Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language (Haney Foundation) - Hardcover

Garvia, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812247108 ISBN 13: 9780812247107

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global lingua franca. Many individuals and social movements competed to create an artificial language unencumbered by the political rivalries that accompanied English, German, and French. Organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the Comintern, and the League of Nations intervened in the debate about the possibility of an artificial language, but of the numerous tongues created before World War II, only Esperanto survives today.

Esperanto and Its Rivals sheds light on the factors that led almost all artificial languages to fail and helped English to prevail as the global tongue of the twenty-first century. Exploring the social and political contexts of the three most prominent artificial languages—Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido—Roberto Garvía examines the roles played by social movement leaders and inventors, the strategies different organizations used to lobby for each language, and other early decisions that shaped how those languages spread and evolved. Through the rise and fall of these artificial languages, Esperanto and Its Rivals reveals the intellectual dilemmas and political anxieties that troubled the globalizing world at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roberto Garvia is Associate Professor of Sociology at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

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Introduction

In 1928, the young Eric Blair, later known as George Orwell, moved to Paris to begin his career as a writer and to improve his French. He first set up quarters at the home of his bohemian aunt Nellie Limouzin and her lover, Eugène Adam. Better known in revolutionary circles as Lanti, the man who is against everything, Adam was a radical Esperantist. He was the founder of Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, an international—or, more accurately, a non-national—working-class organization that combined class struggle with the advancement of Esperanto as the language of the coming proletarian revolution. Adam refused to speak French at home. Since Esperanto was the home language, Orwell soon had to find different lodgings in order to refine his French.

This was not Orwell's last exposure to Esperanto. During the Spanish Civil War, when he volunteered to fight against General Franco's pro-fascist forces, Esperanto was widely used in newspapers and on radio stations and even by the Catalan government to inform International Brigades about the war. Nor was Esperanto Orwell's last encounter with international language projects. From 1942 to 1944, while working for the Eastern Service of the BBC, Orwell broadcast news commentaries in Basic English, an artificial language fashioned by the linguist and philosopher C. K. Odgen.

Given his long acquaintance with artificial languages, it is not surprising to find in Orwell's fiction the most notorious, effective, and popular use of an invented language. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949), Orwell introduced us to Newspeak. Deliberately designed for totalitarian dominance, Newspeak "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible."

Orwell's portrayal of an artificial language as a potent tool of political submission was certainly not the kind of speculation that many Esperantists and Basic English adherents might have expected from a former supporter of artificial languages. In any case, by the time Orwell published his dystopic novel, Basic English and Esperanto were not the only artificial languages on the market. Ido, created in 1907 by the philosopher Louis Couturat, still had some supporters, as well as Occidental and Novial, devised in 1922 and 1928 by the linguists Edgar de Wahl and Otto Jespersen, respectively. Volapük, an artificial language created in 1879, still lingered in the memory of many Europeans, too. And shortly after Nineteen Eighty-Four went to press, yet more artificial languages appeared. Interlingua was sponsored by the International Auxiliary Language Association and supported by the philanthropist Alice Vanderbilt Morris.

Although today it is barely remembered, a spirited, intense "battle of artificial languages," as contemporaries called it, figured prominently in the intellectual landscape from the late 1800s to the outbreak of World War II. The American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the League of Nations, and even the Comintern participated in this battle. The problem posed by emerging nationalisms and linguistic chauvinisms, and the increasing internationalization of scientific research, persuaded many that an increasingly interconnected world plainly required a lingua franca. There is currently a debate on the problem of international communication, linguistic rights, and the impact of globalization on less commonly used languages. But, truly speaking, this debate began more than one hundred years ago, when the first wave of globalization took place and artificial language supporters raised their hands to make it clear to whoever was willing to listen that they had found the solution to all those problems.

This book is about the battle of artificial languages and the social movements that supported them. It focuses on the three most prominent languages that contended for supremacy: Volapük, invented by the German Catholic priest Johann Martin Schleyer; Esperanto, created by a Russian Jew, Ludwig Zamenhof; and Ido, a reformed Esperanto created by Couturat, a French philosopher. Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido, however, did not stand alone. Other minor contestants, such as Reform Neutral, Latino sine flexione, Occidental, Novial, and Basic English also made their mark.

If, strictly speaking, rationality recommends learning the language of your neighbor, or, perhaps better, an international language, what drove Volapükists, Esperantists, and Idists to invest so much time and energy to learn and promote their languages, when many others deemed it preposterous, when not anti-patriotic? Were they sharing the same dream, or were artificial languages going to serve different purposes and interests? Why were there so many artificial languages, and how was it that the Esperantists managed to crowd out their rivals? Was it because Esperanto was a better language, or because the Esperantists proved to have the best strategy?

As detailed in this book, the battle of artificial languages was fought neither by marginal people nor in an institutional vacuum. Rather, the battle of artificial languages was entwined with the intellectual dilemmas of the time, reflecting the anxieties that traversed the European mindset amid the drastic economic, social, and political transformations taking place in every corner of the continent. Whether these anxieties were based on the role of science on human relations, the fate of spirituality and religion in a more secularized world, the importance of ethnicity and national identity, the so-called "Jewish problem," the prospects for peace, or the place of nature in a more mechanized world, artificial languages supporters liked to think that they had the cure.

Among all the artificial languages created between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II, only Esperanto is still thriving; its former rivals are only ghosts on the Internet. And after more than 100 years of face-to-face interactions and an impressive literary corpus, Esperanto has been transformed into a full-fledged language, with its own irregularities, ambiguities, exceptions, and conventions.

Although Esperanto won the battle of artificial languages, it did not become a global language. Today, English holds that position. But by the time the battle of artificial languages began, nobody could tell which, if any, of the three main national languages, English, German, and French, would become the global language. In fact, it was the fierce competition between English, German, and French, and the national rivalries between their speakers that opened a window of opportunity for the cause of an artificial language. A non-ethnic lingua franca would not only assuage national rivalries but also put everybody on equal footing. Since a lingua franca is a collective good, we might then wonder why a neutral language such as Esperanto did not prevail. If linguistic fairness recommends a neutral language, then Esperanto or any of its rivals would seem like a better choice for an international language. This book explores how Esperanto won the battle for supremacy among competing artificial languages, but lost the war to become a lingua franca.

Confident that the balance of power among leading nations and international rivalries would prevent a national language from becoming the lingua franca, Volapükists, Esperantists, and Idists worked hard to make their case. They set up journals, collected membership fees, organized language courses, issued language certificates, created their respective language academies, organized at the local, national, and international level, convened international congresses, participated in special...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812247108
• ISBN 13: 9780812247107
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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