55. ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE (Part-5)

Because of the difficulties inherent in translation, people have been trying for

over a century to devise a neutral, artificial language. At the end of the

nineteenth century there arose a vogue for made-up languages. Between 1880

and 1907 , fifty-three universal languages were proposed. Most were enthusiastically ignored,

but one or two managed to seize the public's attention. One of the more

improbable of these successes was Volapuk, invented in 1880 by a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer. For a decade and a half, Volapuk enjoyed a large

following. More than 280 clubs sprang up all over Europe to promote it. Journals

were established and three international congresses were held. At its peak it

boasted almost a million followers. And yet the language was both eccentric and

abstruse. Schleyer shunned the letter r because he thought it was too difficult for

children, the elderly, and the Chinese. Above all, Volapuk was obscure. Schleyer

claimed that the vocabulary was based largely on English roots, which he said

made it easy to learn for anyone already familiar with English, but these links

were often nearly impossible to deduce. The word Volapuk itself was supposed

to come from two English roots, vole for world and puk for speak, but I daresay

it would take a linguistic scholar of the first mark to see the connection. Schleyer

helped to doom the language by refusing to make any modifications to it, and it

died with almost as much speed as it had arisen.

Rather more successful, and infinitely more sensible, has been Esperanto,

devised in 1887 by a Pole named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhoff, who lived in an

area of Russia where four languages were commonly spoken. Zamenhoff spent

years diligently concocting his language. Luckily he was a determined fellow

because at an advanced stage in the work his father, fearing his son would be

thought a spy working in code, threw all Ludovic's papers on the fire and the

young Pole was forced to start again from scratch.

Esperanto is considerably more polished and accessible than Volapiik. It has just

sixteen rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings, and no illogicalities of

spelling. Esperantists claim to have eight million adherents in 1 10 countries and

they say that with three hours of study a week it can be mastered in a year. As

evidence of its success as a living language, its proponents point out that it has

developed its own body of slang (for example, luton for hello, a devil-may-care

shortening of the formal word saluton) and even its own swear words (such as

merdo, derived from the French merde). Esperanto looks faintly like a cross

between Spanish and Martian, as this brief extract, the first sentence from the

Book of Genesis, shows: "En la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la teron."

Esperanto has one inescapable shortcoming. For all its eight million claimed

speakers, it is not widely used. In normal circumstances, an Esperanto speaker

has about as much chance of encountering another as a Norwegian has of

stumbling on a fellow Norwegian in, say, Mexico.As a result of these inevitable shortcomings, most other linguistics authorities,

particularly in this century, have taken the view that the best hope of a world

language lies not in devising a synthetic tongue, which would almost certainly

be doomed to failure, but in making English less complex and idiosyncratic and

more accessible. To that end, Professor C. K. Ogden of Cambridge University in

England devised Basic English, which consisted of paring the English language

down to just 850 essential words, including a mere i8 verbs—be, come, do, get,

give, go, have, keep, let, make, may, put, say, see, seem, send, take, and will—

which Ogden claimed could describe every possible action. Thus simplified,

English could be learned by most foreigners with just thirty hours of tuition,

Ogden claimed. It seemed ingenious, but the system had three flaws.

First, those who learned Basic English might be able to write simple messages,

but they would scarcely be able to read anything in English—even comic books

and greeting cards would contain words and expressions quite unknown to them.

Second, in any language vocabulary is not the hardest part of learning.

Morphology, syntax, and idiom are far more difficult, but Basic English did

almost nothing to simplify these. Third, and most critically, the conciseness of

the vocabulary of Basic English meant that it could become absurdly difficult to

describe anything not covered by it, as seen in the word watermelon, which in

Basic English would have to be defined as "a large green fruit with the form of

an egg, which has a sweet red inside and a good taste. – Basic English got

nowhere.

At about the same time, a Professor R. E. Zachrisson of the University of

Uppsala in Sweden devised a form of English that he called Anglic. Zachrisson

believed that the stumbling block of English for most foreigners was its irregular

spelling. He came up with a language that was essentially English but with more

consistent spellings. Here is the start of the Gettysburg Address in Anglic:

"Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue

naeshon… ." Anglic won some influential endorsements, but it too never caught

on.

Perhaps the most promising of all such languages is Seaspeak, devised in Britain

for the use of maritime authorities in busy sea lanes such as the English Channel.

The idea of Seaspeak is to reduce to a minimum the possibilities of confusion by

establishing set phrases for ideas that are normally expressed in English in a

variety of ways. For instance, a partly garbled message might prompt anynumber of responses in English: "What did you say?"

"I beg your pardon, I didn't catch that. Can you say it again?"

"There's static on this channel. Can you repeat the message?" and so on. In

Seaspeak, only one expression is allowed: "Say again." Any error, for whatever

reason, is announced simply as "Mistake," and not as "Hold on a minute, I've

given you the wrong bearings," and so on.

Computers, with their lack of passion and admirable ability to process great

streams of information, would seem to he ideal for performing translations, but

in fact they are pretty hopeless at it, largely on account of their inability to come

to terms with idiom, irony, and other quirks of language. An oft-cited example is

the computer that was instructed to translate the expression out of sight, out of

mind out of English and back in again and came up with blind insanity. It is

curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to

5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference

between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the

English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one's face, and to make

up after a fight are all quite separate things. Here at last Esperanto may be about

to come into its own. A Dutch computer company is using Esperanto as a bridge

language in an effort to build a workable translating system. The idea is that

rather than, say, translate Danish directly into Dutch, the computer would first

translate it into Esperanto, which could be used to smooth out any difficulties of

syntax or idiom. Esperanto would in effect act as a kind of air filter, removing

linguistic impurities and idiomatic specks that could clog the system.

Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more

smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement.