Re: OT: For information only !

Philippe Caquant said:
> Oops, sorry, still half asleep. I meant that I have
> nothing against English, but I'm afraid there are
> political considerations rising up as to English as
> the international language
There are political considerations as to any language, natural or
constructed.


> (well, by "English", one
> should understand "American", of course; strangely
> enough, we don't really care to be regularly treated
> like dirt by tabloids from "the perfid Albion", but
> many of us strongly object to the idea of having to
> speak the same language as our American friends).
Why would it be the case that anybody _has_ to speak English, or any other
particular L2?


> Of course, what one wishes and what really happens are
> two very different things, so I think English - or
> American - might very well be tomorrow's Esperanto, if
> it isn't already.
I was trying to make the point that English already *is* an international
auxiliary language, worldwide. Any further discussion has to be centered
around the notion of _replacing_ English, not coming up with a viable
solution where none was there before.


> I know Esperanto is a very sensible and off-topic
> matter here (in my opinion, mainly because it is very
> offending for many English speakers to imagine that
> another language, even artificial, could supplant
> English),
Any particular reason for that opinion?


> and anyway I don't speak it for the moment,
> so I don't feel like going further in this way. But I
> think that when one compares concepts in different
> languages, one should not ban Esperanto as if it was
> leper. There are interesting (syntaxic) concepts in
> it, and I found several exciting ideas there. After
> all, these ideas Zamenhof just gathered from various
> natlangs, he invented little, IMO.
Zamenhof was multilingual, but linguistically naive and highly
ethnocentric. This becomes obvious in his conlang. I doubt that very many
Europeans are interested in an amateurishly and graphocentrically
relexicalized form of an Eastern Polish dialect as a lingua franca.

Just my opinion, since we're sharing opinions. :)


> So, instead of frowning and instinctively replying
> "Horrible !" when hearing the word "Esperanto",
Why do you believe that such responses are instinctive (especially from
subscribers to this list), as opposed to well-considered?

If you don't speak Esperanto, then there are some people here who know
much more about the language than you do. You're not interested in
treating their responses as anything more than instinctive reflex?


> why not just consider it as one element among others in a
> discussion about linguistics ?
The discussion was not about linguistics. The discussion was about
politics, and language policy.

If you wanted to have a discussion about linguistics, we could go into the
very many ways in which Esperanto fails linguistically to meet the goals
it seems to be setting for itself. (But you'd want to do that on auxlang,
I reckon.)


-- Mark

P.S. My previous post was satirical, but you failed to notice that. I do
not favor the status quo of English as worldwide IAL. As always, my
favorite for that role still remains Tok Pisin.

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