Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language
- Автор: Garvía Roberto
- Год: 2015
- Язык: русский
- Жанр: Культурология
Электронная книга - «Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language». Краткое содержание книги:
The Nazi Esperantists were in no way representative of the movement. As we have seen before, the pursuit of peace had a more central position for the average Esperantist. But the fact that Esperanto could also be found, albeit temporarily, in the most unexpected and undesirable quarters proves the capacity of the language to expand and quite often to be appropriated by the most divergent sectors of society. Esperantists came from all walks of life and chose to learn the language for quite different reasons. They were Bolsheviks, anarchists, and socialists; atheists, and religious-minded people; Catholics and Protestants; feminists and conservatives; blind people; Social Darwin- ists and people convinced of the sacrality of all human life; Herderians and anti-nationalists; people exploring new life styles and "hidden worlds," and people concerned about real-world problems; scientists and Nobel Prize win- ners and workers with a basic education; librarians and Taylorist engineers; and radical and conservative pacifists. They attest to a diversity of interests only foreshadowed in the Volapukist movement.
But, since the Volapukists were not able to agree on the basics of their lan- guage, a precondition for a language to develop and move in different direc- tions, they lived and died together, fighting about this or that word or grammar rule. The Esperantists, in contrast, were able to agree on their Fundamento, which let them explore the language's utility in different and sometimes op- posing directions. This agreement did not make the community of Esperan- tists to be a thick one. On the contrary, it was traversed by different worldviews and lifestyles. Esperantists ended up speaking the same language, but not dancing to the same music.
It was precisely this diversity of interests and peoples within the move- ment, the potential of the language to infiltrate in different sectors of society, and its demonstrated utility as a means of verbal and written communication that made Esperanto not only look invincible vis-a-vis potential rivals yet to come, but also in some quarters a political threat that had to be contained. This potential to spread in different directions, the linguistic resiliency and adaptability created by Esperanto's diverse users, and the merits of empha- sizing communities of speakers over technical perfection—all these prove to be critical when we consider Ido, Esperanto's most dangerous rival.
PART IV
Ido and Its Satellites
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"One Ideal International Language": Ido
In 1900, before the opening of the Paris Universal Exhibition, Leopold Leau, the ex-Volapukist and professor of mathematics at the University of Dijon, published Une langue universelle est-elle possible? In this brochure, the au- thor did not position himself for Volapuk, Esperanto, or any other language project. He was mainly deploring how a multiplicity of vernaculars impeded scientific progress. He anticipated that this problem was going to become quite visible at the international scientific meetings scheduled to take place in Paris. And, consequently, he proposed that national scientific societies and the re- cently created International Association of Academies name delegates to a committee that should try to find a solution. He commissioned some friends who would be attending international congresses at the Universal Exhibition to put this proposal on the floor. Some of them were successful, but not many. Unsurprisingly, the Congres de l'enseignement des langues vivantes did not want to hear anything about an international language. The participants at the Congres d'histoire comparee, the Congres de l'enseignement technique, the Congres de philosophie, and the Congres des mathematiciens, were more enthusiastic. They agreed to name delegates—in the last case, Leau himself— for the proposed committee.1
Leau did not have to try hard to convince his old friend, Louis Couturat (1868-1914), about his scheme. Although with some resistance from fellow philosophers—more particularly, from those who thought that the use of dif- ferent languages in philosophical investigations was a blessing, not a curse— participants of the Congres de philosophie finally agreed to name Couturat for the projected committee.2
By this time, Couturat was already fascinated with the idea of an artifi- cial language. With a major in mathematics, he had applied his interests to philosophy and symbolic logic. His dissertation on the problem of the infi- nite received a very favorable review from Bertrand Russell, with whom Cou- turat later forged a closed friendship.
Both Couturat's interest in symbolic logic and in the possibility of an arti- ficial language originated in his research on Leibniz, many of whose works were still buried at the archives of the library of Hannover, waiting to be dis- covered. In his work La logique de Leibniz, published in 1901, Couturat de- voted a lot of attention to Leibniz's ideas on the problem and possibility of a philosophical language. But, contrary to Leibniz, as well as to Dalgarno and Wilkins, Couturat did not think it possible to construct a philosophical lan- guage. He did think it possible, however, to approximate this ideal with the help of symbolic logic. The new field of symbolic logic, Couturat thought, could help adjudicate between competing artificial languages. By thinking in these terms, he and Leau were reproducing the agenda and spirit of the American Philosophical Society, which, as we saw in Chapter 4, thought that the construction and ultimate decision about the properties of an artificial language should not be left to aficionados. More important, the success of an international language, according to Leau and Couturat, as well as the American Philosophical Society, exclusively depended on its internal quali- ties, no matter the number of people who had been lured by one or another competing project.
Following their plan, in January 1901, Leau and Couturat established the Delegation for the Adoption of an Auxiliary Language. They wanted to con- vince the general public of the need to adopt an international, auxiliary lan- guage, and, more importantly, to adjudicate among different projects. To promote the Delegation, Couturat launched an intense campaign, mostly fo- cused on scholars and scientists. This campaign had uneven results. For ex- ample, his friend and rising star Bertrand Russell was not very enticed by this idea. As he wrote to Couturat, he still preferred the Leibnizian project of a strictly logical language. Also, if the merit of an artificial language such as Esperanto is that "it saves us the trouble of learning two or three foreign lan- guages, I wouldn't say that there is much utility in the project, since it only spares us of a little bit of trouble . . . and I think that learning foreign languages has a value of itself." Still, Russell thought that Couturat's plan could have some utility "if the Russians, the Dutch, and so on, were persuaded to adopt it; since, it would be intolerable that it became necessary to learn all these barbaric languages (langues barbares)." In the end, Russell agreed to help his friend and campaign for the Delegation.3
Like Russell, more than 1,300 scholars and around 300 scientific societ- ies and academies gave their support to Couturat's Delegation. They expected that the International Association of Academies would pursue the matter. If not, the Delegation would name a commission that would choose among the competing language projects and give its official support to the winner. To help the cause Leau and Couturat published in 1903 the Histoire de la langue universelle, a 500-plus-page book that analyzes more than forty language projects originating from as early as the seventeenth century. Four years later, the Histoire was updated with the supplement Les nouvelles langues internationales.