Re:At the Universal Congress of Esperanto
by coldtea on Friday August 07, 2015 @06:45AM
(#10021757)
Yes.
In general, lab-bred languages are a 19th century concept (or early-20th if you prefer) of the "smarter-than-though" guy who thinks he'll unify the world from his university office and all that's lacking is a "common language" people will adopt en masse.
Especially attemps such as esperanto, in a time when linguistic understanding was totally lacking.
Actual languages are breed in an evolutionary fashion over centuries (or millenia in some cases), and are shaped to fit the culture and history of the population that breed them.
As for "universal languages" we had them too aplenty, and they are adopted for commercial, cultural and other reasons based on an initial push by a prevailing country (Greek, Latin, French ("the language of diplomacy" at some point), now English, etc).
Even the least succesful of those universal languages has had 1000x the reach of artificial languages like Esperanto.
In general, lab-bred languages are a 19th century concept (or early-20th if you prefer) of the "smarter-than-though" guy who thinks he'll unify the world from his university office and all that's lacking is a "common language" people will adopt en masse.
Especially attemps such as esperanto, in a time when linguistic understanding was totally lacking.
Actual languages are breed in an evolutionary fashion over centuries (or millenia in some cases), and are shaped to fit the culture and history of the population that breed them.
As for "universal languages" we had them too aplenty, and they are adopted for commercial, cultural and other reasons based on an initial push by a prevailing country (Greek, Latin, French ("the language of diplomacy" at some point), now English, etc).
Even the least succesful of those universal languages has had 1000x the reach of artificial languages like Esperanto.