which to choose is rich and vibrant, each with their own distinct design principles, goals, and, relative to the speaker, advantages and flaws. Depending on your own particular goals, then, this means there is also an abundance of mere choices. Most of them, however, employ a similar ethos to that of Esperanto as raison d'être, that fair communication involves easy communication for all. A fitting analogy from software would be the gamut of existing Linux distributions: there are nauseatingly many ways to get your feet wet, but usually you can just expect to land on something that'll do amazing things for you the first time in.

In an age of thriving economic globalization, the ability to reach potentially billions of people with minimal effort, and a generally, ridiculously limitless wealth of information to be shared, the opportunity to learn a language is one that everyone who can, should seize. It's hard to give a really airtight argument for choosing an auxlang, but if the conception of "fair communication" that I've described here suits your ideals, it'd be worth your time to consider. Given that most knowledge of any kind is no longer out of reach, the only really difficult gaps in our indivudual knowledge result from gaps in our shared language. This essay is a plea to all people, to make the decision to help narrow those gaps.

Feliĉan Esperanto-Tagon.


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Notes:

* See this Eurobarometer study for a potentially unscientific estimate reported ca. 2006, or the Wikipedia article from which the numbers are extracted directly.

† I am unable to find the place on the internet where this was said, but I distinctly remember reading it. Please feel free to correct me or send along the link if you're aware of its source.