🚀 go-pugleaf

Remembering that this is COMP.std.internat, the topic of Esperanto
seems to be only peripherally related.  On the other hand, David
Harvey's message points out some issues that apply to the more
general question of international standards.  I will try to keep
the topic from ranging too far afield of the newsgroup charter.

In article <645@wsccs.UUCP> dharvey@wsccs.UUCP (David Harvey) writes:
>
>I just had to throw my two bits into the discussion of languages.
>I don't really know enough about Esperanto to judge its relative merits,
>but it seems that people who favor it have forgot an essential element.
>All people seem to favor their own ethnic culture which also has an
>associated language.  If you doubt it, try getting the Quebecois to
>speak English!  

Esperanto supporters hardly forget this fact.  Indeed, the *usual*
argument that Esperantists face is the more naive `but English is
already the de facto standard international language.' 

>And even if Esperanto is adopted, what is to prevent it from
>changing?  A language is a living thing, something that changes as the
>people who use it also change.  

Here we manage to get back to the original issue.  The purpose of
Esperanto is not to replace national languages, nor is it intended to
represent some Platonic ideal of The Perfect Language.  The purpose of
Esperanto is to provide a standard method for the interchange of ideas
between people without a common national language.  Its goal is to
fulfill the same function, in natural-language (human) communication,
as the ISO Latin-[1-4] codes, all-numeric dates, metric measurements,
and other international standards (although all too often,
`international' means `not American').  Naturally, as a human language,
it is subject to evolution in usage.  But since it is not normally used
as someone's first language or primary language, the pressures for
change are certainly mitigated.  At present, the fact that Esperanto is
primarily a *written* language, and that the dissemination of written
materials in Esperanto is fairly global, keeps the language
comparatively stable; Mr. Harvey tacitly acknowledges this when he
says,

>Actually, television, radio, and other means of national and
>international communication mediums are having a stronger stabilizing
>force than the French national committee on language.

Interestingly, some of the antecedent discussion (all-numeric
dates) also seemed to be based on the idea that the topic was finding the 
Perfect Representation of date information, rather than considering
that the purpose of the date representation was to agree on a 
standard notation that could be understood everywhere.  Similar
peculiar arguments have been presented to show that English/American
measurement units are `better' (more natural) than the arbitrary
SI units.  These also miss the point.

>But back to Esperanto, I really don't feel that it is a language worth
>studying.  It is kind of like Latin, a dead language since it isn't used
>much.  

The number of speakers is approximately on a par with Icelandic.  But
this is a fairly weak argument in any case, although a common one
(`Well, Esperanto seems like a swell idea, but until everyone else
learns it I won't bother with it').  Most computers speak ASCII,
not Latin-1, but that is hardly a reason to ignore Latin-1.

>Personally, I feel Americans would benefit far more from studying
>Espanol or another language that is in ACTUAL USE somewhere in the
>world.  

Which ONE?  Or is it proposed that we learn several?  Does learning
Espa\~nol really address the problem that the Unix Programmer's Manual
has to be translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese
and Italian (instead of a single, well-understood interlanguage)?
Or that Americans are extremely isolated from technical
and industrial developments in Japan, France, Germany, Italy, etc.,
because a relatively small fraction of their technical material
is translated into intelligible English?  

Many early reformers of Esperanto, or proponents of similar
interlanguages (Ido, Novial, Interlingua, etc.) had the idea that the
reason that Esperanto was not more successful was due to imperfections
in the language itself.  They apparently felt that if a more perfect
language were available, the world would open its arms and adopt it.
It is now clear that the main reason no neutral language has been
accepted as an international standard is that the world has not yet
acknowledged the magnitude of the language problem, or still maintains
the belief that adoption of a national language (usually `my' language)
as an international standard is a feasible solution.  In the United
States, owing to our geographic isolation, we rarely understand the
need for international standards of any kind.  Only in the last few
years have American computer manufacturers heeded the long-standing
European need for an 8-bit alphabet (and we will note that DEC's 8-bit
code is different from the Macintosh's, which is different from
Latin-1, which...).  Laser printer images are still resolved in `dots
per inch'.

The problem still appears to be recognition of the problem.
   Mike Urban
	...!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban 

"You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"