I started this blog just over
two years ago, on Friday 29 January 2010.
During that time I've generally made a fool of myself by changing my mind countless times, repeatedly making so-called 'final' decisions which didn't last very long. That's the embarrassing part. The less embarrassing part is that hopefully at least to some small extent I've made a worthwhile contribution to the topic of the use of
international auxiliary languages for literature.
Well, I suppose I should not feel so embarrassed since, after all, a blog is a very different thing to a book. In a blog, the writer does his thinking and does his experimentation in public, more or less in real time. Of course it is natural that by a process of trial and error some things will work well and other things will not work so well. And of course it is natural that if hardly anything works well, and there do not seem to be any credible alternatives left to try, one will revisit those things which have already been found not to work so well, in the hope that perhaps upon the second, third, fourth or fifth try they might start working, perhaps due to having in the meantime gained more experience.
That is pretty much the story of this blog.
Curiously, the one language to which I have
successfully returned and to which as it happened I awarded my personal "Best Literary Language" award
two years in a row was
Lingwa de Planeta (LdP). Like many of the other
auxlangs, I repeatedly abandoned and then resumed the used of this language; unlike the others, I am still very actively using it now.
Lingwa de Planeta is currently the auxlang in which I have made my second-longest translation (currently
3766 words and rapidly increasing); my longest translation so far was in
Occidental (about
5787 words). I have no doubt that in the near future my LdP translation will surpass the length of the Occidental one. In short, for whatever reason (these things are rather difficult to reliably predict or to analyse) it so happens that no other auxlang has been so productive for me in a literary sense than LdP. To put it another way, it seems that in general LdP has been very effectively designed.
Recently I found that I could read Esperanto much more easily than before, despite not having studied it much in recent months. Actually I now realise that this is pretty much true of any of the major auxlangs, I just happened to notice it first with respect to Esperanto. I have also noticed that my comprehension of written French has greatly improved (whereas I still can hardly write a correct sentence in French, far less a literary paragraph). That is, there seems to have occurred a simultaneous improvement in my ability to read multiple languages, even those languages I have not been actively studying. I now understand, after reading an excellent non-fiction book called
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by
Nicholas Carr, that what really was happening was that my brain was changing as a result of the intensive study of languages, in such a way that improved my ability to parse and comprehend written language; this is known as
brain plasticity. Presumably this is the physiological mechanism which explains why the study of
auxlangs has been found to be beneficial to learning
natlangs.
I have focussed nearly entirely on written language and hardly at all on conversational language; thus I cannot undertake significant conversations in any auxlang. However I can read aloud quite fluently and expressively in LdP, Occidental, and Interlingua, providing that I have previously studied the text in advance, using a dictionary to identify any words which are unfamiliar to me. In the case of French I have focussed nearly entirely on reading and hence can hardly write or converse in the language. This focus on written language is appropriate for me as a writer and reader, here in Australia.
So, where to from here? To paraphrase
Douglas Adams, "I've got the answer but I don't think you're going to like it..."
Enter the Twenty-First Century
I noticed something recently. It's obviously no longer the nineteenth century, when Esperanto was invented, a fact of which I was already well aware. But what dawned on me very recently was something equally profound: it's also no longer the twentieth century, when Interlingua and most of the other major competitors to Esperanto were invented and published. What I mean is, it dawned on me that
we now live in a very, very different world.
In short, times have changed.
The relative importance of different languages in the world (that is, in the global economy and in international trade and politics) has changed. The languages of Asia and the Middle East have become very important and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future; the region of Central Asia and the Near East also holds a place on centre stage in world events such that its languages will continue to increase in global importance. And for me as an Australian writer in the twenty-first century it is now absurd to think of using a language for world literary use which does not include great influences from non-European languages. Business people in Australia regularly learn Mandarin, Japanese or Indonesian; we do not expect our customers and suppliers and business partners to necessarily be fluent in English. Nevertheless, English remains of paramount importance in the world today and is the
de facto international language of business and science. Other major Western European languages are also highly important globally, especially Spanish, French and Portuguese, or regionally, especially German and Russian. As the saying goes, we live in interesting times.
What I am interested in is the idea of writers and readers from all over the world, from very different cultures and whose native language is very often not a European one, being able to enjoy literature without translation. This would be achieved by the use of one or more auxlangs designed for global rather than regional use. Such an auxlang should be of sufficient ease such that professional writers could write flawless novels (with the help of a professional editor but without a translator) after only five years of
dedicated study and such that regular readers could use it to comfortably read a novel (with the aid of a dictionary) after only five years of
casual study. I had previously hoped that shorter time-frames might be possible but after two years of studying auxlangs I have concluded that five years is realistic. (By the way, such a five-year time-frame is unrealistically low for English literature. One or two decades might be more realistic.)
Writers reading this will understand why I seek to use an auxlang for such international literature rather than writing in a natlang and relying upon translations into other natlangs; a translation increases the distance between writer and reader and much is lost in translation. By choosing a language which both writer and reader can use, the full literary value of a work of literature, aimed at a truly global market, can be realised. For example, even with my lowly intermediate-level French, which allows me to read French novels painfully slowly (so slowly that I've never completed one), it is absolutely obvious that the English translations pale by comparison to the original French text, reducing the great to merely good.
Now, does writing in an auxlang mean that we have to forego some of the incredibly subtle nuances of natlangs? Yes, absolutely! But we should not worry about that since such things are generally lost in translation anyway, especially to languages dramatically different to the original language. Furthermore, writing in an auxlang forces us, if we endeavour to write well, to abandon the idiomatic expressions of our native language and instead make a conscious effort to reach out to the reader (whose first language might be, for example, Farsi or Mandarin) using literary plain language which could reasonably be understood despite major cultural differences between writer and reader. This is a wonderful, creative way to write.
Furthermore, I could embark on spending the next decade learning Russian in order to fully enjoy a short story by Gogol but might well still be oblivious to much of the fine nuance in his prose. Maybe it would take me two decades to become fluent enough as a reader of Russian to truly understand every aspect to a level similar to a native speaker. But by reading the same works translated into, say, Lingwa de Planeta by a native speaker of Russian, I could enjoy probably 70-80% of the full effect of reading the original Russian text after three to five years of studying that auxiliary language. The next week, hypothetically speaking, I might read a novella translated from Chinese or Arabic or Indonesian, made easily accessible via Lingwa de Planeta. All of that is merely good, but where it really becomes great is when writers from around the world start writing directly in Lingwa de Planeta, such that readers from all around the world can read their works without translation. Of course, all this is pie in the sky stuff, but it could well become real.
And just in case you think that computers will remove the need for auxlangs because computer-aided translation will make cross-cultural communication easy, I have three things to say: firstly, this is literature we are talking about and literature is quintessentially human and should remain so: an interplay between human writer and human reader, not a machine language; secondly, when it comes to art we should not become dependent on machines and neither should we depend on machines for international cross-cultural understanding if we wish to survive as a planet and as a species; thirdly, we are a very long way from having good machine-translations of literature.
So why not Esperanto, Interlingua, or one of the other major auxlangs from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries? Because they have already failed, and they are gaining less and less traction rather than more and more traction with the general public, because times have changed and the world has moved on. Esperanto, the world's most successful auxlang, is simply too European, too difficult, and too old-fashioned to capture the imagination of writers and readers on a large scale throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It is like a kind of quirky wind-up toy, a gigantic and impressive toy which consists of a great mechanism of springs and cogs; certainly an interesting curiosity but one quickly grows tired of it when one notices that it hardly contains a single word root from one's own region of the world.
Quite frankly, Esperanto by and large does not even capture the imagination of many people in English-speaking countries. I'm not saying, dear reader, that you should not learn Esperanto, by all means go ahead and learn it if you wish to, but in my opinion although Esperanto is a workable language it is rather like a nineteenth-century European locomotive, puffing its way around the world in a great cloud of coal dust and steam, engendering bemused looks of disbelief from those it passes by.
Nevertheless I think its inventor,
Ludwig Zamenhof, was a genius, was apparently a man of very noble convictions, genuinely did something good for the world, and that his invention, Esperanto, was a great achievement... for the nineteenth century. Times have changed and it is time to move on. The same goes for other highly artificial constructed languages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Interlingua and its kin are less like clockwork toys, being more naturalistic in appearance; that is, people could easily think Interlingua or Occidental were actually natural languages at first glance. However they are relentlessly European to the point of being largely inaccessible to those whose native language is not a European one. By the way, I'm not implying that naturalistic auxlangs are necessarily better than more artificial ones; rather, my conclusion is that none of the auxlangs of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, regardless of whether they are naturalistic or artificial in flavour, will succeed in the twenty-first century (failing a government decree).
My personal conclusion, then, is three-fold:
- all auxlangs suitable for literary use are difficult
- the auxlangs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lack relevance in today's changing world in which non-European languages and cultures are now of first-order importance globally; they are therefore not seen as being worth the effort (especially since the already considerable difficulty of learning them is at least doubly difficult to those who do not speak any European language; those accepting such heroic effort generally choose to learn English instead of a constructed auxlang)
- only those twenty-first century auxlangs which include a large degree of influence (in vocabulary and grammar) from non-European languages and which are truly "up with the times" in their design paradigms (thus making them of acceptable difficulty to consumers
globally) have any chance of great global literary success in a free market (without government decree).
This leads me specifically to my decision that, unless I have a change of heart, I'm not going to bother learning any nineteenth- or twentieth-century auxlangs. I hereby permanently give up Esperanto, Interlingua, and all the rest of the auxlangs of the last two centuries.
What I am saying is: the answer lies with the new not with the old.
Fortunately there are two good candidates that I am currently aware of, and should neither of these prove to be successful for my writing endeavours then I will probably seek to become a co-inventor of some new language, unless in the meantime another excellent language is released.
The two auxlangs which remain for me are therefore, quite clearly:
(1)
Lingwa de Planeta
(2)
Sambahsa
I am currently focussing on LdP for the remainder of 2012, in order to give it a really thorough and fair literary evaluation and not just a half-hearted test drive. If it turns out that LdP does not meet my needs then the next step will be to focus on
Sambahsa in 2013. I do expect, however, that with some relatively minor evolutionary changes to improve its still-young grammar, which presumably will be made by the LdP community over the course of the year, it is quite likely that LdP will meet most of my literary needs. Furthermore, LdP is easier than Sambahsa for those from the Far East.
I do think that the solution to a viable twenty-first century literary auxlang for popular global use lies somewhere on the continuum between these two
worldlangs: the relatively easy LdP, with its free-wheeling and non-threatening grammar which is accessible to everyone but which at times lacks precision, or the intimidating and demanding grammar of Sambahsa (simplified from Proto-Indo-European) which delivers relentless precision. Mostly I prefer the former but sometimes I crave the latter.
If neither LdP nor Sambahsa work out for me, then I will be looking for other new twenty-first century auxlangs or becoming involved in creating one myself, perhaps as a kind of compromise between the two (such a project would probably require international collaboration right from the start, with at least one team member representing each major language group; it would not be an impossible or endless task with the right team).
I will not, however, be writing literature in nineteenth-century or twentieth-century auxlangs. So, it's goodbye to Esperanto, Interlingua,
et. al.
Nau nu zai go for!
Now we are making progress!
Onward...
P.S. Many, many thanks to the brilliant inventors of LdP and Sambahsa. Your work is keeping the dream of better international communication and understanding alive for the twenty-first century.
