From the article: "By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English." Yep. Esperanto is toast as a world interlanguage compared to English. The number of new speakers added to English each year just by natural increase of households in which English is spoken as a home language is, matched for levels of proficiency, comfortably greater than the total worldwide number of speakers of Esperanto. (The same is true, of course, of Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, and Hindustani.) English is by far the language of choice in "interlanguage" contexts, as for example when a native speaker of Korean travels to Taiwan (I have seen this many times) or when a native speaker of Japanese travels to China (I have seen this too) or even when educated native speakers of various Sinitic languages meet up and some are not proficient in standard Mandarin (I have seen this plenty of times too). The use of English as an interlanguage in India alone (where mandating Hindi as the sole interregional language would be very politically contentious) ensures that English will continue to grow and thrive, even if the United States and Britain somehow disappeared from the world. (I have been watching a lot of films from India recently, as my town is blessed with more than one cinema that show current films from India, and even in a movie set in India with entirely Indian characters, you will hear little snatches of English embedded in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam dialog, and you will always see signs in English in street scenes even of very rural places.)
So, yes, what will the world speak only a century from now, as the article asks? Plenty of other languages, for sure, and I for one am glad I devoted years to learning Chinese and German and other languages, but there will be more and more people speaking English in more and more places as the years go by.
On the other hand, Esperanto is the only constructed language to have got anywhere at all, and is outlasting those smaller languages that are going extinct every few weeks and those natural languages on life support kept around by hobbyists with too much power, like Welsh.
It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed, and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language.
Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language
That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.[1]
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?
I would struggle, because I'm not a fluent Esperantist; it would come out be omething like:
Alian ideon. la Esperanton estas la sola konstruitan lingvon kio havas multaj da parolistoj en multaj loĝoj. Ĝi ekzistas, dum ĉiu semajno aliajn malgrandajn lingvojn mortas, kaj ĝi havas pli vivo ol tiojn denaskajn lingvojn kio vivas de amatoristoj kun tro influo - ekzemple kimra lingvo.
La Esperanton neestas la plej uzata mondlingvon (nuntempe), sed ĝi ne mortas. Nenio ŝanĝis la fakto ke vi povas lerni ĝin, ĝis vi bonparolas, en malpli tempo ol iu denaska lingvo.
--
[I dropped English idioms "on the other hand" - which hand?, "have got anywhere" - languages don't go anywhere, some of the metaphoric stuff about a language being alive and "on life support". If I've written it reasonably well it should carry the same general meaning. Transliterating this comment back to English:
Another idea. Esperanto is the only constructed language which has many speakers in many places. It exists while every week other small languages die, and it has more life than those native languages which live by amateurs with too much influence - for example Welsh.
Esperanto is not the most used world-language (currently), but it is not dead. Nothing changed the fact that you can learn it, until you speak well, in less time than any native language.
]
I could surely learn Dutch to given level of proficiency faster than I could learn Esperanto to the same level of proficiency. And what's really sad about that for Esperanto is that learning Dutch would give me access to more speakers in more places than learning Esperanto does.
That's not a great comparison since Dutch is about as close as a foreign language gets to English. And when you learn it you can only use it in the Netherlands and some former colonies. More speakers yes, but ... More places?
You seemed to be quite confident in your use of the phrase "any native language," so I immediately suggested a counterexample. As the Justin Rye website, already linked above, points out, Esperanto is NASTILY hard to learn for the native speakers of many languages. I by no means accept the statement that Esperanto is easy to learn to a given degree of proficiency unless someone shows me a well conducted study to that effect published outside of Esperantist advocacy publications. (I know for certain that the United States Army investigated using Esperanto as a language for the "aggressor" force in war games, but that practice appears to have been abandoned. Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage that I have to conclude, on the basis of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," that Esperanto is not especially easy to learn for actual real-world use with persons who have other native language backgrounds.)
But why surely? What makes you suggest Dutch would be easier than Esperanto to learn to fluency? Dutch looks as daunting as any other natural language to me, whereas the simplified patterns in Esperanto make it much more attractive. No more (goose->geese, but bed->beds). No more (swim->swam, but jump->jumped). No more (row/row) spelling and pronounciation weirdness. (X/malX instead of X/Y) dramatically reducing vocabulary to say the same thing. Looks much easier than Dutch.
(Albeit not Easy because how easy can it ever be to learn to say everything in another way?)
Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage
If they really had "sufficient" interest, they would have funded some linguists and had an interlanguage designed from scratch, then mandated that it be taught in their schools and solved the problem[1]. Language work requires minimal technology, minimal physical resources, and minimal space, so funding from a government scale budget would be a non-issue ... so why haven't they?
All of the central European governments with multiple neighbour countries speaking different languages, international organizations like the EU, the UN, WTO, ISO, any of these people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intergovernmental_organ... - which of them had sufficient interest to actually try and solve the problem - in whatever way, picking any of the myriads of constructed languages or having their own designed and agreed upon?
Your suggestion is that they investigated Esperanto and found it too difficult, right? But why haven't they done anything, except be happy that English or French is good enough for them and ha ha sod the entire rest of the world who find English and French difficult to learn to fluency.
[1] I conclude, either the problem of agreeing on a more-simple shared language is unsolvable, or they didn't have "sufficient interest" in solving it.
I have read large parts of this rant, and I started off thinking "wow, he's really ripping into Esperanto, there will be nothing useful left afterwards!". Then I started thinking about it; on the high level his arguments are weak. E.g. the overall theme of his rant seems to boil down to "If Esperanto has flaws, it can't be good", and on the low level, his arguments are weak, he gets right down to "A flaw in Esperanto is that the 1905 published book on it contained a typo". That's someone with a real axe to grind.
I'm not linguist enough to follow very closely, but pages and pages of this are essentially. "Here's what Esperanto did. It's bad because it's not what I'd have done". Look:
The actual forms of these inflections (‐os? ‐inta?) are unconvincing. Worst of all is ‐u, the imperative. Most languages, for obvious reasons, arrange it so that commands can be given via the most basic verbal “stem” available, not a special, uniquely inflected form!
Well I disagree, I like that basic stems and imperatives are clearly different. Now what?
B3: I wouldn't have chosen those sounds.
F1: It uses words people knew!!!!!
F2: I wouldn't have chosen those words!
F3: It's plausible that a hypothetical language could do better.
G2: He wasn't even a real linguist!
G5: I don't like how this looks, therefore it's bad.
M1: Unsurprisingly, Esperanto's phrase structure rules and so on turn out to be hardly distinguishable from the ones Zamenhof grew up with – they're pretty good simple ones, but it's sheer blind luck… - Really? You can't even give him the benefit of the doubt? He spent ten years working on this and the only way he did something you like was blind luck?
On and on, sour grapes and "hypothetically it could be done differently and more to my taste" by the author.
Yes there are some valid criticisms in there, the way "Three twelfths, 32nds and Thirty halves" are written the same, numerically.
But then we come back to... what's the point of the article? "If there are problems it must be completely useless?" or "If I can find no problems then everyone would speak it?" or "it's possible to design a language that nobody would find any flaws with?".
Anyway, let me not whinge forever, since I'm not a fluent Esperantist or a linguist. See instead Claude Piron's response to that deconstruction: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm (He being a UN translator working on translating English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish into French, and was fluent in Esperanto).
There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.
Languages such as Esperanto are no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or English.
When I observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia, especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans, I made it a point to ask people how much time they had devoted to acquiring the language. [..] Most of these Asians with a rather crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity, nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is based on erroneous data. (See my research report "Esperanto: l'image et la realite'", Cours et Études de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8, 1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this book can be found in Language in Society, 26 (1), 143-147, 1997).
Also, ref. Bjarne Stroustrup's quote 'There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses'.
I think the article asks the wrong question. Surely by 2115 we will have a perfect universal translator fluent in hundreds of languages.
Why learn Chinese or Hindi if your smartphone or perhaps your glasses will seamlessly translate back and forth between your native language? The pressure to learn a second language will be lessened greatly.
Sometimes automatic translation seems to be the flying cars of computer engineering.
In 2115 we might be able to technically do a very good approximation of it, but it might not have much use except for very casual contexts.
I think it really comes down to controlling one's communication. For instance, right now businessmen learning Mandarin are not cheaping on translator services, they want a better understanding of someone's culture, the concepts they think in, and want to speak in their own words.
Communication is and always will be extremely important, and as soon as there will be enough stakes, the time we 'lose' in learning will always be worth the gain in control.
Of course a universal translator would help for tourism and casual matters. But I think for translating a menu, street signs or simple instructions we are already having pretty decent applications and won't need to wait for another century.
As an example of how overly optimistic people have been about translation, here's a page on Foresight Exchange (a long-running play-money prediction market) where people have been betting on the probability of high-quality machine translation by 2015, since 1995:
Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015! Of course the people who were more actively following AI knew that it wouldn't. I probably doubled my fake money on FX, if only I could remember my login.
Overly optimistic over the course of 20 years is one thing, but I find it pretty difficult to believe that translation between major languages won't be mostly solved in 100 years. The difference between what is available today and 20 years ago is already pretty impressive, but 100 years ago we didn't even have the theoretical underpinnings of a computer, let alone a machine capable of any kind of automated, generalized translation. Unless machine learning developments or computing power comes to a screeching halt, I can't see any insurmountable roadblocks.
That isn't to say I agree with the sentiment that efficient and accurate translation will make English obsolete. Pretty much every major programming language, along with things like URLs and markup, requires using ISO Latin characters found on a QWERTY keyboard, which greatly limits the power of a major class of contenders. English just happened to be the lingua franca at the time that cultural globalization allowed for a language to keep that status long past the nation that made it such stopped being a super power (which, of course, may or may not happen to the US in the next 100 years).
I think translation isn't an isolated problem. I mean by that that we might not be able to solve translation alone, and probably will need an almost exact machine reproduction of the human thinking process to correctly translate something.
For any mildly complex concept, heuristics, context analysis, pattern matching and word databases won't be enough to match two exact sentences in different languages. Even a sentence like 'I felt sick watching him treating his partner this way' will need an extreme lot of intelligence to correctly parse and convey in a different language.
If in 100 years AI really reaches the holy grail and we have actual artifical intelligence, translation will be a solved problem. Now, will we be able to reach that goal in 100 years ? I hope, but that's not a given I think.
And the comments include "Google has been doing this for ages".
Siri, Cortana, Google Now, all have speech recognition. Google and Microsoft have translation engines. Microsoft and WordLens (and Google?) have live image OCR and translation.
It's no Star Trek Universal Translator, but it's a thing and it exists.
The thing is, that would require that your smartphone be sufficiently aware of the context of your words that it could correctly map one ambiguous statement in one language to another in another language with a different set of ambiguities.
For example, the German 'ich mag sie' could mean 'I like her' or 'I like them' or 'I like you' in formal settings, while the English 'at least' could be translated to German as 'zumindest', or 'mindestens', or 'wenigstens', with different emotional significance.
I'm not sure you could really do adhoc translation at the language level with any real fluidity: you would probably need your phone to monitor your brain before you spoke to get at the pre-language meaning of what you are saying, if that is even possible.
Not to detract from your point (which is very true; for machine translation to match human translations they need equal access to and understanding of context), but as a native German speaker, your example seems wrong to me :). "It is pleasing to her" = "es gefällt ihr","It is pleasing to them" = "es gefällt ihnen".
No doubt it's possible to construct examples that support your agument in just about any language, though. I'd recommend East Asian ones, since they're less heavy on the pronouns than Indo-European languages, and you can generally often omit subject or object if it's clear from context, or are even expected to for good style. Korean poetry even relies on intentional ambiguity a lot of the time, forcing the reader to consider the options, for their enjoyment or to challenge them.
Yep, 'ich mag sie' could be informally referring to a woman, formally referring to a person of either gender, or just any group.
Machine translation is of course aware of this problem, and doing the (rough) equivalent of "whole program analysis" is an active concern. I.e. you can try to source info elsewhere in a longer input to decide between multiple possible translations for another bit. The problem is really these short inputs where no context is easily available to the program - it's an input problem in some sense; it's just much easier for a human translator to guess from cues the program simply has no input channels for. One of those cues is who exactly they've been hired by, though, and that can be replicated with user profiles, too.
I wonder if there would be even more demand for an e.g. refined English-to-casual English translator, and vice versa. If someone from one of the entrenched higher classes uses a phrase like "acquire the appropriate attire for dressage," one of their new staff might not be educated enough to understand even the own-language equivalent and its nuances. I would think there'd be plenty of demand for something that transcends languages to perform meaning-discovery tasks for the wearer/user.
I'm not sure about "more demand", but I wouldn't be surprised if multi-language ability were to seen as more distinguishing in a world in which language translation is readily available - i.e. "can do what most rely on a machine for". I don't think "why do they trouble themselves instead of just using machine translation" would happen any time soon, since being able to speak a language yourself still affords the most direct communication path (unless it falls out of fashion to talk face to face).
Especially since this is something where it's not possible for machines to truly just eclipse humans -- if you're fluent, you're fluent. Of course machine translation easily surpasses human speakers on vocab, but you're more or less bounded by what the recipient/listener can understand, anyway.
But demand for translation services will likely dwindle.
That said, one of the best reasons to learn languages is simply the mental exercise, and unless we change the way humans learn and maintain mental performance, that will remain true.
I don't know how people will communicate in 2115, but I can't imagine a 2115 where every human doesn't know every language without any effort at all. How can a discussion of life that far in the future not mention how computers will shape it?
I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages.
They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important.
In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more tolerant of bad or variant pronunciations than english(Assuming you can get tones right but there are really only 5 tones to learn). Tones just make a few more bits available for error correction.
As background I have studied chinese for 8+ years and lived in asia for a couple of years as well.
I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages.
Most irregular verbs also serve to increase bandwidth though: You can say "I ate" faster than "I eated".
We use tones in English, too. Is it TACO Bell, or Taco BELL? Either one can get you laughed out of the room in refined company, depending on your peer group.
I'm not sure what you are trying to communicate with the capitalization there, but what it suggests to me is more stress/accent than tones; those aren't the same thing.
I've never thought of syllable accents as being equivalent to tones. Maybe you're right but to me the difference in emphasis has more to do with cadence and volume than tone.
English has intonation, which is different from the "tones" that tonal languages such as Chinese have. Intonation is the use of pitch to convey additional information regarding emotion or attitude. Tones, on the other hand, are used to differentiate completely different words altogether.
For tonal languages, the use of tone as a distinguishing characteristic is similar to any other phonemic characteristic you would typically have to distinguish words in any other non-tonal language. For instance, in English, voicing is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "pat" and "bat". Similarly in Mandarin Chinese, tone is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "mā" (mother) and "mǎ" (horse).
Tone is not phonemic in English. What you are describing is properly called intonation, which is the application of pitch (as well as stress, loudness, tempo and other markers) to distinguish more subtle conversational functions.
Stress in English is phonemic however, viz. this minimal pair:
"rekord (record, n.) vs r@"kord (record, v.)
This is a regular phonological process in many English dialects to derive verbs from certain nouns (or is it the other way around?). Future English could turn this into a tonal distinction - I think that has a precedent in Swedish.
I think that quite contrary - when language without literature is lost then everything about this language - traditions, knowledge, history, is lost forever (unless anthropologists manage to save some bits of it).
Not nessasarily, the people could continue to pass down the traditions/knowledge/history using another language. If a language with literature is lost, then you loose just as much of those things, as well as the literature (because no one can understand it). Of course, having literature increases the chances of having a rossetta stone.
I have a different opinion. I think people will stick to their languages, and some will die naturally.
However, one new language will emerge. It will be a set of 500 to 1000 words that anyone can learn and use to communicate world wide.
Similarly to a programming language, this one will be limited in words and easy to pick up. This language will act as a framework, giving the essential people would need to have basic communication. 500 to 1000 words.
What culture is English tied to anymore, though? India, South Africa, even Asia to some degree have significant unique English vocabularies, having recombined or reapplied existing morphemes to fit local cultural contexts. Consider the Korean "officetel" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officetel). You're not wrong to point to basic xenophobia as shaping what people do, but I think the "ownership" of English is diffuse enough now that it would take much less effort to dilute it further than coin a new language (which doesn't really happen anyway).
Your hundred year prediction is already more than a hundred years out of date. Welcome to 1880's Bialystok in not-yet-Poland, and the birth of Esperanto.
Here we are in 2015 and the one hundredth annual Esperanto Congress is coming.
The reasons approximately nobody speaks Esperanto now, are the same reasons nobody will speak your universal language in 2115.
I see things differently. I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries.
I think it's odd for people to argue that "it failed" when it's the only language to have started from scratch and taken off at all; there's no precedent to compare it with - how long "should" a language take to go from non-existent to popular?
It was ahead of its time, perhaps. I never heard of it until this thread. It would good to learn from its failure and not repeat the same mistake. But certainly just because something did not succeed does not mean another solution won't.
I think it's more likely that most people don't want to invest thousands of hours of effort into learning another language, and those who do, do so because they like a particular country/language/culture, than any big mistake it made.
So, yes, what will the world speak only a century from now, as the article asks? Plenty of other languages, for sure, and I for one am glad I devoted years to learning Chinese and German and other languages, but there will be more and more people speaking English in more and more places as the years go by.