I gotta admit to not reading the whole thing 'cause the thread is gettin' bloody long. What happened to the non bickering version of this thread anyway? lol. Funny enough, more people speak English in the Eastern hemisphere than than in the West because of their higher populations, especially in India and even China.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/story/0,,1355064,00.html

English as the international lingua franca is fine with me, it is my native language, although I'm not of English blood. Objections to this are usually political and or nationalistic, which can be justified due to not wanting to lose native cultural richness that English speaking can bring. The attribute of English that is making it the unofficial second language of the world are for two simple reasons:
1) Legacy of the British Empire
2) If you learn English you can communicate with more people in different communities (globally) than other languages. (This usually means better job prospects and access to educational materials.ie. written in English as opposed to [insert obscure language here]

JimmySeal I suggest we cap this little aside here.

Anyone know Esperanto? mankso seemingly does.
Does anyone else know Esperanto that is already using this forum?

If not I guess this thread has run aground.

Peace.

I know some Esperanto. But since I studied it after I studied Japanese, I can't really comment on whether or not it would have helped in the study of Japanese.

But I think learning any foreign language would help in learning yet another foreign language simply because you know how to go about it now. I think I had an easier time with Spanish because of studying Japanese first.

And to comment on English as the world's second language... I've been to many countries and it's really easy to find English speakers anywhere. To the point that if you try to speak to locals in their native tongue, they respond in English anyway. When I was in China, the locals would speak to all foreigners in English whether the foreigners spoke English as their native tongue or not. And, it seemed like all the tourists spoke English too (nearly all of them as a 2nd language).

JimmySeal Wrote:@Jarvik - the number for Chinese is 20x, but I essentially agree. I know someone who was functionally proficient in Chinese (spoken only) within 4 years, so it would follow that someone could reach the same level of Esperanto in 2.4 months? A bit hard to swallow.

Ah, I was thinking 100 years - 20 x 5 (my assumption for Esperanto fluency).

ファブリス Wrote:

Quote:"Is a meat-eating diet, with such an opponent, not perhaps something worth looking into, or is one not, albeit perhaps unknowingly, aligning oneself with him in opposing it so vehemently?"

I've seen this logic used often in "conspiracy" circles, for example about the silence surrounding UFO's in the media. The logic is not always used incorrectly, but is often flawed like in this good example above. I'm sure there must be a name for it, like in the case of "Godwin's law", because I've seen it many times.

　
I believe you're referring to the fallacy of Guilt by Association. It's related to an Appeal to Misleading Authority.


Guilt by Association:

"Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. Therefore, vegetarianism is wrong."


Appeal to Misleading Authority:

"Albert Einstein was a vegetarian. Therefore, vegetarianism is right."


If Guilt by Association were a valid argument, that would make Einstein an EVIL genius.
Bwahahaha! =D

-- Daniel

I've had my eye on Esperanto in the same way I've had my eye on Klingon and Elvish. There's something about a constructed language that fascinates my inner geek. But I don't have any experiences to share.


I look at it this way:

Learning Esperanto probably won't make learning Japanese harder for you except by taking away time that could be spent on the latter language.

Therefore, the balance is between time spent learning Esperanto versus time saved learning Japanese. This is ignoring any other benefits of learning Esperanto.

The numbers I saw earlier in this thread -- 200 class hours to learn Esperanto and 2200 class hours to learn Japanese -- seem like a reasonable ratio to me. You can adjust the numbers as you like. If we go with this assumption, then the break-even point is when Esperanto reduces that load to 2000 class hours, or 91%.

That is, you get Esperanto for free if it can increase your Japanese-learning proficiency by 9%. And it's a good deal even if it doesn't.


If Esperanto increases your efficiency by more than 9%, it's like getting two-for-one for less than the cost of Japanese alone, i.e. learning Esperanto should be a part of every Japanese-language curriculum in that case.

We know it is possible for that kind of relationship to exist because learning Heisig does the same thing for holding the Kanji shapes and basic meanings in your head.

That's begging the question, but I think we all agree on this point or we wouldn't be here.

A better example is addition. If we can understand a single, fundamental rule for adding, it saves us an infinite lifetime of blind memorization.

Interestingly, it seems this is not a commutative relationship. Order matters. For example, if you learn all the kanji without Heisig, it doesn't help you to go back and learn Heisig. You must learn Heisig first to get the benefit.


To rephrase the original question: Can Language A provide some fundamental understanding that boosts the learning of Language B significantly?

It's hard to answer that question because it's not falsifiable. I can't say that it won't. I have no evidence that it is. I can only say how likely I think it is, which doesn't help much, because unlikely things happen every day.


So I'll try to identify some ways in which it could help.

One way is overlap. If they share some grammar, sentence order, words, etc. learning one is the same as learning parts of the other. In the best case, both languages are highly similar, like English and Lowland Scots.

This is a purely linear relationship.

That means, in the best case, if you spend 200 class hours learning Language A, you save at best 200 class hours on language B. For example, learning Simple English will save you almost as many hours learning native English as is put into it, but no more, because it is a subset of English.


This relationship is probably commutative. But I'm looking for something more fundamental; something that upsets the balance.

Such a relationship might lie within the way the mind works.

Language learning starts with acquiring a large library of words, sentences, grammar points, etc. This is a linear process, as described above. But gathering and holding these new facts in addition to existing, conflicting facts from the primary language is something new.

Language fluency requires being able to apply your new knowledge on the fly. This means thinking in different patterns.

These are new ways of using your brain that you do not know when you spoke a single language.


If this is correct, then we have established our imbalanced relationship. Learning Language A (easy) to fluency may very well provide a significant, non-linear benefit when learning Language B (hard). Learning Language B (hard) first would provide a similar benefit when Language A (easy), but the gains would be unequal. For example, in the first case you might save 200 class hours, but only 20 in the second.


Based on the many assumptions I've made, and recognizing the inexhaustiveness of this approach, I come to the following tentative conclusion:

You'll probably benefit from learning any second language to fluency, and the easier and quicker the better. Esperanto's a good candidate because of its simplicity and uniformity.

But I cannot conclude how much of a benefit there is. Only that it is reasonable that there might be one.


Finally, I put forth a new hypothesis*: The sentence method of AJATT may be even more efficient.

Since it collapses the mental process into one step, at every point along the way you are fluent with the knowledge you have acquired. That's probably why he stresses that you need to understand each sentence, not just memorize it.

-- Daniel


* Not to be confused with an actual hypothesis.

PrettyKitty wrote:
>When I was in China, the locals would speak to all foreigners in English whether the foreigners spoke English as their native tongue or not. And, it seemed like all the tourists spoke English too (nearly all of them as a 2nd language).

And I've witnessed a small group of Quebec francophones in a restaurant in Mexico get mightily p*ssed off at a Mexican waiter who insisted on using English with them - and all the more so, since they had all made an effort to achieve a reasonable working knowledge of Spanish beforehand (unlike most English-speaking visitors to Mexico that I've come across). There's usually a big difference in attitude to language between anglophones and francophones. I don't think the waiter had too much idea of why there was such a fuss though. For me also a foreign country loses much of its appeal when I'm confronted everywhere with English signs, English menus (usually very amusing in Greece!), McDonald's, Baskin-Robbins, KFC etc. etc.

And thank you, Terhorst, for that last post!

mankso Wrote:For me also a foreign country loses much of its appeal when I'm confronted everywhere with English signs, English menus (usually very amusing in Greece!), McDonald's, Baskin-Robbins, KFC etc. etc.

Hitler would of disliked reading english signs everywhere too.

EDIT: Yeah it is going too far yorkii, sorry about this one if it bugged anybody. I'd delete it but that's not really fair to do after somebody else has responded after it.

this thread is getting a bit ridiculous. and all the Hitler mentions is getting a bit offensive. Fabrice, I think it might be time to introduce the "lock" feature of BBS boards.

mankso Wrote:For me also a foreign country loses much of its appeal when I'm confronted everywhere with English signs, English menus (usually very amusing in Greece!)

Would it be better if there were Esperanto signs and menus everywhere?

Quote:McDonald's, Baskin-Robbins, KFC etc. etc.

This has nothing to do with English.

JimmySeal wrote:
>Would it be better if there were Esperanto signs and menus everywhere?

Of course not - at least not uniquely in Esperanto, which I understand to be your point, no?! Four pages later and I'm left wondering how much has actually been grasped after all this discussion. All signs should of course be in the local language AND in addition in the non-ethnic, non-territorial common second language. The point is not to replace any one's language with Esperanto (not ethnic or linguistic neo-colonialism, but linguistic ecology or eco-linguistics, whatever you want to call it, and linguistic democracy), but to have an additional easy-to-learn, cost-effective inter-language. If you don't like Esperanto, then do it in Klingon or whatever, but at least get started on doing something to help solve this world communication problem (which I face everyday here in this large English-speaking city), taking into account human and language rights, the right to communicate, and an omni-directional information flow. (Now we seem to have come back to the Prague Manifesto).

If you haven't yet read Robert Phillipson's article "International Languages & International Human Rights", now might be a good time:
http://www.uea.org/informado/ed37-angla.html
(He is a respected linguist, and author of "English-only Europe?" and "Linguistic Imperialism" among many other titles).

mankso Wrote:>Would it be better if there were Esperanto signs and menus everywhere?

Of course not - at least not uniquely in Esperanto, which I understand to be your point, no?! Four pages later and I'm left wondering how much has actually been grasped after all this discussion.

Well in that case I have to ask what you mean by this

Quote:For me also a foreign country loses much of its appeal when I'm confronted everywhere with English signs, English menus (usually very amusing in Greece!)

I can say that at least here in Japan, the only time when English appears without Japanese is when people are going for a "coolness" factor and that has nothing to do with communication.
All other places, English is appearing as a supplement to the Japanese, not a replacement for it. It's acting as an international language and it seems you just don't like the world's choice of an international language. If they were using Esperanto instead of English, they would be just as much "tainting" the local culture and damaging its appeal.

I meant signs exclusively in English in a country whose language is not English. I have less of a problem with bilingual signs, but would hope that the local language would be the more prominently displayed one. Nevertheless, even that does take something away from, or dilute, the local flavor. In Greek and Bulgarian restaurants it is more often than not the custom to hand only an English-language menu to any non-local diner, knowing that few of the visitors will have mastered the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. (And sometimes the prices for the same item are different too in each menu, as I soon found out). The best way out of the dilemma is to use pictograms where at all possible.

>it seems you just don't like the world's choice of an international language.

I don't like linguistic neo-colonialism and the attendant destruction of micro-languages and cultures. And I fear 'one language for the world' - a slogan which is for some reason wrongly often imputed to Esperanto-speakers by the ignorant. And I'm not so sure that 'the world's choice' (as you put it) is as benign as you want make out. To wit this quote from David Redekop's 'In praise of cultural imperialism?' [1997]:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pro...hkopf.html
>It is in the general interest of the United States to encourage the development of a world in which the fault lines separating nations are bridged by shared interests. And it is in the economic and political interests of the United States to ensure that if the world is moving toward a common language, it be English; that if the world is moving toward common telecommunications, safety, and quality standards, they be American; that if the world is becoming linked by television, radio, and music, the programming be American; and that if common values are being developed, they be values with which Americans are comfortable.

From what you have said you are, I believe, a part of all this. So was Robert Phillipson (previously cited) who worked for the British Council till he saw the light. (He's not an Esperantist, by the way!) As a English-speaker, you are probably not too concerned about English-language hegemony - after all you get all the privileges and economic benefits from this - but what about the other 92% of the world's population (non-native speakers of English)?

Another point - I've mentioned Nitobe and the supportive attitude of Japan to Esperanto in the 1920's. But what was the attitude of Imperial Japan preceding and during WWII to Esperanto? Was it similar to Nazi Germany's? Do you have any info on this, or can you direct me to where I might find something? (In any European language, but not Japanese, please!) Thank you.

Excuse me - David Rothkopf, not David Redekopf!

mankso Wrote:I don't like linguistic neo-colonialism and the attendant destruction of micro-languages and cultures...

...
>It is in the general interest of the United States to encourage the development of a world in which the fault lines separating nations are bridged by shared interests. And it is in the economic and political interests of the United States to ensure that if the world is moving toward a common language, it be English...

I don't think America is being malevolent in the supposed destruction of micro-languages and cultures, because everything on a large enough scale is economically motivated. Everything. If Albania had the economic force to impose Albanian on the world as a second language, I guarantee they would without a second thought, as it would be economically beneficial to them. There is no denying that America is the most powerful economic force in the world (for now at least, and the last 50 years), so it naturally follows that America can get its way for things that make it easier/cheaper/better for her.

Quote:In Greek and Bulgarian restaurants it is more often than not the custom to hand only an English-language menu to any non-local diner, knowing that few of the visitors will have mastered the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets.

The same happens here (in the places that have English-language menus). But if people (like the French-speaking tourists you mentioned earlier) are going to be offended when someone assumes they speak English better than the local language, wouldn't they be just as offended if someone assumed they spoke Esperanto and not the local language (that is, assuming it ever gained some foothold, othewise it would just be bizarre)? After all, like it or not, English is the international language of today and most people doing international travel have some basic command of it or are accompanied by people who do.

The problem is just that people don't know how to make menus. The right thing to do would be to have "international menus" in restaurants that listed English side-by-side with the local language, but some restauranteurs just aren't keen to the blunders they're making.


As for David Rothkopf, you are taking one man's opinion and attributing it to an entire nation. As daniel mentioned, America and other English-speaking nations are the economic powerhouses right now, so people want to know English to communicate with them. And seeing English's rise to prominence, other people realize that if they learn English they can communicate with almost anyone, anywhere, and it builds up and snowballs. Maybe some linguistic imperialism is at hand, but really, this phenomenon would be happening even without it.

@danieldesu
>I don't think America is being malevolent in the supposed destruction of micro-languages and cultures,

'Supposed destruction'? Are you seriously claiming that there was never any official government policy in the USA, and also in Canada, Australia (and Brazil and Mexico too) to suppress and eradicate indigenous languages?! The speaker statistics for the last 50-60 years are disastrous. This is the world's linguistic heritage we are talking about here. Language diversity is every bit as important as bio-diversity. Even the churches took part in this eradication in Canada. [Google for example 'destruction+indigenous+languages'; 'endangered languages'] Whatever happened to linguistic democracy, equal language rights, the right to communicate? What about e.g. the linguistic influence of the Peace Corps, exchange students at US universities, mass tourism, on the linguistic ecology of the world? Is all you can say about it 'tough titty' or 'that's the way the cookie crumbles'?!
Even Antonio de Nebrija in La gram?tica castellana in 1492 knew of the connection between empire and language and was able to write:
?Siempre la lengua fue compa?era del imperio.?

What was and is, by the way, the situation with the Ainu in Japan? Is the number of speakers increasing? Does the language get state support? Is the group thriving or moribund?

>it naturally follows that America can get its way for things that make it easier/cheaper/better for her.

Isn't this called 'big bully' politics? We have personal experience of this in Canada, despite NAFTA. Are you, God forbid, condoning this attitude? I thought we now lived in a mutually inter-dependent world, and are supposed to be a bit more sensitive to one another.

I'm not saying one way or the other what is morally right or wrong. But I believe there are overlying economic factors that influence the actions of every country and also *almost* every person. Just as with environmental destruction, industrial pollution, and endangering of species, people as a whole only protect the rights of the environment/animal/culture when it becomes an economic liability to proceed in an easier and usually more destructive manner.

Back when America was first being inhabited by Westerners, there was widespread fear that people were going to run out of lumber/trees because of the harvesting of forests to make railroad ties. At that point, it became economically responsible to start planting trees (planting trees = good thing in the grand scheme of things), and now in modern times, we have more trees in America than even when settlers first arrived. Right now, America is just "cutting down forests" because that is the economic thing to do. One day, probably soon, America will have to start "planting trees." Don't worry, that day will come before you know it.

Yes, America is a big bully. I am not particularly proud of the fact, but I rest easy knowing that any other nation would act exactly the same were it in the same economic position.

My point is that there is no economical reason for anyone to promote Esperanto when there is such a huge body of knowledge in English, tons of media, and countless hours of time put into learning English (also an economic factor). That will almost definitely change in the future when economical factors change. But not anytime soon.

@mankso
If what you say is true, I certainly can't disagree with you on those points. Not that the English language itself is to blame, though. And whatever Esperanto's stated goals are, if some segment of the world were to adopt it on a large scale, it could potentially be used in exactly the same way as you say English has been used heretofore (e.g. Would there have been anything stopping the nazis from using it as an easy lingua franca among the axis powers?). In that aspect it is no different from any other language, no matter what the Prague manifesto says.

Even the churches took part in this eradication in Canada.
Funny you should say "Even the churches." The church has long been one of the worst perpetrators of opression and forced uniformity, but that's neither here nor there.


Unfortunately, this forum does not support accented Latin characters. Your posts will be more readable if you find other ways of expressing them. And not everyone here speaks Spanish, or Latin, or some language other than English or Japanese, so it would be appreciated if you could provide translations for such things.

Esperanto is just plain silly. It's silly to promote a manufactured language as an international language - it's just so far-fetched and and implausible that it will never be worth the time or effort. It's creating something that takes effort to learn and doesn't add anything useful.

Right now people are learning English if they want to easily communicate globally. More important people know it in important global positions than any other language - it's the default language in sciences, politics, etc. In the future, that will change as America becomes less dominant globally and China/India gain more influence and their languages become more useful.

Nobody, outside of a handful of linguists, is going to dedicate years of their life to learn a manufactured language that nobody actually knows and which doesn't actually have any use (nobody would even dedicate months, if Esperanto really is that easy). If you're a Chinese student from a poor family who's hoping to make it in the world, you're just going to learn the current global language and not think twice about defending linguistic heritages or promoting a universal standard or whatever the argument is for adopting Esperanto. If you're an affluent University student, you're going to learn a useful language for your career or maybe a neat language native to its country that actually opens up histories and cultures. Maybe Esperanto is a cool language or whatever - I couldn't care either way, and it doesn't matter. It's not viable or realistic. It's not going to happen.

JimmySeal Wrote:Even the churches took part in this eradication in Canada.
Funny you should say "Even the churches." The church has long been one of the worst perpetrators of opression and forced uniformity, but that's neither here nor there.

I was going to post the exact same thing. That has happened so many times on this thread

[ファブリス]

Someone mentioned that a manufactured language doesn't have a historical or cultural background.

Maybe an even stronger barrier to using a manufactured language, is that the language is deeply connected to how people think and how they express various concepts.

And what of languages evolving? Languages do evolve over time. People dictate what the language becomes. In some African countries they have mixes of their native language and english which becomes a language of its own.

Over time, English may evolve into a truly universal language, who knows.

Here's an interesting account of a first-hand experience of someone with Korean background trying to learn Esperanto:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...=Esperanto

So much for the perceived universality...

Yes, one has to wonder why an "easy to learn" language wouldn't have a simpler phonetic system, considering the wide and varied native phonetic systems of the world. Maybe the inventor didn't suppose East Asians might be trying to learn his language.

Incidentally, some of the harder sounds are represented by the letters with those silly hats. The language could have had simpler phonetics and simpler orthography without them. 一石二鳥! (two birds with one stone)

mankso Wrote:>And I've witnessed a small group of Quebec francophones in a restaurant in Mexico get mightily p*ssed off at a Mexican waiter who insisted on using English with them - and all the more so, since they had all made an effort to achieve a reasonable working knowledge of Spanish beforehand (unlike most English-speaking visitors to Mexico that I've come across).

Yes, that is very annoying. It's happened to me often. I don't understand why the waiter didn't just switch to Spanish if the customers were wanting to use it. It kind of made me feel like learning Spanish was worthless since they all insisted on speaking English to me. And nearly everyone in my group that went to Mexico spoke Spanish.

And I didn't really get why people kept inserting random English words into their sentences in Japan either. It just made it harder to understand them. :/ (Although this mainly only happened in Tokyo...)

But still, it shows how widespread English is already.