🚀 go-pugleaf

|> 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?

As it happens I have met hundreds of such people: people who have
laboriously learnt English and then keep on insisting that English
is the "dominant international, second language". Often these people
are agressively and irrationally opposed to Esperanto.

The same problem rarely effects Esperanto speakers, because almost no
one laboriously learns Esperanto: either they enjoy learning Esperanto,
or they give up straight away. In the places I've lived (Britain and
Germany) it is very unusual for someone to be motivated to learn
Esperanto so strongly that they'd be willing to put any serious
effort into learning it.

It's interesting that even Esperanto speakers - who are better informed
about such matters than the average citizen - vastly overrate the
"power" of English, as a little questionaire in the Esperanto magazine
"Monato" once illustrated. A lot of people are taken in by the hype
and spend the best years of their life desperately trying to learn a
language that they hardly need. Later, as you say, "cognitive dissonance"
sets in and you get amusing scenes like a German insisting on addressing
a Hungarian in bad English even after the Hungarian has explained several
times, in German, that, though he does understand some German, he speaks
no English whatsoever ...

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

No doubt you are better qualified to talk about such things than I.

Edmundo <etg10@cam.ac.uk>          http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/etg10/