Philippe van Parijs kaj Esperanto
Dear Philippe van Parijs
Your latest book, Linguistic Justice, is one I've enjoyed very much to read (except for the equations -- I'm not a very mathematical head). It's one of those books that could be wrong on all the claims it makes, still it's so articulate and thought-provoking that the debate would be much poorer without it. However, there is one part of the book that finds itself way below your usual level, and that's your remarks about Esperanto on pages 39-46. You're probably already thinking "Oh no, not yet another crank", but read on. I'm sure I can tell you a few interesting things you won't hear elsewhere.
Firstly, a language does not have to be perfectly neutral in terms of equidistance in order to work perfectly as a neutral language. It's much more a matter of who "owns" the language than what it actually looks like. And even more than that, it's a matter of the position of the language-owning community within the global community. This is a line of thinking that a social scientist will need to pursue in order to disentangle the concept of an international language from that of an imperial language. But you didn't do that, you tried to be a linguist, didn't you?
Let me tell you what the linguistic perspective is. Esperanto is not a "Latin-Germanic-Slavic hybrid". No language is a "hybrid", not even pidgins. There is only one language: Human, and what in common parlance is called languages are just dialects of it. You may look on the dialect of Liège as part of Belgian French, Belgian French as a part of French, French as a part of Romance, Romance as a part of Indo-European, and Indo-European as a part of Human. But you can also look directly on the dialect of Liège as a part of Human, on par with Dutch, Japanese, Khoisan, Yidiny or whatever. Linguistically that makes no difference at all. Language is a natural phenomenon, but the notions of national, imperial and international language -- indeed, the very notion of languageS as something that can be counted -- are social constructs. The natural and the social need very different approaches, but when it comes to language the distinction is very often blurred, with disastrous results.
Most Esperantists are just as linguistically uninformed as you are -- well, significantly more uninformed than you, probably -- so when you say "Most Esperantists will readily concede all of this", that doesn't mean they're right. When it comes to "native" Esperanto speakers, naturally most are proud of them, while a few see the same danger as you do: "Nothing would then prevent it, after some generations, from thickening ... into the mother tongue of a significant proportion of [its speakers] ... neutrality would be lost again ..." -- but hello, are any of them likely to be monoglots? Are they not likely to speak Esperanto with a local accent -- possibly even more marked, on average, that among its second language speakers? (It's basic linguistic knowledge that you get your first language(s) more from your peers than from your parents). And last not least, where's the territory they are claiming? Are you sure you're not forgetting one of your own chief tenets here? (By the way, there actually have been efforts to grab a territory for Esperanto on a neutral spot of land situated where the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany meet. I've written the story of it -- in English -- here).
Secondly, your thoughts about "Globish" seem rather incoherent. Do you really think that the prestige of Globish can evolve to anything more than that of a dumbed-down version of "proper" English? If Globish really can develop into a language in its own right, why wouldn't that prospect make native English speakers champions of Esperanto? Indeed, if the world actually needs Globish as something different from English, why couldn't Globish be Esperanto from the outset?
Your characterization of Globish also has an eery scent of dejà-vu to anyone conversant with Esperanto history: "a handy instrument of communication across all borders, and not [one] which can only properly belong to its cultural heirs". Zamenhof always saw Esperanto and national languages as completely equal with respect to expressive, emotional and artistic power. Not everybody agreed, and in 1907 a reform of Esperanto, under the name of Ido, was launched by three of the most illustrious names among the Esperantists: Louis Couturat, Otto Jespersen and Wilhelm Ostwald. During a few years, maybe until WW1, Ido could look like a serious contender, but it utterly failed. The Idists took pride in Ido being a dumbed-down version of Esperanto, fit for science and business, but not for poetry, while at the same time advertising it as more "logical" and "perfect". Nobody in their right mind (alas, there's no shortage of people in their wrong mind) would even think of doing that today, because if one lingua franca can be _intrinsically_ better than another, then the same can be valid for ethnic languages. Suddenly racism raises its ugly head in the horizon, doesn't it? It has the strength to raise it because of the confusion between the natural and the social side of language. How do you think that should affect our view of Globish?
Thirdly, anything that is good for the spread of English can be good for the spread of Esperanto (or any other language that people may happen to know the name of). If people get more opportunities to meet English-speakers, the same kind of opportunity can be used to meet Esperanto-speakers. One might also fancy going to Beijing for a month and learn a few words and characters of Mandarin at an institute, as my niece just did (and I never even mentioned Esperanto or discussed language with her). In my time we nearly had to be Maoists to be motivated to do something similar. -- Of course there's not much of an Esperanto film industry, but the Esperanto movement itself is now bit for bit taking over its own radio scene as it is migrating to the internet in the form of podcasts. Formerly they were dependent on national radio stations being willing to grant air time on shortwave. By the way, one of those still remaining is Radio China International -- which gives the lie to any claim that Esperanto has more appeal to Europeans. Esperanto has always had a good reputation in China, and several of those that devised Pinyin were Esperantists; and just to top that, the present president of the World Esperanto Association (UEA) is professor of linguistics Probal Dasgupta from Hyderabad, India.
Esperanto is now also spreading in several African countries, despite the local difficulties. One of the oldest Esperanto associations there is the one in DR Congo, perhaps because the colonial ruler was bilingual herself. You take the opportunities to learn French in that country as a function of exposure, arguing against Esperanto because "there would be significant inequalities between those whose cosmopolitan family background provides plenty of opportunities to practice it and thereby to learn it effortlessly ... and those who grew up in closed, linguistically homogeneous communities ...". Well, for one thing, like most African countries, DR Congo isn't exactly a linguistic homogeneous community, unless you regard the country's 250 indigenous ethnic groups as more homogeneous than Belgium's 3. But more to the point, I fail to see any difference between French, English and Esperanto in your argument. A whim of my niece can take her to China and let her experience that corner of the world. Shouldn't the Congolese be granted the same kinds of whim -- and thereby be enabled to take the whole question of exposure into their own hands?
Then there's the matter of simplicity. As I said, all languages are intrinsically one and the same, so Esperanto's extrinsic learnability doesn't account for much in the long run, no matter how easy it is claimed and experienced to be. We agree on that... but for all the wrong reasons, and as the whole subject is strictly linguistic, you really shouldn't have gone into it. For instance, you seem to think that irregular forms are regularly shorter than regular forms. That's mostly the case for English, but that's a chance example; for a counterexample you don't have to look any further than the French verbs in -ir as opposed to the regular ones in -er. Neither are newly borrowed words necessarily shorter than indigenous derivations. That's usually the case with Chinese loans in Japanese and Korean, but the other way round with Greek and Romance loans in Germanic and Slavic. You are actually making a fetish out of linguistic shortness that has no relevance outside of telegraphy and newspaper headlines. You also seem to know exactly what makes languages slow down or speed up change. No serious linguist has claimed such knowledge since the 1950's. To be fair, though, I must add that the pride Esperantists can take in dictionary thinness also often degenerates into a fetish.
Your linguistic speculations are largely not even wrong, which, as you know, is the worst that can be said about scientific claims. But the second you leave the linguistic, you stop making a fool of yourself. Your worries about the need of a "coercive, centralized, top-down approach" to enforce Esperanto is worth a thought, although there's no "clock ticking" in favor of English, unless the lingua franca is supposed to annihilate all other languages rather quickly. Ethnocide without genocide cannot proceed very fast, and once we have a situation where a decision has to be taken, anything is up for grabs. On the other hand, the clock is certainly ticking when it comes to safeguarding linguistic diversity, to which the English language is far from the only threat -- though perhaps at the top of the food chain.
Neither did Esperanto have any better chances in the good olden days of the League of Nations. Nowadays, the UEA can at least boast of "operational relations" with UNESCO (details here), and apparently the UEA is the only one of the NGOs that is capable of taking politico-linguistic issues seriously. If Esperanto was allowed on a higher formal plane in the League of Nations, that's simply because there was no UNESCO back then to hand the matter to, and the League had infinitely less power and prestige than the UN has now. For instance, the USA was never even a League member. Come to think of it, UNESCO is the first (and, till now, the only) UN organization that the USA sees fit to leave completely when it's dissatisfied with developments within the UN system.
I also have a somewhat more constructive critical remark:
In the Introduction you admit that the book has "geographical bias". It indeed has, also in ways you don't seem to have thought about. I mean, if the language issue is threatening to blow Belgium to pieces now, how did the country come about in the first place? Most Danes believe that the Flemings are Protestant, so that it's a religious conflict too; that they should not only be Catholic, but even more so than the Walloons is simply inconceivable. I think it could be worth it to look a little deeper into the relationship between language, religion and identity in your future work.
The whole idea of writing a book that extolls the virtues of English as a global lingua franca also has a geographical bias: it is, paradoxically, very French. In the Anglophone tradition, language is not something you plan, but something that happens to you. And it turns out that my local university library in one and the same week acquired your book and an example of your book as written in the Anglophone tradition: "The History of Languages" by the Swedish linguist Tore Jansson. It is, of course, linguistically informed (and an easy read -- you really need the book!), but it doesn't enter the question of justice. That enables Jansson not to mention Esperanto at all, even if his last chapter consists of predictions about the next 200, 2000 and 2,000.000 years.
By the way, the abstract of Marc Fleurbaey's essay "English or Esperanto: a case for levelling down?" in "Arguing about justice", published in your honor, is not at all in Esperanto as claimed, but apparently in something inspired by Diego Marani's Europanto. I wonder how you feel about that?
Sincerely,
Jens S. Larsen, Copenhagen.