Esperantic Studies

Introducing Ourselves ...

How can international language barriers be overcome? There are several possible remedies. Language teaching can be improved. Translation can be automated. Official international languages can be adopted. Languages can be reformed for international use. New languages can be designed. Nonlinguistic communication systems can be created. Other solutions not yet imagined may be discovered.

ESF adopts a multidisciplinary approach to improving the world linguistic situation. This is a matter not only for applied linguists, but also for engineers, social scientists, humanists, politicians, and citizens. For example, solutions to language barriers may need to comply with treaties guaranteeing equal rights irrespective of language, or with emerging norms such as freedom of information, the right to communicate, and the right to know.

The study of international language problems, now called interlinguistics, has a long history. It has occupied philosophers, inventors, and scientists like Wilkins and Leibnitz in the 17th century, Delormel and Condorcet in the 18th, Lott and Zamenhof in the 19th, and Jespersen and Wüster in the 20th. These pioneering, activist scholars, presciently envisioning a worldwide communication network, theorized, experimented, and organized for what they regarded as appropriate linguistic reforms.

The scholars who founded ESF were moved to do so by the recent experience of Esperanto. Of over 900 attempts to design world languages, Esperanto alone became the vernacular and literary medium of a durable speech community. By World War II, several hundred thousand persons used Esperanto. This triumph, though minuscule on a world scale, apparently convinced many interlinguists that the world language problem had found its final solution. In the early postwar era, both popular and scholarly discussion often degenerated into debates between polar alternatives such as Esperanto versus English.

ESF saw a need for renewed serious scholarship in interlinguistics, including but not restricted to Esperanto. In recent years, research, publication, and education in interlinguistics have begun to flourish again. For examples, see the bibliographic survey on page 3. ESF is a participant and facilitator in this work. Our newsletter will publicize current progress and opportunities in interlinguistics. We have published a research bibliography, worked on instructional development, and provided information to scholars, officials, and journalists. We consult with educators at all levels.

We seek advice, cooperation, and support from individuals and organizations, including other foundations. Nominations for our rotating Advisory Board are welcome. Although ESF at present has no regular grant program, we invite inquiries about support. In suitable cases we shall attempt to locate sources of funds or to offer direct collaboration. ESF is incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia, is recognized as a tax-exempt private foundation, and claims status as a private operating foundation (50%-limit organization).

Time to Learn Asian Latin?

Britannia insula est. Amo, amas, amat.

In the good old days, the college prep course in high school included a year or two of Latin. It produced few if any Latin conversationalists, but it did reduce the mystery of Romance languages and of English etymology.

The good old days are gone now, and outside the Vatican Latin really is a dead language. But I have a new scheme for bulking out the language part of the standard college prep course. It's time to teach young Americans the Latin of Asia. Let's have everybody learn a thousand or so Chinese characters.

The languages of East Asia are of course different from one another. Japanese and Korean have similar grammatic structures, like Italian and French, but the pronunciations are completely unalike. Chinese has no grammatical connection at all to Japanese or Korean, and within China there are a number of mutually incomprehensible dialects.

What Japanese, Korean, and all the varieties of Chinese do have in common is a bond even stronger than what Latin represents in Europe: they can all be written with Chinese characters. And if you know some characters you can make sense out of languages whose spoken version you could not begin to comprehend. If a Japanese person dropped into the middle of China, he'd have no more luck than the average American would at asking directions or chatting with passersby. But if he could write out his questions or pick up a guidebook, he could quickly figure out what was going on, since despite minor variations the characters for north, south, office, school, plane, train, and most other things are the same. Chinese scientists might not be able to say hello or goodbye in Japanese, but they can read Japanese research reports and get early word on the results.

The real point is: Americans and other Westerners could do the same thing in China, Japan, Korea, and much of Southeast Asia if they learned some characters, too. Is my 1,000character scheme somewhat unrealistic? Maybe so. One friend suggested I push for universal Esperanto instead, since it was more likely to occur. But, if people are looking for practical ways to improve our schools and cope with the rise of Asia, here's a place to start.

[Reprinted with permission from Morning Edition , National Public Radio, 2 May 1989. Fallows is Washington correspondent of The Atlantic and author of More Like Us: Making America Great Again (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). He was an ESF consultant in Beijing in 1986 and described his experience in Esperanto Lives, The Atlantic , December 1986.]

Two Languages for the Price of One?: The Propaedeutic Puzzle

How much more time would it take you to learn Japanese and Esperanto than to learn Japanese alone? If certain interlinguistic researchers are correct, the answer may be no time at all! These scientists advocate the propaedeutic hypothesis, which says that an invented language is a potent precursor for the study of an ethnic language.

Aptitudes and motivations for language learning may both be boosted when one first studies a planned (or artificial) language. An argument for this hypothesis was made by Sylla M. Chaves in the information-theory journal Grundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft in 1978. Chaves reasoned that the surface features of a planned language are nearly isomorphic with grammatical categories (parts of speech, tenses, moods, cases, etc.) that monolinguals have internalized but have not yet learned to name or explicitly manipulate. Learning a planned language, he claimed, is like learning a model language. As in any field, models, though artificially simplified, may be better learning tools in preparation for the messy real world than realistically complex case studies. Thus, while learning any second language may help in learning a third language, the preparatory impact is hypothesized to be especially great when the second language is a planned one.

If the propaedeutic effect is strong enough, time saved in acquisition of a third language might even exceed the time spent studying the second one. In other words, study of the planned language may more than pay for itself. If we knew this for a fact, we would all presumably want to precede our studies of foreign languages with study of a model language.

A 1968 experiment in a United Kingdom middle school reported that students who studied Esperanto for 6 months and then French for 3 years emerged with greater mean fluency in French than matched students who took French for 4 years. An experiment in several elementary schools in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s resulted in an estimate that German children studying English for more than 3 years would be net gainers in terms of English competence if they converted their first year of study from English to Esperanto.

Unfortunately, both of these studies allowed selfselection of student subjects, thus violating a basic rule of experimental design. It is easy to imagine that students willing to volunteer for the study of Esperanto, at the cost of a postponed study of English or French, are on average more interested in languages or more selfconfident about their ability to learn languages than those who take the traditional option. Until a rigorously controlled study is attempted, the propaedeutic power of a planned model language will remain an enticing but unproven claim.

ESF would like to hear from schools and educational researchers interested in being consultants to, or participants in, a study to compare the propaedeutic effects of the preparatory study of planned and natural languages.

Anthropologists Demand Language Rights for Native Americans

Recent Research in Interlinguistics

Interlinguistics has no normal place in academic organization charts, so its outputs in any interdisciplinary field can be difficult to locate. To help you find your way, we list some recent publications, including a sprinkling of our own work. Ask us about sources for items you wish to acquire.

Blanke, Detlev. 1985. Internationale Plansprachen. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Surveys attempts to design an international language.

Fishman, Joshua A., Robert L. Cooper, and Andrew W. Conrad. 1977. The spread of English. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House.

Forster, Peter G. 1982. The Esperanto movement. The Hague: Mouton. Historical and sociological analysis, using survey of British members.

Glossop, Ronald. 1988. Language policy and a just world order. Alternatives , 13, 395409. Language discrimination in international affairs and a possible role for Esperanto.

Harry, Ralph L. 1989. Development of a language for international law: the experience of Esperanto. Language problems and language planning , 13, 3544.

Humblet, JeanE. 1984. The language problem in international organizations. International social science journal , 36, 14355.

Interlinguistica tartuensis. 1982-. Subseries of Acta et commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis (Tartu, Estonia, USSR). Articles, mostly in Russian, largely about the history of efforts to design international languages.

Janton, Pierre. 1991. Esperanto: language, literature, movement (ed. and trans. Humphrey Tonkin et al.). Albany: SUNY Press.

Jordan, David K. 1987. Esperanto and Esperantism: symbols and motivations in a movement for linguistic equality. Language problems and language planning , 11, 10425.

Julià, Pere. 1989. Linguistic theory and international communication. Language problems and language planning , 13, 923.

Large, J. A[ndrew]. 1983. The foreign-language barrier. London: André Deutsch. In world science.

Large, [J.] Andrew. 1985. The artificial language movement. Oxford: Blackwell. 17th20th centuries.

Lieberman, E. James. 1979. Esperanto and transnational identity: the case of Dr. Zamenhof. International journal of the sociology of language , 20, 89107. Psychobiographical and psychosocial essay.

Lins, Ulrich. 1988. Die gefährliche Sprache. Gerlingen, Germany: Bleicher. [Also exists in Italian and Esperanto.] Persecution of Esperanto and its speakers in Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

Maxwell, Dan. 1988. On the acquisition of Esperanto. Studies in second language acquisition , 10, 5161. Surveys learnability experiments.

Pool, Jonathan. 1991. The official language problem. American political science review , 85 (2). Proves mathematically that a language policy can be both efficient and fair.

Pool, Jonathan. 1991. The world language problem. Rationality and society , 2, 78105. Mathematically models viability of a world language.

Schubert, Klaus. 1987. Metataxis: contrastive dependency syntax for machine translation. Providence: Foris. Includes accessible introduction.

Schubert, Klaus (ed.). 1989. Interlinguistics: aspects of the science of planned languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Psychological, literary, grammatical, terminological, and engineering studies.

Serta gratulatoria in honorem Juan Régulo, vol. 2: Esperantismo. 1987. La Laguna: Universidad de la Laguna. Articles in various languages on Esperanto movement, literature, language.

Tabory, Mala. 1980. Multilingualism in international law and institutions. Rockville, MD: Sijthoff & Noordhoff.

Tonkin, Humphrey (ed.). 1987. One hundred years of Esperanto. Special issue of Language problems and language planning , 11 (3).

Verloren van Themaat, Willem A. 1989. Esperanto literature and its reception outside the Esperanto movement. Babel , 35, 2139.

Wells, John. 1989. Lingvistikaj aspektoj de Esperanto , 2nd edn. Rotterdam: Universala EsperantoAsocio. [Also exists in German.] Phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexicography, semantics of Esperanto.

Want a lighter introduction? Here are two popular surveys:

Crystal, David. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language , part 10, Language in the world. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Richardson, David. 1988. Esperanto: learning and using the international language. Eastsound, WA: Orcas. A textbook and handbook.

For further references, we suggest three bibliographical sources:

MLA international bibliography of books and articles on the modern languages and literatures , vol. 3, Linguistics. Classifications include auxiliary languages.

Tonkin, Humphrey (comp.). 1977. Esperanto and international language problems: a research bibliography , 4th edn. Out of print; available from our Washington office in photocopy for $3.00 postpaid.

Symoens, Edward F. 1989. Dissertations on Esperanto and interlinguistics. Rotterdam: Universala EsperantoAsocio (Nieuwe Binnenweg 176, 3015 BJ Rotterdam, Netherlands).

Esperanto Studies and Interlinguistics.

Esperantic Studies Foundation.