🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 27 Jul 1992 12:52:43 GMT, joinonen@cs.joensuu.fi (Juha Oinonen) said:
>
> 	Could we use Esperanto as a kind of official language (for naming
> 	UU, for instance) and give teaching in English. Currently,
> 	(virtually) no-one knows Esperanto, so it's not a good idea
> 	to force one to use it. Some day Esperanto may be more common,
> 	so it can be used more. 

What would be the point of an "official language" if one were supposed not to
use it, but use English instead?   Could you state your idea in an a little 
more explicit manner?   I don't see the point in declaring a language which
we don't want to "force" anyone to use, official for any purpose.

However, I like your idea, and I shall try to explain how I interpret it.  
The following is just my personal view of the problem.  Not even I 
see it as a realistic view of the future.  Let me know whether or not 
it is the same idea as the one you had in mind.

If Esperanto is going to become more common, I hope (as do you) it will not
happen by having it "forced" upon anyone.  But, because the first users of Use-
net were computer scientists, English has become an almost universal de facto 
standard here.  (English is the one language all computer scientists under-
stand.)  You might say that English is now being "forced" upon the users of 
Usenet.  It is inevitable that any attempt to change this "English-trend" will
be met with skepticism and negative reactions, no matter how carefully it be
introduced.

Until now Esperanto has only been learned by people who really wished to
learn it and who took an initiative themselves to learn it, mostly for fun.
Making Esperanto a mandatory course (as I imagine it must be, should it be
chosen as *the* official university language)  would change all that in a 
fundamental way.  Linguists and spare time linguists probably wouldn't mind,
but a part of the natively English-speaking community would definitely object
to having to learn another language when teaching everyone else English would
be so much more convenient (for the English-speakers) and useful (for all).

One solution would be to let everyone use their own language, and have
all papers of interest translated into many languages.

Great care must however be taken to prevent the same expensive
evolution in Usenet as in the EC (and other international organi-
zations) from taking place.  Many official languages means a lot of
unnecessary and expensive translation work, none of which can yet be
automated.  

I think that a good solution might be to make Esperanto a
"source" language, in the sense that all documents should exist in
Esperanto, and be translated into native languages when necessary.
Even if (or perhaps especially if) *all* documents were translated
into *every* native language used, the gain from such an arrangement
would be substantial.

Consider an example: Five users with five different native languages
each have a document which they want to share with the others.  Now,
without Esperanto, they'd need ten translators to make the twenty
necessary translations: (1) One who could translate from language L1 to
language L2 and from L2 to L1, (2) one for the translations L1-L3 and L3-L1,
and one for each of the following translations:
(3) L1-L4/L4-L1,
(4) L1-L5/L5-L1,
(5) L2-L3/L3-L2,
(6) L2-L4/L4-L2,
(7) L2-L5/L5-L2,
(8) L3-L4/L4-L3,
(9) L3-L5/L5-L3,
and (10) L4-L5/L5-L4.
Even if none of the documents were originally written in Esperanto and
none of the users knew how to read Esperanto (a worst-case scenario,
but a very likely one), the use of Esperanto as an official language
would now reduce the number of translators from ten to five, and the
number of necessary translations from twenty to ten, as the only
translators needed would be:
(1) L1 to Esperanto and Esperanto to L1,
(2) L2-E/E-L2,   (3) L3-E/E-L3,   (4) L4-E/E-L4, and (5) L5-E/E-L5.

Teaching those five translators Esperanto would take much less time
than teaching the ten translators in the first scenario the languages
they need for their jobs.  On top of that, the translators who had
learned Esperanto would all become able to communicate directly with
one another!  

Thus, introducing Esperanto as a "source" or even just "intermediate" 
language would greatly simplify translation matters.  It would
also be a great incentive for learning Esperanto: If one of the users
in our example knew Esperanto, she would not need a translator at all!
She could write in (or translate into) Esperanto herself, and read the
Esperanto versions of the others' documents without first having them
translated into her mother tongue.  (That she could also do herself if it
were necessary.)  This advantage would in turn mean that most people would 
*want* to learn Esperanto for practical reasons.  I.e., they would not 
feel that it were being forced upon them.

And they lived happily ever after. 

I know that this was very clumsily written, but I hope that I have
nevertheless conveyed my fuzzy opinion in sufficient clarity.

Ulf Lunde
(If you followup, please note that this article was crossposted 
to soc.culture.esperanto.)