Re: Esperanto in Europe

Mi respondis jene, Brian.

Tim

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Alongside the two points that Brian mentions, I think that there's a third misapprehension associated with Esperanto. If somebody called himself a Lojban-speaker, Klingon-speaker, Glosa-speaker and so on, my instant reaction would be that this individual could not possibly speak fluently in his language. This being the case, why should we expect people to think differently of Esperanto?

The fact is that Esperanto is spoken fluently by tens of thousands of people, and not simply limited to those countries whose languages are closer to Zamenhof's European reference languages. This is a message that we need to convey. Esperanto is not simply theoretical, a nice idea but unworkable in practice; I speak it fluently. So do Bill and Brian. So do hundreds of people that I've met. It works. And it's not even unknown to use it in cross-national situations, such as the one we're discussing; Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia and President Jonas of Austria, both supporters of the language, used it to talk to each other.

Even if we were not to aim so high as asking the EU to adopt it, there would still be, in my opinion, a clear use for Esperanto-teaching in schools. The language is a wonderful introduction into language-learning. Because it's relatively easy the learning reinforces itself, giving children a real sense of progress. No longer (in the UK, at any rate) would a child's initial thoughts about learning languages be that it's improbably difficult. And once the child has learnt how to learn a language it becomes easier to learn more. I'm a good case in point. My fiancée and I were recently on holiday in Kiev, a city where nearly everyone is bilingual in Russian and Ukrainian ... and where there was scarcely a word of English understood. We were wholly reliant on our very limited Russian, which we learnt with relatively little effort because we're both schooled mentally in how to learn a language. How commendable to give children such a start, so that they too can go on to learn other languages without the countless challenges that language-learning throws at them when they start with a national one! I remember (and I'm relatively gifted for languages) struggling with the concept of grammatical gender, and our lessons on individual French verbs taking 50 minutes each. It's no wonder that most of my contemporaries will be monolingual now.

Should it be the language of Europe? I think that anybody with a sense of fairness would have to acknowledge that using principally a single nation's language is not ideal and runs counter to the EU's egalitarian motives regarding, for example, funds for redevelopment. I'd certainly like to see Esperanto introduced to more schools (it's already taught in several primary schools in the UK) for the benefits that I outlined above; and then, who knows, at a time when some schooling in Esperanto is the norm we can look at the descendants of Tito and Jonas following in their footsteps, using Esperanto according to its purpose; as a neutral common tongue. There's already a common currency and harmonisation in legislation, so it's really not such an outlandish aspiration after all.

--- In [email protected], Brian Barker <bribarker@...> wrote:
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> 
> Bonvole reagu se vi kompetentas en la angla lingvo - kaj eble pri statistikoj 
>  
> http://www.debatingeurope.eu/2011/08/03/should-esperanto-be-the-language-of-europe/
>  
> Brian
> 
>  
>  
> Brian Barker
> Lang House, Ward Road
> LONDON
> N19 5ED
> http://www.esperantolobby.net
>




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