Re: Poll by Email No. 2

From: "Matthew Kehrt" <matrix14@...>

| E or B. (Pound it in as you wish.)
|
| I see auxlanging for the purpose of creating an IAL to be silly and a
| waste of time, simply because it will never succeed.  The language of
| the dominant culture in an area will already serve as a lingua franca.
| Any attempt to create a new IAL will almost certainly fail because (a),
| no one will use it, because one already exists (greek, latin, french,
| english etc.), (b), no one wants to be forced to learn something and
| (c), people hate change anyway.
|
| That said, auxlanging from an artlang perspective is fine.  To create a
| langauge for the fun of it is reasonable and, of course, fun.  This
| includes languages that could be used as IALs, or which were created to
| be as easy to learn for as wide array of people as possible.  However,
| to expect people to actually speak your language as an international
| language is ridiculaous.

I would hardly consider Esperanto a failure! The world is catching on
s-l-o-w-l-y (especially in America). Perhaps a type of Basic English might also
work, though there are many natlangs I'd rather have as a global lingua franca
than English.

But there's also Lingua Franca itself, which (I believe) was used in the
Mediterranean and based on a bunch of European languages as well as Arabic. That
was a sort of pre-Esperanto, and you got stuff on the web for it.

(A similar auxlang to LF, Polari, somehow became chic among British gay men at
one time.)

~Danny~


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