Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 13:10:15 -0400 
From: Bruce Sherwood <bas+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Interlingua?
Distribution: inet

I second all that has been said about the ease with which an "educated
West European" can read Interlingua, and that this doesn't necessarily
translate into speaking and writing.

One of the most serious problems concerning vocabulary in Interlingua is
that while its roots come from the Romance languages (making it a kind
of simplified Latin), there is no principled scheme for which of the
Romance languages will furnish the pattern for a particular word.  Even
if you are a skilled speaker of Italian, Spanish, and French, and know a
fair amount of Latin, you don't have much of a clue as to which form a
word should take in Interlingua.  This makes it difficult to know how to
add new words on a decentralized basis, without going to Gode (who is
dead, which makes it even more inconvenient), and of course with a
Romance orientation you can't coin new words in the Esperanto style of
"diserigi."

This is related to the lack of internal autonomy in Interlingua.  In
Interlingua you are always looking uneasily over your shoulder for
legitimacy and validity to come from some Romance source, and this
looking is made the more uneasy by there being no clear criterion as to
which of these various sources to exploit at a given moment.  Esperanto
has a great deal of autonomy and looks mainly to itself for validity. 
It even looks distinctive in its written form (if you prefer, read: 
looks "funny" in its written form, but at least it is its own self).

I believe this internal autonomy is very important to Esperanto
speakers, who very much feel that it is "their" language, not someone
else's, not even Zamenhof's.  It is felt keenly by Piron, and not well
understood by de Diego.

One other point......

The enormous dominance of American power after the Second World War --
political, economic, military, scientific, and cultural -- made it seem
reasonable to suppose that the language problem was solved, because
everyone would learn English as the international auxiliary language. 
That also made Esperanto seem utterly irrelevant.  And to a large extent
this is what happened, on a much broader and deeper basis than ever in
the past with French or Latin.

Yet the great difficulty of English has meant that in many domains only
passive reading of English is truly international -- for example, in
international science, where all scientists must and can read scientific
articles in English even when they cannot write English articles
themselves and miss a great deal in international conferences.  The
universal English reading capability in science makes the use of
Interlingua for science abstracts utterly superfluous.  The "educated
West European" who can mostly read Interlingua on sight is already
reading English in detail.

And yet it is not the reading of abstracts or articles that is the
problem.  There remains a serious problem in international science
concerning writing, speaking, and understanding English.  These other
skills are addressed well by Esperanto, and hardly at all by Interlingua.

A major power shift is occurring now.  The United States no longer has a
monopoly of power.  There is emerging a plurality of power centers,
including especially Japan and Germany.  What a surprise -- with this
shift in power one sees more and more use of Japanese and German!  (No
doubt for purely linguistic reasons.....)  In a world of multiple power
centers, the case for Esperanto becomes vastly strengthened, for how
else to balance the competing demands of efficiency and equality?

It is this major power shift that has created a situation in which it is
again feasible to ask the questions that were put on hold by American
power.

Bruce Sherwood
Newsgroups: soc.culture.esperanto