🚀 go-pugleaf

etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) writes:

>|>   Interlingua may be a viable choice if you can't decide
>I'm not so sure. Check the weird psychoanalytical chapter in Klaus
>Schubert's "Interlinguistics: aspects of the science of planned
>languages" (Mouton de Gruyter, 1989) where it goes on about "oral
>penises" and things like that. I can imagine that there might be
>some attraction to speaking a language that millions of people
>can understand (you think), but which almost nobody apart from
>you can speak ...

To whom are you referring, Edmundo, international auxiliary language
users like yourself? Kjell recognizes that English is the dominant
international, second language, and it has millions of people to whom
you can talk to in it. And he is fairly fluent in it, as are most
educated Swedes.  If you want to get psychological, consider this:
how often is it that after spending a good bit of time and effort in
learning one of these international auxiliary languages, one discovers
another one that may have as desirable or even more desirable features
than the one one has so laboriously learned.  Cognitive dissonance
enters in, and to reconcile all one's effort in the face of the 
attractive alternative (now seen as a rival), one begins to think up
all kinds of reasons about how wonderful and superior one's auxiliary
language is to the rival, just to convince oneself that all that
effort was not in vain. And one finds all kinds of faults with the
rival, and the rival's speakers, again to reassure oneself that one's
efforts have not been in vain.  You don't know any people like that
do you?

Stan Mulaik


-- 
Stanley A. Mulaik 
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332
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