How else explain the total 180-degree reversal of trends, which those of us of a certain age were brought up to consider as certainties? We knew that humanity was moving toward eventual union. Nations were getting bigger and bigger. The number of languages and cultures was shrinking. Some day, we were going to enjoy one world government and speak one Earth language. Chauvinists thought it would be French. We Americans knew it would be English. And linguists invented a synthetic new universal language they called Esperanto. The trend seemed ancient and irreversible. Peter the Great had brought many tribes and principalities into Russia. And Joseph Stalin had extended the process .... Britain had its empire and even when that began to fall apart ... it left behind a residue of the English language and English-style governments. There might be setbacks, but we were progressing, advancing toward unity.
Now, all of a sudden, we're moving in the opposite direction. Every group whose ancestors once spoke a different language, ate different foods, or believed in different rituals seems determined to form a new and independent nation. ... So what is our policy toward the current splintering trend? Are we for it or neutral towards it? Because it will affect us as the already enormous roster of nations and languages swells and bulges with new entrants. ...
[Reprinted with permission from National Public Radio, Weekend Edition on Sunday, 14 April 1991. Herman is a veteran broadcast correspondent and former moderator of CBS's Face the Nation .]
An electronic revolution is underway. New technologies are changing the ways people learn, work, entertain themselves, socialize, politically participate, express ideas, and even formulate ideas.
What are the linguistic implications? Will the world's languages fuse into one? Will language differences become irrelevant as everyone learns to communicate to - and through - machines? Will voice-to-writing transcription and language-to-language translation be redefined from skilled crafts to routine and be performed automatically?
A key variable may be distance. In one view, "Distance is ceasing to be a barrier to communication", so "both nations and cities ... will be transformed. Except insofar as governments enforce that constraint, human interaction in a world where its cost is no longer a significant bar need not be confined within national boundaries. ... Information services ... will become available from outside the national domain at costs hardly greater than from within" (Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies without Boundaries (Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. 8, 13).
But let's think again. Is distance the only costly barrier to communication? No. When cheap telephone calls between China and Mexico become possible, other distance-related barriers remain.
Language barriers don't disappear when the distance barrier disappears. In fact, language barriers may become more significant. Persons who are linguistically incompatible are more likely than before to come into contact. Distance (like ethnic segregation) previously made language barriers irrelevant; now, the irrelevance of distance makes language barriers important.
With increasingly salient language barriers, we may notice language problems more often. We may then increasingly dispute the linguistic rules imposed by governments and other institutions and the hegemony of certain languages' speakers. The demand for measures to overcome language problems may rise. We can expect to be more aware than before of the linguistic costs of doing business - and to spend more time considering linguistic variables as we make decisions. Language capabilities may become more relevant in hiring. Multilingual features may become more influential as we select computer software. The linguistic differentiation of one's clientele or audience may become a major determinant of how and where goods and services are advertised, marketed, and supported. Multilingual transaction-processing and information-dispensing machines, now a novelty, may become commonplace. Automated telephone-call-processing systems may first ask in which language the caller prefers to hear the remaining questions. If the above speculations are well founded, it is only a matter of time before communications are redesigned to function in a shrunken but still multilingual world.
I have been collecting notes on Esperanto usage for several years. The effort began with the hope of helping intermediate students avoid common errors. But I soon found it impossible to treat Esperanto grammar without attention to style. Avoiding mistakes is not the whole story. Some usages are correct, but obsolescent or conspicuous or outré . Shouldn't a language student be taught about these differences?
My forthcoming textbook, Being Colloquial in Esperanto: A Reference Guide for Americans , aims to bridge the grammar-style gap. In writing it I consulted with numerous American Esperanto speakers and learned three basic facts from their response to the problem of style in Esperanto:
1. Esperantists have learned by experience that good usage is a necessary part of Esperanto fluency. Thus, they express a need for a usage guide that goes beyond elementary textbooks or dictionaries.
2. Esperanto is experienced by most as an evolving language. Speakers are aware that some usages are emergent or obsolescent, that there is slang, that there are areas in which usage varies considerably, that some usages are comparatively unobtrusive and others more conspicuous, and that some "errors" are so common that it is prudent to learn to understand them.
3. There are usages about which speakers widely disagree. Stative verbs, for example (forms like "la arbo altas" - "the tree talls"), although understood and used by all my consultants, struck some as unobtrusively natural, others as avant-garde, and still others as substandard.
So, is Esperanto really artificial? A criticism commonly leveled at the idea of an artificial language over the years is that precisely because of its legitimate claims to logic or simplicity it will be immune to the impact of its language community upon it and hence will forever lack "soul". By "soul" critics may mean stylistic resources based on the common experiences of speakers using a language. But Esperanto, at least, far from lacking "soul", seems to have stylistic resources within reach of the average speaker that are subtler and more extensive than is commonly realized. Fluent speakers substantially agree on how these resources are effectively utilized.
Is Esperanto, then, really simple? The flip argument has also been often heard. It is that usage will change an artificial language once it is launched, indeed change it beyond recognition. As a result, however simple and logical an artificial language may start out to be, the knocking about that it takes in the course of real use by real speakers will eventually render it just as complicated as a "natural" language. It will lose the advantage of its initial simplicity and logic and will break into competing dialects.
Simplicity wins, it turns out. The pressure of usage by a large and diverse community of speakers does indeed generate ever evolving conventions of usage. This has happened to Esperanto, too, as its inventor Zamenhof forecast. Linguistically naïve commentators may have believed that Zamenhof's "Sixteen Rules" were the actual grammar of early Esperanto and hence assumed that this grammar could only become more complex with time. But as with all living languages the actual grammar was too complex to codify fully. In Esperanto, despite most expectations, innovations have apparently tended toward greater rather than less simplicity and "logic".
Why might Esperanto be getting simpler? One reason may be that concern with simplicity and logic saturates most of the self-conscious linguistic intuitions, judgments, and innovations that occur. Another force is probably more important: As in any language, some people have more effect on standards of usage than others. But, unlike natural languages, influential speakers and writers in Esperanto are not confined to a single country or language community. I was struck that most of my more fluent American consultants seemed relatively uninfluenced by the usages of English. In other words, the evolution going on in Esperanto is genuinely the result of Esperanto speakers using the language across language community boundaries. Thus, the direction of change over time is probably moving Esperanto toward greater internationality rather than less, and innovations are diffused among the best speakers across the very fissure (native language) that has most worried prognosticators of Esperanto's future.
Linguistic change, then, seems no threat to the simplicity and uniformity that the aficionados of Esperanto have always perceived in their language. If my manuscript readers are representative of Esperanto's stylistic vanguard, then the prophets of a complex and dialectalized Esperanto are in for a surprise. In fact, I'd bet that already, despite interference from hundreds of different native languages, Esperanto among the best speakers is probably more uniform from Amsterdam to Zanzibar than is English from Amarillo to Zanesville.
Esperanto Studies and Interlinguistics.
Esperantic Studies Foundation.