🚀 go-pugleaf

On 18 Feb 1996, STAN MULAIK wrote:

> etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) writes:
>=20
> >|>   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 ...
>=20
> To whom are you referring, Edmundo, international auxiliary language
> users like yourself?=20

Edmundo seems to be busy in the AUXLANG list (or maybe in the real
world) at the moment, so I jump in (he was quoting me in the first
place). So: no, he's obviously referring to interlingua-ists
specifically, not IAL'ers in general.

> Kjell recognizes that English is the dominant
> international, second language, and it has millions of people to whom
> you can talk to in it.=20

We all do, if not in other ways, then by using it in practice. It's
rather beside the point, actually.

> And he is fairly fluent in it, as are most educated Swedes.

I've heard the educated British are fairly fluent too.

> 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=20
> 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?

Well, it happens that people from not only different cultures, but
even different sexes meet each other in an Esperanto gathering. I
think this means more to people than any linguistic considerations;
if you wanna meet girls, Esperanto is clearly superior to any
(constructed) contender, and the attraction to the language often
remains even if the relationship breaks up. Of those who don't break
up, some even use Esperanto in the family, so that there now are
several hundred people with Esperanto mother-tongue (Jouko, kion
diras la lasta statistiko?).

So naturally, I know people that don't want to think their effort to
learn Esperanto (laborious or not) was in vain, and Edmundo probably
does too.  That of course does not give us the right to condescend
other people's motivations for learning Interlingua, Volap=FCk,
Cantonese or whatever, but it _does_ make the language Interlingua
seem rather anemic(sp?) as a contender to Esperanto.=20

And if all that is too carnal, then let us have a look at the
original literature. There's nothing like the novel "Ombro de
interna pejzagxo" or the odissey(sp?) "Poemo de Utnoa" in
Interlingua - and there probably isn't in any other language either,
since it simply wouldn't make sense to try to make fiction like that
without knowing Esperanto, even if translations of them may come
around some day. And notice that I'm not implying that those two
works are literary masterpieces (even if they might be); they just=20
take up issues that wouldn't be there without the works being
written in Esperanto.

All right, I may be exaggerating, read the books yourself and make
your own judgment. But are there books originally written in
Interlingua at all, that it would be worth it making a judgment
about?

/Jens Stengaard Larsen ( =3D jens@cphling.dk )

"Dio benu vin!" - diris la ateisto.
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