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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-03-13
While perusing my feed just now, I happened to come across a bit of news that deals with an unusual topic. That is to say, it's not the sort of thing you hear about every day, though I am certainly familiar with it:
"French call to replace English with Latin as Europe's official language". Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it sort of is. If you actually read the article, it talks about a mostly-scorned suggestion by a French official to have the working language of the EU be made French (again?). Later it's mentioned that someone had also suggested Latin.
Naturally, the article makes no mention of Esperanto. It's probable that they either don't know about Esperanto or are not taking it seriously, which is stupid.
Why is it stupid? Because Esperanto addresses everything they claim is wrong with English. From the article:
For point one, Esperanto very effectively solves the problem of challenges faced by non-natives. Esperanto wasn't made for native speakers. Yes, it has a few native speakers now, but it was made to be an ideal second-language. With so very few native speakers, everyone is on more level footing, and even if the number of native speakers were to grow, it doesn't change the fact that the language is founded on a supernatural regularity.
Constructed languages have a strong tendency towards regularity regardless, but Esperanto still tried as hard as it could to be easy and regular. Learners of the language need to memorize comparatively little vocabulary, for example "granda" means "big", "malgranda" means "small", and "grandeco" means "size".
On point two, regarding Latin being ideal for Europe for various reasons, Esperanto is simply a modern version of Latin. It's very strongly rooted in Latin, but it's been modernized and made easy. In some fundamental ways it is very unlike Latin, but the legacy is clearly there, and however Esperanto may differ from Latin, it is decidely European. Critics of Esperanto often claim that it's "too European", as if that's a bad thing. Well, not for the European Union it isn't.
How does one revive an ancient, dead language? Well, Esperanto has, in effect, done this. Esperanto did not start out as living, but it was made alive, much like modern Hebrew. It's based on an ancient language, but it has taken on a new, modern form. Latin's children, of course, live on in modern languages like French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. (Hell, even Romanian.) However, one can say on the whole that they have strayed farther from Latin than Esperanto has. Esperanto possesses some suprisingly archaic features borrowed directly from Latin, for example in its spelling and vocabulary, ie the preservation of Latin roots. This conservative spelling (but not TOO conservative) keeps Esperanto well connected with Europe's literary heritage.
The last two points I've already sufficiently addressed. Esperanto does take advantage of how Latin shaped modern European languages, so it's a very fair middle ground. It uses the common denominator, and it is also not too difficult to be exclusive. It's super easy for Europeans to learn, but even non-Eurpoeans can learn it easily, if even without the "super" part.
The stupidity of all this, is that Esperanto was already well-established a century ago. Now it's 2021 and people are pretending it doesn't exist while thinking, "How do we find a common language for Europe based on Latin? What a novel idea! What ever shall we do?" Gee, I wonder. It's like we didn't know one day we'd need to look beyond English.
Esperantists had been calling for Esperanto to be the common language of the EU for as long as the EU has existed, so this is not a new thing. The issue is that we are wilfully ignored. Of course French nationalists want the French language to be the official language. English speakers want English to be on top. Powerful, wealthy, or influential individuals or institutions wanting things usually means that those things are the ones that get done, but that doesn't mean they are the best things for everyone.