Tag: conlang

An international language – why did existing conlangs not take off? Part 4

In part 3, we’ve seen that there are many alternatives to English. However, none of them has become the de facto international language – at least so far.

Why didn’t they flourish?

With English being so difficult and while many easier alternatives exist, why and how did English eventually become the international language? Objectively, Esperanto is a lot easier than English. I mean, a great lot. Even for non-European people. In fact, some Asians learn it as a starter to get a grasp of European languages, which I believe is a smart move. Yes, Esperanto is far easier than English. Yet, it struggles to become something more than the fad of a few enthusiasts.

Fellow Esperantists, yes I know there are hundreds of thousands of people who understand Esperanto, if not millions, depending on the claims. However, we are far from the billions we aim for, aren’t we? All this despite the fact Esperanto has been around for a staggering 140 years. We do have to take a step back, look at the big picture and ask ourselves “why?”.

Of course, there isn’t one single answer to that question. And we can make a lot of excuses.

Typewriters

Let me make a little parallel. Coincidentally enough, Esperanto has been around for exactly the same time as typing technology. Typewriters became increasingly widespread around the 1880s, exactly when Esperanto was invented.

At the time, typewriters consisted of pieces of metal striking a paper and imprinting the ink from a ribbon. That mechanical setting came with a few problems: the keys had to be put in staggered rows because of the mechanical pieces that connected them to the typing shafts inside the machine.

People also mention that the shafts would get jammed when people were typing too fast, and there is a story telling that the qwerty layout was invented to prevent that:

However, there is little to no evidence to back that claim. Instead, the keyboard was roughly designed from the alphabet to which a few rules were added, supposedly to make typing easier. The thing is, touch typing or even dactylography did not exist at the time, so they did that in a very clumsy way with the knowledge they had at the time – without realizing that a century later the whole planet, billions of people, would be typing on this thing. The result is a keyboard layout that has many imperfections, which in turn can lead to hand injuries for those who spend their lives typing. Those people generally switch to another layout later in life, and see clear improvements to their conditions after switching.

Yet, despite Qwerty being extremely clumsy and inefficient, 140 years later, we still use it. All this while many quality alternatives have been invented. Back in 1932, Dvorak invented a keyboard layout optimized for speed while typing in English: his layout is definitely worth trying, and I have used Dvorak for 20 years. I have only switched to another layout because I type daily in other languages than English and Dvorak is really a pain in French, for instance.

So, people in the 21ˢᵗ century still use the Qwerty layout and other similar layouts (Azerty for French) in other countries. We even use it on smartphones! And yes, we even kept the staggered rows, even if there are absolutely no mechanical constrains of the sort anymore. In fact, staggered rows are less than practical as they force the fingers and arms to move and stretch a lot more to reach the farthest keys:

Besides, there are many alternatives from people who have invented new keyboards from scratch, getting rid of the mechanical constraints of the original typewriters:

Sadly, only a minority of geeks and keyboard afficionados (not to say fetishists!) use that kind of keyboards.

And again, the Dvorak layout is only used by a few daring enthusiasts. In the meantime, on finger touching devices such as smartphones or tablets, where a “normal keyboard layout” makes very little sense, almost nobody uses alternatives such as Messagease, which I find absolutely brilliant:

The one-million-dollar question

Why in the world would people just not use what is actually best for them but an old, crippling, inadequate thing instead?

The first answer lies deep in human psychology. Resistance to change. Social pressure and blending in: “Millions are using this, why should I use something else? I would certainly stand out. People would whisper behind my back that I’m a weirdo.”

But there is also another reason. And it lies exactly within the title of this section. Money. Had Dvorak been a multi-millionaire, I can bet safely that we would all be using his keyboard layout today. But instead, the powerful manufacturers did everything they could to stop his layout from spreading. “Why?”, you wonder. Well, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a typewriter manufacturer. In their minds, typing faster meant one typist could be more productive – which would translate into fewer typists, and fewer typewriters sold.

The same goes for languages. If you have the dollars required to pay for ads, and sponsor lobbyists in Governments to introduce your language in schools, you can get that language learned by the majority of people within a very short time. But if you have no influence at all, why would anyone bother? Everyone speaks English, why try something else?

Finally, those who have money and power generally rule by using the old and safe “divide and conquer” strategy. If everyone across the world was able to communicate in a common language, that would make the “divide” strategy a little less effective. Thus those who have the power to push it forward don’t really want to – because they have a conflicting interest: keeping their power.

Other reasons

I strongly believe there are also other reasons why those languages didn’t become widespread. Let’s take a look at Volapük. Yes, the breakup of the community caused a huge blow. But I don’t have much doubt that the fatal blow was Esperanto. Indeed, Esperanto was much easier to learn for Europeans, especially among academics who knew Latin.

However, there are some aspects of Esperanto that I believe cause a pushback for many people, which is the main reason why it didn’t take on further. The same can be said of other conlangs. Those languages have enough serious flaws for them not to become international languages. We will study them in the next part.

Existing “lingua francas” – some history – an international language – Part 3

History

In the previous part, we have seen that existing languages can be fairly complex. Besides, we cannot speak all languages spoken by others. Clearly, from the beginning of language, people needed to communicate with “others who don’t speak your own language”.

Many existing languages served as a common tongue between different civilizations. In fact, such languages emerged in history in every region that had enough trade going on, and where communication was necessary.

In the West, during the Middle Ages, traders around the Mediterranean spoke a language called “Lingua Franca”. The term now means “common language”: a language spoken by people who otherwise wouldn’t understand one another. All over the world, groups that had strong interactions used some variations of regional languages as “lingua franca”, such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Swahili, Latin, Quechua, and many others.

Vulgar Latin served as the “lingua franca” for the whole European continent for centuries. It is actually still in use in the scientific world, where Latin is the root of botanical and anatomical names.

After the Renaissance in Europe, there were many attempts to devise simplified languages, mostly for scientists from different countries who couldn’t communicate across Europe because they spoke different languages.

Volapük

In the late 19th century, Schleyer, a German priest, created a language called Volapük, which he hoped would become an international language. His language gained big popularity very quickly, with over a million enthusiasts, but it was short-lived.

Among Schleyer’s followers, some wanted to make changes to the language. However, he wanted to keep it “pure and unmodified” – and also didn’t want the credit for creating the language to slip from his hands. As a result, many “unofficial” variants of the language appeared. Different factions started arguing and claiming that their version was “the best”.

Power is a treacherous thing. Every promoter of their own version fought with others. Many branches of the language appeared, and this is probably one of the main causes of the destruction of this language. I insist on this part of the story because it explains what followed with Esperanto, and is still visible to this day.

Esperanto

10 years after the creation of Volapük, a Polish ophthalmologist (he was actually born in the Russian Empire at the time), Zamenhof, published a book under the pseudonym “Doktoro Esperanto”, describing what would become the language “Esperanto”. He had been working on creating an international language for more than 15 years. Indeed, he believed that humanity needed a common language to be at peace. Many Esperantists (people who speak and promote Esperanto) still have this same goal in mind: a unifying language for the world.

I do admire the goal, and I absolutely share the vision. Not being able to understand one another creates division. And certainly, the “divide and rule” tactic is working partly because we all speak different languages.

Fear and rigidity

However, like many other people, I find that the Esperanto language is lacking. In fact, Zamenhof himself thought that his language could be improved. However, many Esperantists feared that modifying the original language would lead to a “Volapük schism” which would eventually destroy Esperanto. A large majority rejected Zamenhof’s own reform when he proposed improvements to the language. This fear is still felt by many Esperantists today.

Although I do understand the fear, I feel it is based on the wrong grounds. Volapük did not disappear because it was modified by others. It disappeared because Schleyer would not allow to modify it to make a better version – thus provoking the splitting which eventually led to its demise. The thing is: the inevitable obviously cannot be stopped. Trying to stop a natural evolution makes things worse, not better. From a shallow point of view, it looks like a schism destroyed Volapük. However, when looking deeper, the root cause was rigidity. I fear the same might happen with Esperanto.

Granted, some reforms did take place in Esperanto. But they are very minimal and insufficient, at least from my point of view. On the other hand, I do share the view of many Esperantists that an international language shouldn’t go through a reform every month. I also agree that “better” is often the enemy of “good”. However, what is clearly broken and/or creates strong negative emotional reactions cannot be widely adopted and creates resistance. Esperanto is the oldest of the current major surviving conlangs, it also benefited from a number of hypes over time. Yet, it never really took off and we’re very far today from it being a common international language.

Ido

Many, very early on in the life of Esperanto, shared the view that it needed some extra touch. Branches of the language appeared despite all the efforts from Esperantists to stop anyone from modifying the language in fear of a schism. Those branches separated forcefully from the main Esperanto speakers since there was no tolerance from their side. One of them is called Ido, a “revised Esperanto” (“ido” in Esperanto means “offspring”).

Frankly, I find that Ido feels like a patch. It does solve some of the problems I see in Esperanto, but it is still lacking. Quite a lot. We will see that in more detail in the next posts. It is an honest attempt at fixing many aspects of Esperanto that many people judge negatively, but I believe it is not sufficient. It is just like fixing a broken house with tape.

And indeed, the result is here: despite being around for quite a long time, Ido is at a standstill. In fact, it is far behind Esperanto in terms of the number of speakers. If it was as good as it claims, I believe it would have overtaken Esperanto by now.

Glosa

In the middle of the Second World War, a scientist, Lancelot Hogben, devised the bases for an international language during his idle hours. He published a book called “Interglosa”, mostly aimed at language teachers, confident that people would pick up his language immediately. However, people at the time had other things on their minds, with the war going on. His introduction manual for the language never took any attention.

Almost 20 years later, another scientist, Ron Clark, found Hogben’s book in a second-hand bookshop. He read it and immediately found it fascinating. He was soon joined by Wendy Ashby, and they worked with Hogben, who was still alive, to improve the language. However, Hogben died in 1975. Clark and Ashby founded Glosa after some further modifications of the language.

I find Glosa much better than any previous attempts. After all, Hogben benefited from many failures before him, so he definitely had an advantage. Here are some of the core features of Glosa:

  • it is fully phonetic, every single printed character is pronounced in one way, and vice versa,
  • unlike Esperanto, words do not change, they can serve multiple purposes by the simple addition of prepositions. This feature eliminates complex inflections which makes it difficult for many people to speak and understand languages – people in general don’t think about what an adjective or an adverb is when they speak!
  • the vocabulary is limited to 1000 words,
  • the roots of the words are exclusively taken from Greek and Latin.

However, like Esperanto or Ido, Glosa is still not widespread. Granted, it is much younger and didn’t benefit from big hypes as Esperanto did.

Toki Pona

There are many other constructed languages that aim to be international languages. It would be impossible to list them all. I’ll just present a last one, which is quite fun and intriguing.

Toki Pona was created by a Canadian, Sonja Lang, whose aim wasn’t exactly to create an international language, but rather a “minimalist” language. It was a tool to help organize her thoughts. Indeed, the official Toki Pona vocabulary contains no more than 120 words. Yes, you have read that correctly, a language with a total of one hundred and twenty words! In fact, the philosophy is close to Northern minimalism, which along with her pen name led me to believe for quite some time that Sonja Lang was a Swede!

Similar to the founder of Esperanto, the inventor of Toki Pona had something in mind: doing good. While the word “Esperanto” means “the one who hopes”, “toki pona” means “the language of good”.

Besides, I particularly like some of Toki Pona’s features. For instance, the sounds have been selected so that basically all people in the world can read, understand and pronounce the language easily. This is nice! Besides, it can be written in plain ASCII without any diacritics.

Minimalism comes at a price

However, minimalism comes at a price. Although a few root words may be sufficient to express very simple things, it becomes very challenging when you need to express more complex thoughts. You need to become extremely descriptive, like a 2-year-old child who doesn’t know his vocabulary yet.

For instance,

The student learns history from the teacher

becomes

The one who studies learns the communicated chronology that passed from the person whose job is to instruct others.

As a primary tool for communication, this can become very tedious. Better than nothing, for sure. Indeed, the original creator’s intention is to develop creativity and imagination.

However, if we do want to be understood by other human beings, we need a consensus. Everyone must use the same metaphors to be understood. This in turn means that you have to learn vocabulary – or in this case idioms -, just like in any other language. If you don’t, you might scratch your head when someone mentions a “confident bird”. Could it possibly be one of the following?

Actually, it is the metaphor people generally use for an “eagle” in Toki Pona. But if you haven’t come across the expression yet, any one of those above could certainly qualify as a “confident bird”.

Besides, others would probably also scratch their heads when you mention a “confident bird from the Andes”, although that one could come very easily as a “condor” for someone who is familiar with the Andean culture.

Conlangs are also biased

Created languages, or “conlangs”, also suffer from the biases of their creator(s). Because someone created a language with “goodwill” doesn’t mean the language itself is good, easy, or even usable for communication. We’ll examine the ease of learning and communicating of existing conlangs in part 5.

Does a “lingua franca” replace local languages?

To conclude this post, I would like to address this very sensitive topic. Language is deeply connected to the culture of the people who speak it.

Languages politically forced on populations destroy dialects

This is a common fear, due to a very big misunderstanding of what a “lingua franca” should be. Since English has become the de facto international language, many believe that an international language always tries to force itself on people and aims to replace all languages.

In many countries where a common language was forcefully introduced as “the common lingo”, it has been the case.

In my native France, the French Republic has spent countless efforts in the last 250 years trying to kill all regional languages, forcing people to speak French and ditch their local language or dialect. All this in the name of “unity”. And this strong will to eradicate dialects is still very much alive within the Parisian administration today – and, sadly, it has succeeded quite well. In June 2021, it voted on a new law to restrict any teaching of regional languages at school. But that is a political agenda, not “goodwill” to “help people communicate”. Instead, it is a tool to control the population from a centralized authoritarian administration.

In the same way, some other languages did replace the local dialects. But in most cases, those were the results of military conquest. Indeed, Vulgar Latin replaced many local languages in Europe during the Middle Ages. But that was the result of the colonization of territory by the Romans. Similarly, the Incas pushed Quechua on the people they conquered. With the Spanish takeover of South America, it grew even more because the Spaniards didn’t want to have translators for every single local language. Again, it was a military invasion. And after all, the language of the conquerors, Spanish, replaced Quechua to some extent.

English also comes with the conquering American mentality. Conquering through music, a huge film industry, fast food, and many other aspects. It is not the language itself that endangers others, but the associated culture.

This is not what an international language is for.

Lingua francas don’t kill other languages

As I have mentioned, many “lingua francas” emerged naturally in history, and rarely ever replaced or killed other languages. The trading language of the Mediterranean called “Lingua Franca” never replaced other local languages or dialects. Chinese outside of China, Malay, and Swahili, while being widely understood well beyond the borders of their native speakers, didn’t replace local dialects.

The goal needs to be precise: a “lingua franca” is an “alternative means of communication”. Not a new “unified world” thing. By the way, another name for such a language is “international auxiliary language”. Auxiliary. I speak my local language with my family, friends and fellow country or regional people who share a common culture. But if I need to communicate with someone who cannot understand my native language, I still have a tool to communicate with a lingua franca. The easier the alternative, the better.

I actually make the point that providing a constructed language to the world as a lingua franca is actually saving languages rather than endangering them. If you are speaking Cherokee today, you could just learn the easy lingua franca along with Cherokee, rather than having to study English. Because of this, some countries like some parts of Switzerland as well as Finland are actually switching fully to English, ditching their own languages because speaking both Finnish and English at a conversational level is hard (I already mentioned that English is a difficult language, don’t get me started about Finnish!). Which I personally find catastrophic. To keep the diversity, we need very easy access to the lingua franca. And if the auxiliary language didn’t require much effort, there is a good chance Switzerland and Finland would keep their native languages.

Enough spoken of existing languages. In the next part, we will focus on constructed languages: conlangs.