New Year's Resolution for 2012

Okay, I have made a New Year's Resolution!

My resolution is to ignore the most recent change to my one-year study plan and to go back to the version of the plan dated 27 November 2011. In other words, to focus on studying just one auxlang: Lingwa de Planeta (LdP).

Recently I had been pleasantly surprised to discover that I could suddenly read an introductory Esperanto novella reasonably easily (with the help of a good dictionary) despite not having studied Esperanto in recent months. That was a pleasant discovery. It conforms to my current hypothesis that (extrapolating from my experiences over the past two years) it probably takes about five years to learn any good auxlang to true fluency. Sure, now I can read a little Esperanto; that's great. But to be able to fluently converse in Esperanto or to write a novel in Esperanto would take me a few more years of study, beyond the few months of work I have invested studying that language so far. The question is: Do I want to put a few years into studying Esperanto?

A key factor here is time. I am a person with many interests and I chronically over-estimate the number of things which I can simultaneously undertake or learn. The truth is that because I am very busy with many other commitments, and also committed to learning French, I really only have time for learning one auxlang. This forces me, as the new year begins, to make a decision and choose between Esperanto and LdP. I choose LdP.

There is a compelling reason to do so. Almost two years ago, when I first started on this long journey, I had the good sense to write the following statement. Since then I have made many mistakes and have gone down many wrong roads. But in retrospect I still think that the following statement is one of the most valuable things I have ever written on this blog. Here it is:

Any constructed language which had more than 1,000 to 10,000* reasonably fluent speakers in 1993, when the World Wide Web was popularised, and which has had a considerable online presence (including lessons and dictionaries) for several years, and which nevertheless has not grown exponentially in number of speakers since that time, has already failed. That is, the language has failed to gain popular acceptance and probably never will gain popular acceptance (unless induced artificially, such as by government decree). This is probably due to the language being more difficult than consumers were willing to accept, relative to the perceived benefits of learning the language.

* That is, a population of reasonably fluent speakers which numbered in the thousands rather than in the hundreds. By reasonably fluent I mean either able to correspond as a pen pal by writing simple letters, and/or able to read texts such as easy Wikipedia articles, and/or able to have spoken conversations.

Esperanto does work, as I discovered recently when suddenly it had become relatively easy for me to read. However, Esperanto has already failed according to the above definition. And I still think that matters.

Please don't misunderstand my intentions here. I certainly do not wish to discourage anyone from learning Esperanto. And I have finally come to understand, from personal experience, that although Esperanto is not perfect it really is a workable language; I can see that if I wanted to put a few years into learning it, I could use it to write novels, and people would be able to read them effectively if they themselves had put five years or so of studying into learning Esperanto to fluency. However, I do think that it is highly significant that, according to the above definition, Esperanto has not succeeded despite there being nothing to hold it back now that the internet is so globally accessible to billions of people. Anybody who wishes to learn Esperanto can now do so for free, using abundant resources freely available online. Yet people are not doing so except in rather limited numbers. Esperanto has thus, according to the above definition, already failed.

Now, one could say, perhaps this means that the whole concept of auxlangs has already failed. One could say that perhaps the failure of Esperanto is just a symptom of the failure of the concept of auxlangs in general. Maybe the vast majority of people will never have any interest in auxlangs and maybe the failure of Esperanto demonstrates this. Maybe. But until we have some mature twenty-first-century constructed languages which offer a global rather than regional approach in their design, we cannot be sure. Much has changed since 1887 when Ludwig Zamenhof (who was undoubtedly a genius) first published Esperanto. Asia is now poised to become the centre of the world's economy by the middle of this century. Travel and the internet has rendered the globe smaller than ever, with more and more interaction between people with no language in common, and with a much larger percentage of these interacting persons speaking no European language. It could be that the failure of Esperanto (which is not a total failure but a partial failure, since thousands do use the language successfully) actually indicates the unrealised potential for the greater success of auxlangs, but that what is needed is an auxlang much more accessible to speakers of Asian languages while remaining accessible to speakers of European languages. Maybe, just maybe, there is a literary future for such an auxlang.

Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) is in my opinion the most mature and promising of the currently available candidates for such an auxlang, for literary use, which fits the accessibility requirements noted above. These accessibility requirements, for speakers of Asian languages, mandate the use of a grammar that is not so dependent on prior knowledge of European grammar as is Esperanto; for example, there certainly should not be any definite article and it is probably best if constructions of tense are fewer and easier than those found in Esperanto. Although I doubt that LdP itself will necessarily be the auxlang which, in the far future, might succeed in gaining the interest of millions of readers of literature worldwide (including readers in Asia) it does seem to me that if the future is to bring the global success of any auxlang, it will be an auxlang that is more accessible to those in China than is Esperanto (and not just to those in China but to those throughout the entire Near-, Middle- and Far-East regions of the planet). In short, the successful auxlang of the future will be less Eurocentric than Esperanto, particularly in the formation of its grammar (and, to a lesser extent, its vocabulary; a lesser extent because Western vocabulary already dominates science). The East, not the West, holds the key to auxlang success. In other words, it is absolutely paramount that an auxlang should bridge the East-West gap; in my opinion Esperanto, although it can certainly be successfully used by most people, contains insufficient Eastern features to optimally be that bridge. LdP I think is closer to what the auxlang of the future might be.

Bear in mind that I am talking specifically about literary use. That is my interest. I am a writer of fiction. I want a language which is good for reading and writing literature. It may be that for science and business it will always be better to use a natural language, due to the great precision of natural languages and the enormous resources available for them; however to be able to use a natural language with such precision probably takes between one and two decades of very dedicated study, unless that language already resembles your native language. I think to be able to fluently use a good auxlang for reading and writing literature takes perhaps five years.

Even if no auxlang ever truly makes it big in the global market for literature, there is the educational benefit of learning auxlangs. For me personally, I'm more interested in the educational benefit which LdP offers than that offered by Esperanto. LdP teaches me words from Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Swahili, and so on which Esperanto does not. It's fun to learn Hindi, Mandarin, Persian and Arabic words and be able to talk about them with my friends. Esperanto does not give me that benefit. I think perhaps I could maybe convince some of my friends to take a look at LdP and to learn a little of it, just based on its use of words from their own native languages. Again, this is something Esperanto does not offer.

Lastly, I think I can make more difference as a writer by choosing LdP rather than Esperanto. One more writer using Esperanto is hardly significant. But one more writer using LdP is highly significant because by comparison the community of LdP users is so tiny. Since apparently it takes about five years to become truly fluent in any auxlang, it hardly makes any difference either way in that, either way, readers would have to invest a few years of study before they could read any novel I might write in either language. Thus very few people would read any novel I might write in Esperanto, anyway, so it is not as if choosing Esperanto over LdP would magically make it far easier for readers to access such a novel. In essence, my original dream when starting this blog, that maybe some auxlang exists in which novels could be written and readers could quickly and painlessly learn to read them, is forlorn. However, for reasons mentioned above, I think LdP is closer to what the successful literary auxlang of the future might look like.

Also, I note curiously, my journey has brought me back to LdP again and again. Every time I have gone off down different roads with other languages, in the end I have returned to LdP. While LdP is not perfect, there is something about it which brings me back again and again. It is, I think, at least somewhat on the right track, at least somewhat an indicator of what a successful auxlang of the future might look like.

By the way, I think the fact that I am an Australian weighs heavily into this decision. I live in Australia. I happen to speak a European language, English, but those of my friends and colleagues whose first language is not English speak Asian languages, not European languages. I cannot imagine getting any of my Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic-speaking friends and colleagues to learn, say, five Esperanto words for fun over lunch. But I can easily imagine having lunch with any of them and getting them interested in learning five LdP words, because LdP contains words from diverse languages around the world, including some prominent Asian languages. This makes it relevant.

Also significant is that the grammar of the European language which I speak, English, is simpler than the grammar of other European languages such as French; the grammar of LdP is more accessible to me than Esperanto grammar, a fact which is of no small significance when one considers that English is the most popular second language spoken in Asia. For example, like English, LdP favours using a standard word order rather than inflection to indicate the accusative, and there is no adjectival agreement. For me as an English speaker, LdP grammar seems much more familiar and less demanding than the unfamiliar grammar of Esperanto; whereas if my first language were French (uses adjectival agreement) or Turkish (uses agglutination), Esperanto grammar would probably seem less intimidating to me.

In 2012 in Australia, the vocabulary of LdP is more immediately relevant to my life and to the life of my friends and colleagues than the vocabulary of Esperanto, which was relevant in 1887 in Eastern Europe. That's not to say that the vocabulary of Esperanto is better or worse than the vocabulary of LdP, but the vocabulary of LdP is I think better suited to the global outlook of the twenty-first century, which is heavily influenced by Asia. Having said that, LdP combines the best of both worlds since most of its vocabulary is from the major successful European natural languages of the world and it still, like other languages, favours Western vocabulary for scientific terms.

I think that studying LdP is the best way to spend my auxlang time this year, at least until the end of my one-year study plan this October. In essence, I've decided it's better to learn one auxlang well than two auxlangs badly.

Onward during 2012...