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:
There are two ways that a language can become a lingua franca: it can be formally adopted following a decision of an international body, or it can be- come the de facto lingua franca following the strength and extension of its community of speakers. The defeat of the Esperantist lobby in the League of Nations blocked the first path, and this made the second one imperative, that the community of speakers expand. The political climate of the first post- war years was in fact very congenial for Esperanto's expansion. Following the victory of the Allied powers in 1918, parliamentary democracy and liberal constitutions seemed to be the default model of government when the states that had emerged after the collapse of the Central and Eastern European em- pires embraced it. But what seemed to be the final triumph of democracy in European soil was only a mirage, and the Wilsonian dream of a new Euro- pean order based on national self-determination and democracy proved un- realistic. The international and domestic tensions triggered by national minorities (it was estimated that around 25 million people were living within the "wrong" state borders), combined with the international economic de- pression, drastically changed the political landscape. Beginning with Miklos Horthy's Regency in 1920 Hungary, democracies were toppling like domi- noes and replaced with nationalist, right-wing regimes. Italian democracy was next to collapse in 1922, and by the mid-1930s all Central and Eastern Eu ropean countries, with the exception of Czecho slovak i a, were under the rule of one kind or another of anti-democratic and nationalist regime. Only France and the northern fringe of Europe had been able to contain this anti- democratic wave.21 Esperantists of Central and Eastern Europe, harassed by the conservative press and government officials as untrustworthy members of the new national states when not indicted as friends of the Jews or the spear- head of Bolshevism, found it more difficult to recruit new members.22 In West- ern Europe the movement suffered its hardest blow in Germany, with the dismantling of the labor Esperanto movement and, shortly after, of the neu- tral Esperantist movement.
In sum, the big nations' fears of falling behind in the international com- petition for linguistic hegemony combined with the authoritarian and ethno- nationalist character of many European nation-states became insuperable obstacles to the Esperantists, conveniently labeled as either well-intentioned but ultimately eccentric cranks, or enemies of the nationalist (or revolution- ary, in the case of the USSR) aspirations of the new autocrats.
In the era of nationalism, Zamenhof conceived of Esperanto as an instru- ment to solve the Jewish question and, by extension, the ethnic and religious hatred that was poisoning European societies. If the problem was national- ism, the solution was not more nationalism, but less, and a non-national lan- guage could help. But the opposite solution triumphed. Deeply imbued with a nationalist ideology, Zamenhof's contemporary, the Lithuanian-born Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), was also very aware of the political dimension of language. As with Zamenhof, he was a language builder —and certainly the most successful among his contemporaries. Driven by a quasi-religious pas- sion, he moved to Palestine before the 1881 pogroms to give the Jewish na- tionalists what they most needed: a national language. From a stock of 8,000 words in the Bible and around 20,000 in rabbinical commentaries, he codi- fied, planned and, to borrow Romaine's expression "reinvented" a new lan- guage, Modern Hebrew, which in 1922, along with English and Arabic, became official in British Palestine.23
Ben-Yehuda succeeded because there was a real need for a lingua franca, given the different languages that diaspora Jews spoke when they moved to Palestine. Second, as a reinvented language, Modern Hebrew was neutral. Since it was not anybody's mother language, everybody was on the same foot- ing. Third, and perhaps more important, it was a language constructed or re- invented on the basis of a sacred language. Ben-Yehuda therefore simultaneously proved Zamenhof right and wrong. As Modern Hebrew demonstrated, Za- menhof's dream of making an artificially constructed language the language of millions of people proved possible. But at the same time, he proved Za- menhof wrong: in the era of nationalism and national rivalries, an artificial language could not succeed if it was not adopted by a nation to become part
and parcel of a nation-building project.
* * *
When the battle of artificial languages began, three main languages, German, English, and French, competed against each other to become the international language. Today, English holds that position. According to some estimates, around one-fourth of the world's population has at least a basic knowledge of English. More important, English is spoken in all corners of the world. This combination of a huge number of speakers and geographical distribution is unprecedented in the history of language. Compared with other lingua fran- cas such as Latin, Arabic, Persian, or French, all geographically and socially bounded, English has spread over the five continents and through many ech- elons of society. It has become the first global language. And although it might also be the last one—with computer translation technology allowing everyone to use their own language and be understood by everybody else, as Nicolas Ostler suggests—for the time being no other language can challenge English's dominance.24
Given this new scenario, what are the odds for an artificial language such as Esperanto to be adopted internationally? Can we picture an international body embracing Esperanto as its only language, or as just another official language? With twenty-eight countries and twenty-four official languages following the entry of Croatia in July 2013, the European Union can help us explore this issue. Few question that the EU is entrapped in a linguistic di- lemma that opposes a democratic principle (the valuing of multilingualism and the equal treatment of all official languages) with an efficiency principle (having less multilingualism and simplifying the EU's linguistic regime).25
This tension has economic and political effects. For example, for ten years EU members were not able to agree on a unified patent system, given Spain and Italy's objections to the idea that European patents could only be in En- glish, French, or German. Only in December 2012 did the remaining twenty- five EU members pass a unified patent system, which, due to the complaints of Spain and Italy, had to be sanctioned by the European Court of Justice.26 Also, the one billion-plus euros that the European Union annually spends in translation and interpretation services could perhaps be better allocated to other programs.27 Unable to fully implement multilingualism and grant all European languages the same status, the EU has ended up discovering that some languages are more equal than others. Most of the internal documents and negotiations are written and conducted in the three main languages: En- glish, French, and German. In the second tier of the hierarchy are Spanish, Italian, and sometimes Polish, due to the sheer number of their speakers. The remaining official languages lag far behind, and English dwarfs them all. Not being official at the state level, regional languages such as Sami, Breton, and Catalan do not even enter the picture. This hierarchical order affects the work- ing routines of European officials as well as their communications with the citizens they serve. For example, a laudable practice recently introduced by the European Commission is to post draft proposals on its website and let individual citizens, professionals, academics, and organizations participate in an open discussion about them. The documents for discussion, however, are not translated in all official languages. In fact, quite often they are only available in English, and occasionally also in French and German, with the end result that the ability to participate in the European demos is somewhat filtered by language and, indirectly, wealth.28