Futility of auxlangs (was Re: Aesthetics)

Hallo!

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:02:47 -0500, Chris Peters wrote:

> > > From Jorg Rhiemeier> > Add to this that the race is practically
> > > already run, and English is the winner.
>
> Agreed.  All Auxlangs aspire to the international status that English
> already holds, due to the dominance of English speakers in world affairs
> over the last few centuries.  (Brits first, Americans more recently.)
> Take as a perfect example this very mailing list, which consists of many
> international, multilingual members -- the language of discussion is
> English.
Yes, exactly that.  I remember a prediction made some time in the
1990s that by 2007, Chinese will overtake English in the Internet,
but that did not happen.  It failed to take into account that English
is widely learned by non-native speakers, while Chinese is not.  The
Chinese learn English rather than treating foreigners to learn their
language.  Similar predictions were made about the future role of
Japanese in the 1970s - they failed to come true for the same reason.

> And a very distant second in terms of public recognition is Esperanto.
> Ask anybody outside of the linguistic community if they can name one
> constructed language, and if they can answer at all, they'll name
> Esperanto.
Yes.  Esperanto has a huge head-start over all the other artifical
auxlangs - but it still has less than 1% of the speaker base of
English.

>       Not necessarily because it was the best designed (that's
> a different debate), but just because it had good enough timing to
> establish a bit of name recognition.  First-to-market counts for
> a lot ...
Yes.  Esperanto was the first artificial IAL that became widely
known and wasn't as deeply flawed (as Volapük and the 17th-century
"philosophical" languages were) as to be unusable.  It has its weak
points, but none are crippling, and the improvements (if any) made
by later designs were not substantial enough to win over significant
numbers of Esperantists.

> (not to mention, so the legend goes, the fact that Zamenhof
> relinquished any copyright to Esperanto, but left it out to common
> usage, thereby avoiding one of Dr. Schleyer's biggest mistakes with
> Volapuk.)
Yes, Volapük failed not only because of its grotesque, overly
complex grammar and difficult sounds (while Schleyer decided not
to use /r/ because he thought the Chinese would have trouble with
it, he had no qualms including the front rounded vowels of German,
with which the majority of the world's population would have at
least as much difficulty as the Chinese may have with /r/), but
at least as much because of Schleyer's proprietary attitude towards
"his" language.

> And for the even smaller percentage of people who can name two
> conlangs, the second one would most likely be either Klingon or
> Quenya.
Apparently, there are now people who know of Klingon or Quenya
but not of Esperanto.  The public interest in Esperanto has been
waning lately, it seems.  Who needs Esperanto in a world where
almost every educated person speaks English?

>       But neither of those was ever intended as an auxlang.
> No other conlang that I'm aware of has any reach whatosever
> into popular culture -- which is necessary to get any public
> use at all.  And public use is the entire point of an auxlang,
> methings ...
Precisely.

> All this tells that I'd have no place to be an auxlanger.  I don't
> have enough ego to think I could even compete with Esperanto,
> let alone supercede it (and then overcome the dominance of English,
> to boot).
Nor do I.  Auxlanging is such a futile game these days.  The supply
of usable, practical artificial IALs far exceeds the demand.

> The next Klingon or Quenya?  Sure.  There's my ideal, then.  :)
Well, I don't really care whether Old Albic, Germanech or any other
project of mine will ever reach that kind of popularity.  Perhaps
the novels I am planning to write about the British Elves become
the next fantasy smash-hit wonder, but I don't expect that.

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