Endangered Languages Week 2011: Peter Austin Interview

Even if, for the Asians, Esperanto were so difficult to learn, as claimed by this scientist, it wouldn't cost much to try to make it at least the neutral, auxiliary language of EU.
Step by step. First of all let's "unite" Europe, than - if possible - also the rest of the world!
If Esperanto became the second language of all Europeans, and it was known in the other continents as the common language of 100 millions people, why should a Japanese tourist, coming to Europe, prefer to learn English, French or German, which are just "local" languages, useful to communicate with 25-30% of the Europeans, instead of a language, which could be learnt in few years at a good level by ALL?
When you go to Ireland, do you prefer to learn Irish (which only a part of the population speak) or English (which all speak and understand, at least as a second language)? With English, in ireland, you kill two birds with one stone. With Irish, only one.
When you go to Spain, do you prefer to learn Catalan (very useful in Catalunya) or Spanish (spoken all over the country, even in the Catalan Barcelona)? With Spanish, you kill two birds with one stone. With Catalan, only one.
With Esperanto, you can kill 100 millions birds with only one stone, while English - because of pronunciation and even cultural reasons - will never be able to be learnt at a good level by all the Europeans.
Coming to Europe, a Japanese would like to know a language, that all speak and understand. If he comes today to visit Europe by using English, he will have no problem in Northern Europe, but he will find enormous difficulties in countries like Italy, France, Spain and maybe even Germany.

Esperanto is taught in China, Japan and Vietnam universities, and no students complain about its difficulty.
All say it's a very regular, and even "creative", language.
Maths and music are also difficult to learn. but they are universal languages, conventional simplifications of a much more complicate reality. Apart from this, when you have an aim and believe in an ideal, you don't care about the "difficulties" you'll find on your way, especially when it's demonstrated that these difficulties are fewer than in any other language.
Everything in life is difficult. Nothing can be learnt (learned?) automatically and without trying hard.
Esperanto vocabulary can be actually more difficult to learn for Asians than for Europeans, but the agglutinative structure of Esperanto and the way you can freely combine different stems reminds much more Eastern languages (like Turkish) than the "classical" European ones.
Esperanto is regular. 1+1 is always 2.
In European languages - I am a teacher of Italian - we have as many rules as exceptions to the same rules! This is a nightmare for pupils, always looking for easy "universal" rules to apply and not for lists of words and conjugations of verbs to learn by heart. Who likes this?
The Asians like the regularity of Esperanto, which permits them to become fluent in Esperanto relatively quickly and even to "generate" new words, without being afraid they don't exist. In English you have "happy" and "happiness", "lonely" and "loneliness", but you cannot say "funny" and "funniness" or "stupid" and "stupidness". In Esperanto you use prefixes and suffixes and you "create" your own words, that all can quickly "decrypt".
In Italian we have the following numerals: uno > primo, due > secondo, tre > terzo, quattro > quarto and so on. In English it's the same (one > first, two > second, three > third, four > fourth). You need several classes in order to make your pupils learn numerals well. In Esperanto, you put an -a after the number (unu > unua, du > dua, tri > tria) and the lesson is over.
In one year you learn at least what in another language you can learn in two or three years. There are several studies about this.
If a pupil is not able to learn a lesson by heart, because not all are able to learn the same way, why should he/she feel frustrated? He can learn a really LOGICAL language, which can be relatively easily learnt by both intelligent and "stupid" pupils, at least at a basic or intermediate level, like mathematics and music (partitures), which are also conventional and artificial, but at the same time universal languages!!!
That's why the Asians find Esperanto much easier than English or French.
And even if for the Asians Esperanto were difficult, why don't we try to make it the common language of Europe? When it becomes the second language of all Europeans, and it is the language of 100 millions people, the arguments of this professor will fall down. Now he says that an Asian student should prefer English or German, which are spoken by millions of people (only in ONE part of Europe). Esperanto will be spoken all over Europe by all Europeans. Won't it be a better perspective for a Japanese tourist to learn this instead that "local dialects"?

Professor Austin obviously ignores the fact that Esperanto is not widely taught, as it is not learnt in the usual way, Even a Greek community for example, in England, needs to send its children to Saturday morning classes in order for them to be able to communicate with their relatives in Greek. What little mastery British children have of French, for another example, is due to the fact that they undergo five years of French at their secondary school. The various languages such as Basque and Maori, cited by the professor, have to be taught. Yet he ignores the fact that Esperanto is not generally taught in our schools. As national languages are irregular British children cannot master them even when taught at school. As Esperanto is absolutely free from irregularities children would be able to master more than a smattering of it. Professor Austin does not seem to realise that learning takes place informally in some cases, and formally in others. But he disapproves of Esperanto because it is not taught informally. He professes to know a lot about Esperanto, but he has obviously not bothered to learn it. If he had bothered to do so, he would strongly advocate its widespread teaching in all schools. His point about Chinese and Japanese, for example, finding Esperanto more difficult than national languages is not valid, for Esperanto vocabulary-building is agglutinative, like Chinese and Japanese, and totally unlike European languages. Therefore it is easier to learn than the national languages of Europe. I hope that Professor Austin will make sure that he knows what he is talking about with regard to Esperanto.

I must disagree with Professor Austin regarding some aspects of Esperanto.
It is a fact that it is easier to an asian person to learn Esperanto than another language. Esperanto "protects" the minor languages because it is made for being used in international communication and doesn't substitute the mother language of a person.
I agree that nowadays English is spoken for so many people but we cannot agree that its influence is the correct way to the future of the world communication. We cannot accept this fact simply because a specific language (the one spoken for a determined country or group of countries) brings with itself the culture of a "region" and imposes its influence to everyone.
Esperanto is neutral in this aspect because it is a planned language and doesn't belong to any specific country.

With a lot of interest I heard what professor Austin said about Esperanto. I began to learn Esperanto in 1977 and since then I used it quite often, several weeks a year. I don't agree that Esperanto is "nobodies language" as professor Austin put it. I feel it is my language. In Esperanto we sometimes refer to it speaking of "nia lingvo", our language. For "nia lingvo" I just got 130 000 results from Google.

Professor Austin said that to learn Esperanto is as difficult for people from Japan or China as it is for them to learn English or French or German. Asian Esperanto speakers on the contrary do think that Esperanto is "much easier to study" (Hoshida Acushi: «L'espéranto est beaucoup plus facile à étudier.»). Han Zuwu said: "I study Esperanto much quicker than English" («Evidemment j'étudie l'espéranto beaucoup plus rapidement que l'anglais.») http://www.bonalingvo.org/index.php/Opinioj_de_azianoj_pri_Esperanto

Professor Austin presents an alternative between English and Esperanto. I don't agree. In many cases for your studies and for your work you just have to learn English (if you don't speak it already) - no alternative. Esperanto nowadays is something for your leisure. The alternative is much more to watch a film in TV, to read some book (or do whatever) or to learn Esperanto. I did not learn Esperanto in the hope of using it, but because the idea of it was just convincing, I wanted to contribute to that great idea. Later I met interesting people from many different countries, so I continued learning and enjoying the language.

I can confirm what professor Austin said, that Esperanto has created an international community. In fact while in 1887 it had maybe five speakers, nowadays probably some hundred thousand people speak it on a regular basis, several million people learned it. In Burundi there are more than 30 schools where some people learn Esperanto.

So Esperanto had more or less the smallest language community of the world in 1887, while today you don't often find a list of fifty languages without Esperanto. Esperanto is a search language for Google, OpenOffice has an Esperanto version, the Esperanto wikipedia has over 145 000 articles. In Hungary and in Lithuania it has place no. 16 of the foreign languages people speak there. (We do not know about other countries due to the lack of such a question in their censuses.) Probably no other language in human history made such an advance in only one century; usually languages just die, when they have only five speakers.

So, why Esperanto has not been more broadly successful? I think the answer is rather simple: There has not been a professional promotion of Esperanto. Esperanto is a kind of innovation. It is always difficult to promote an innovation. You need good marketing and a lot of money. Esperanto hasn't had that.

I applaud your effort to raise awareness on the problem of language endangerment and to help stem the tide of language death.

Having said that, I feel it necessary to rectify some inaccurate statements made by Dr. Austin about Esperanto.

Esperanto does indeed claim to be neutral, but that neutrality is primarily sociopolitical: it is the language of no state or ethnicity, and hence beholden to none, and offering no particular advantages to any. Linguistically, it is not entirely neutral; as Dr. Austin rightly points out, most of its vocabulary ("root stock" or "lexeme body" is a somewhat more appropriate term) is drawn mostly from European sources, so cognates with non-Indo-European languages will be much rarer. For that reason, Esperanto is indeed easier for Indo-European speakers - but only marginally so.

Esperanto's regular, extensible and productive word-building system requires that only a relatively small part of the vocabulary be learned by rote memorization; the remainder, created on the fly through regular derivation and simple juxtaposition, comes essentially for free, regardless of the linguistic origin of the speaker. Also, Esperanto is almost entirely idiom free, so roots and words, once learned, almost always mean just what one would expect them to mean, alone or in combination with others, without the unpredictable, unexpected traps that plague national languages – an advantage that benefits all, regardless of native language. In addition, the exceptionally simple and totally regular grammar is flexible enough that it allows speakers to pattern utterances after their native languages to a large degree. The result is a language that, while slightly more difficult for non-Indo-European speakers, is nonetheless easy for everyone.

Indicative of Esperanto's ease of learning for all, regardless of linguistic background, is the fact that the current areas of briskest growth in Esperanto speakers include east Asia, notably China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam. Further indicative of it is a collection of testimonials from Asian Esperanto speakers at http://esperantofre.com/book/#asian . These people concur in saying that Esperanto is *much* easier for them than is English, let alone French or German.

Dr. Austin places the number of Esperanto speakers in the thousands. Nobody knows for sure how many speakers there are, but the most scientific estimate to date, the result of in-field research that, among other things, sought out and interviewed Esperanto speakers where they lived, is closer to a couple of million speakers. Still not a huge number, but one that has grown steadily since Esperanto's publication over 120 years ago, with almost no official aid and even bouts of persecution. Esperanto has experienced noticeable growth in recent years thanks largely to the Internet, and is starting to draw the attention of governments in places like China and Brazil.

Esperanto, like every other living language, is the property of its community of speakers. It has shown that a language need not be anyone's primary language to thrive - it requires only a sustained community of dedicated speakers. Esperanto has had such a community since its inception.

Esperanto could actually help forestall the tragic loss of languages. By using easy-to-learn, low-cost Esperanto for interlinguistic discourse instead of a difficult-to-learn, expensive ethnic language, much less time and much fewer resources could be devoted to learning Esperanto for much better results than would be required for ethnic languages. More time, enery and resources could be devoted in schools to the preservation of local languages. That is, instead of having costly ethnic language displace local languages in the curriculum, teach low-cost Esperanto and keep or add local languages to the curriculum. Having mastered Esperanto - a realistic objective - students would be better equipped to learn other languages, should they choose (Esperanto speakers often discover an ability and love for languages). The succsss of such a program would require that Esperanto be much more widely used than it is now, of course, hence the use of the conditional, but it nevertheless has that potential, and shows every sign right now of heading in that direction.

As they say, the proof is in the pudding. Anyone can test these claims about Esperanto by trying to learn it, then interacting with other Esperanto speakers. http://www.lernu.net is a good place to start with several free home-study courses.

Esperanto is more difficult to learn for Asians than for
many Europeans ... so is English.

For Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, it is
much easier to learn Esperanto than to learn English.
Learning Esperanto first is a very good introduction to
learning other languages and helps to save learning time.

Esperanto can be learned in a fraction of the time that
requires to learn other languages.

Many times I heard English speakers, who know little or
nothing about Esperanto, to say that Esperanto is difficult
for Asian people. I visited Japan, Korea, and China, and,
speaking in Esperanto most of the time, I didn't hear any
one complaining that Esperanto was difficult. On the
contrary, many of them said that English was much
more difficult.

There is no Esperanto demise. Just google the word
Esperanto, and check some of the thousands of links.

Dr. Austin says (near the tail end of this interview) that one reason Esperanto has not caught on is that for non-Europeans, the effort needed to learn it is almost the same as the effort needed to learn a European language. That's misleading. Because the grammar is streamlined, the affixes let you build much of your own vocabulary, and the language has very few idioms, it's much easier to learn than straight European languages. I talked with an Esperantist from Japan who said that Esperanto is not ten times easier to learn than English -- it's a hundred times easier. I'm sure that's an exaggeration (...pretty sure...), but the difference is still huge.

And for the smaller effort, you have an excellent introduction to other European languages if you decide to go ahead with one of those.