Re: Auxlangs and Orcs' Langs

Michael Poxon scripsit:

> I seem to remember somewhere in that essay he likens Esperanto to a creation
> of food hygienists rather than cooks, which given his view of such things
> tends to demonstrate his dislike of it (sorry, I don't have the quote to
> hand)
Google is your friend:

	Some of you may have heard that there was, a year or more ago,
	a Congress in Oxford, an Esperanto Congress; or you may not have
	heard. Personally I am a believer in an 'artificial' language, at
	any rate for Europe - a believer, that is, in its desirability,
	as the one thing antecedently necessary for uniting Europe,
	before it is swallowed by non-Europe; as well as for many
	other good reasons - a believer in its possibility because the
	history of the world seems to exhibit, as far as I know it,
	both an increase in human control of (or influence upon) the
	uncontrollable, and a progressive widening of the range of more
	or less uniform languages. Also I particularly like Esperanto,
	not least because it is the creation ultimately of one man, not
	a philologist, and is therefore something like a 'human language
	bereft of the inconveniences due to too many successive cooks' -
	which is as good a description of the ideal artificial language
	(in a particular sense) as I can give.
		--"A Secret Vice", first paragraph

This is in W2K format at http://www.alexandriavirtual.com.br/acervo/t/s_vice.doc,
and in HTML in the Google cache at
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:kBe7QVH_l8wJ:www.alexandriavirtual.com.br/acervo/t/s_vice.doc&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 .
It's a copyright violation, so it may not last forever.

I believe the remark about food hygienists was in one of his letters,
and referred to Ido or some other E-o clone.

--
Deshil Holles eamus.  Deshil Holles eamus.  Deshil Holles eamus.
Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening, and wombfruit. (3x)
Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!  Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!  Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!
  -- Joyce, Ulysses, "Oxen of the Sun"       jcowan@reutershealth.com