ELNA UPDA TE
Quarterly newsletter published by the Esperanto League for Tiorth America         1/1999
PO Box 1129 • El Cerrito CA 94530 • USA                                             1SSM 1081-6224
EUROBABEL
The launch of a common European currency in-
vites the question: Should there now be a com-
mon European language?
Saturday, February 6,1999
Peter FREEDMAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
London — The Portuguese embassy in London does not
know how many Portuguese speak Finnish. Neither do I,
but we agree that the number is probably small, not least
because Finnish, along with Hungarian and Basque, is
among the most difficult and least useful European lan-
guages for most other Europeans to learn.
It may be too early to speak of a crisis. But we can no
longer ignore the international shortage of Finnish-speak-
ing Portuguese. This is because when Finland, Sweden
and Austria became the newest members of the European
Union on Jan. 1, 1995, Swedish and Finnish were added
to the EU's previous total of nine official languages (Dan-
ish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Por-
tuguese and Spanish).
The need for documents and speeches in 11 languages,
each to be translated into all 10 other languages, means
that Finnish-Portuguese and Portuguese-Finnish are only
two of the 110 [Actually there are 220: do the math! - ed.]
translation directions for which the EU must now cater.
With six more countries - Cyprus, Slovenia, Poland,
Hungary, Czech Republic and Estonia - set to join in the
next wave, and others clamouring to follow, the already
unmanageable European-language mountain can only get
worse.
With the introduction of the euro on Jan. 1, there is a
growing argument for adopting a common European lan-
guage. The problem, of course, is that the language issue
is, as one EU official puts it, "a bit delicate." Any move in
the past to restrict the number of official languages has
been vigorously fought by the EU's smaller countries,
such as Denmark and Portugal. "It is seen as a fairly
sacred right to conduct debate in their own language,"
says a spokesperson for the European Parliament.
Thus, when Alain Lamassoure, then France's minister
for European affairs, suggested in 1995 that the EU might
need to consider reducing the number of working lan-
guages to five from 11, the result was an uproar, with
those countries that felt threatened issuing furious resolu-
tions in their respective languages.
Mr. Lamassoure responded that he had been talking
about the future, when even more countries would be in
the EU. "The theoretical maximum is something like 27
countries," says Eyra McNally, a Welsh-born, Esperanto-
speaking, Labour Party Euro MP. The original European
Economic Community had only six members and four of-
ficial languages: French, German, Italian and Dutch. The
mature version could end up with more than 20 languages
and 400 [Actually 760 - ed.] directions of translation.
Even in the days of only nine languages, the European
Community translated more than three million words a
day, at a cost of about 50 cents a word-not bad for words
such as "agricultural" and "intergovernmental," but pretty
steep in anyone's language for words such as "I" and
"the." Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, in his 1994 book
The Search for the Perfect Language, explored the medi-
eval idea that there once existed a language that perfectly
expressed the essence of all things, and that current lan-
guages are its decadent, post-Babel descendants. So why
can't there be an international language once again?
"There already is one-it's called English," says David
Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Lan-
guage. [And pretty certainly a native speaker of English
- ed.] "Pretty well everyone out there is already learning
it from the age of six on." Yet in any contest to choose an
official European language, realpolitik suggests that En-
glish is a non-starter, for the simple reason that the French
would rather swallow a jug of warm spit each morning be-
fore breakfast than face a statutory requirement to speak
English.
Mr. Eco likes the sound of Esperanto, the best known of
the artificial or "planned" languages. But several lan-
guages, alive and dead, planned and organic, could all
claim credentials for the job of common European lan-
guage. Here are the main candidates:
PROVEN LANGUAGES
Latin
The mother, if not also the father, of at least the Western
European languages, Latin also was the lingua franca of
prayer and power and culture and commerce across
Europe for at least 1,000 years after the fall of Rome. And
it remained the working language of ritual and bureau-
cracy in the Roman Catholic Church until the 1960s and
the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. On the down-
side, Latin has been gradually shed from most school cur-
riculums across Europe; even the Vatican no longer uses
it on a daily basis. Its long use as the language of the priv-
ileged also might prompt objections of political incorrect-
ness. On the upside, Latin is concise, clear and proven as
an international language. Its revival also would be the
best news for unemployed classics teachers since the
Punic wars. It already has shown its scope as a language
for the media age in Finland, where a radio station broad-
casts in Latin once a week.
Yiddish
"Yiddish has never been a serious candidate," says Mr.
Crystal when I reveal my own preference for the common
European language. Why not? Like the EU itself, the lar-
gest component of Yiddish is German; unlike Esperanto,
it also boasts a 1,000-year track record as a working inter-
national language, spoken and written in a dozen countries
by the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. While Latin,
English, French and German are all languages of conquest
and colonialism, Yiddish, according to Isaac Bashevis
Singer, the late Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer, is
"the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and cabal-
ists-rich in humour and in memories." It combines poly-
glot roots with unusual expressiveness. Mr. Singer was
fond of demonstrating its richness by reciting 100 Yiddish
synonyms for "a poor man."
PLANNED LANGUAGES
Esperanto
Last year was a good year for Esperanto, the international
language invented in 18 87 by Ludwig Zamenhof, a Jewish
doctor in Warsaw. This was primarily because William
Auld, the Scottish-bom poet who writes in Esperanto, be-
came the first Esperanto writer to be nominated for a
Nobel Prize in literature. This year could be even better if
Mr. Auld wins the prize.
According to Mr. Crystal, "Esperanto has passed its sell-
by date." [I don't recall ever seeing one: it seems fresh to
me! - ed.] But with the European-language mountain
teetering under the weight of its own contradictions, the
sense among Esperantists is that the revolutionary mo-
ment may be at hand. "The lobby for Esperanto is sub-
stantially growing," says Brian Barker of The [British]
Esperanto Society. The Esperanto Society identifies the
requisites of an ideal international language as follows:
1.    The language should have been used successfully by
many people around the world.
2.   It should have had a long trial period to ensure that it
is no flash in the pan.
3.    It should have proved attractive to internationally
minded politicians, since political decisions may settle
its fate.
4.    It should be easy to learn.
5.   It should be pleasant to listen to and to read.
6.    It should have developed an organic life of its own -
a corpus of literature, thought, history and social con-
ventions - but not be identified with any particular
ideology or nation.
To no one's surprise, only one language meets every re-
quirement. Perhaps the highest accolade paid Esperanto
came from the secretary of the French Academy. "Esper-
anto is suitable for expressing the subtlest shades of ideas
and emotions... It satisfies even the most suspicious and
stubborn intellect." Then again, this may have been just
another symptom of the French belief that anything would
be better than English.
Klingon
Klingon is the spoken and written language of the Klingon
Empire, as in the Star Trek television and movie series,
and the only known attempt to create an intergalactic lan-
guage. It has been estimated that "half the quadrant" is
learning Klingon in anticipation of the Klingons' arrival.
If so, it is a tribute to the skills of Mark Okrand, the
American linguist hired by Paramount Pictures to write
the Klingons' dialogue for Star Trek HI: The Search for
Spock (1984). Mr. Okrand got carried away and invented
an entire language. A Klingon dictionary containing 1,500
words and an outline of its grammar now is published in
more than 20 countries. But would Klingon make a good
common European language? "No, not at all," says Bob
Denton, a leading British Trekkie. "It's too abrupt, harsh
and guttural. It is hard to speak and extremely hard to
learn." That is not even taking into account the fact that
different Klingon provinces have different dialects.
STREET LANGUAGES
Jive, Valley talk, Franglais and Cockney rhyming
slang
Given an open mind, the possibilities are endless. Am I
the only one, for example, who would like to hear a senior
European commissioner address the plenary session of the
European Parliament in jive or Valley talk? Or Jacques
Santer, president of the European Commission, make a
keynote speech in Cockney rhyming slang?
Might it not be fitting for German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroder to acknowledge the de facto role of French and
English as the EU's two main working languages by ad-
dressing the next intergovernmental conference in Frang-
lais?
NATIONAL LANGUAGES
English
The best argument for adopting English as the common
European language might be the figures published recent-
ly by the European Commission showing that four out of
five secondary school students in the EU are actively
learning it.
"When the Eastern European barriers came down, it was
interesting to see that everyone started to clamour for En-
glish-speaking materials and courses," says Mr. Crystal.
"Poor old German, which was the lingua franca in a lot of
former Communist Europe, was immediately put under
pressure, while the same thing was happening to Russian
in the former Soviet Union."
And in the European institutions themselves, "you'll of-
ten find informal meetings taking place in English," says
Eyra McNally, the Euro MP. "I was at a meeting and
everyone just made the effort and spoke English."
But Esperantists are not impressed. Not only is English
hard to spell, pronounce and learn, they say, here's the
clincher: It was recently harmed as the language of admin-
istration in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. [Obviously
the real "clincher" is that its widespread official use with-
in the EU would give inappropriate advantages to mem-
bers of one of the nation-states. — ed.] Even in Europe,
French is spoken on a daily basis in more countries and
German by more people.
French
Life was simple for the French in the early days of the
EEC, when the francophone trio of France, Belgium and
Luxembourg made up half of the EEC's original member-
ship while also housing its three administrative and power
centres: Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg. French, in
short, was not only the former language of international
diplomacy and long-time lingua franca of Europe's edu-
cated classes, but the only game in town- The French mis-
take was not to have had French designated the EEC's of-
ficial tongue. French has been on the retreat from English
ever since. A suggestion by France's foreign ministry in
the mid-1990s that European countries should require
their schoolchildren to learn two foreign languages was an
implicit acceptance that, if only one were learned, it woul-
dn't be French.
German
German is not only the language of Europe's richest and
most powerful country but also the language spoken on a
daily basis by more Europeans than any other. This is not
to mention its own track record as a language that once
dominated most of Europe's intellectual, scientific, com-
mercial and artistic life. And German would have a sort of
geographical logic, by providing a natural bridge between
the languages of Western and Eastern Europe. It is also,
of course, the language of Goethe, Schiller and, er, Flitler.
Finnish
Finnish would certainly be a surprise choice as the com-
mon European language. But think of it this way: the lack
of Finnish-language skills across Europe, combined with
the language's fiendish difficulty, would require the cre-
ation of a European-wide Finnish-teaching and publishing
industry resulting in the biggest European jobs boom
since the Marshall Plan.
The choice of Finnish would lend conviction to Euro-
pean expressions of support for minority languages. And
Finland's traditional role as a buffer between Western
Europe and the former Soviet Union would lend it a suit-
able neutrality. On the downside, an enhanced Finnish
role would seriously antagonize the Catalans, already mif-
fed that their language, spoken by more people than either
Finnish or Danish, has no official status.
Peter Freedman is a writer living near London.
Copyright © 1999 The Globe and Mail
LANGUAGE A/ HUMAN RIGHT
The National House of Culture in the center of Tokyo
hosted a symposium last October in recognition of the
50-year anniversary of the Universal   Declaration of
Human Rights. The symposium was called "Language as
a Human Right- Ideas and Practice of Linguistic Rights".
In all 119 people participated, including 36 non-Esperan-
tists. Many specialists in linguistics and linguistic rights
were present, including TUNODA Tasaku, professor at
the University of Tokyo, a Unesco Commissioner in
charge of an internet database about threatened languages
of the world.
The concept of linguistic rights is but little known in
Japan, so the symposium aimed at introducing the idea in
Japan. Most likely this was the first Japanese event,
whether in Esperantio or not, which used the phrase "lin-
guistic rights" in its title. In order to avoid mere juggling
of abstract theories and to keep the discussion rooted in
real-world problems, some specialists in the language of
the Ainu people (the indigenous tribe of the northern
Japanese island called Hokkaido), as well as some experts
on the linguistic situation of Koreans living in Japan. LEE
Cheong-yeong, former president of UEA also participated
in the symposium.
This symposium was organized by two graduate students
of sociolinguistics, KIMURA Goro and USUI Hiroyuki,
who obviously were thinking of the Nitobe symposium
during the UK in 1995. But even within Japan there was
a recent precedent: in autumn of 1997 during the regional
congress of Esperantists in Hokkaido [in which I had the
honor to participate - ed.] there was a symposium during
which several representatives of the Ainu community ad-
dressed issues of linguistic rights. Kimura, who participat-
ed in the Hokkaido symposium, was so impressed that he
immediately began planning a similar event in Tokyo. It
is worthy of note that at that time there was already a
group of graduate students in sociolinguistics (mostly Es-
perantists) who were planning the theoretical basis of such
a symposium, which further motivated its two main initia-
tors.
The symposium began with an address by YAMASAKI
Seiko, president of the Japan Esperanto Institute. Then af-
ter an introduction by Usui, Professor HARA Kiyosi, a
specialist in the Breton language, drew attention to the
fact that discussions of linguistic rights (for example in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) have been
greatly influenced by groups of European minorities
which have insisted with international solidarity upon co-
existence and cooperative rights, not national independ-
ence.
Next came a report from Professor NAKAG A WA Hirosi
about the revival of the language of the Ainu people. The
language of this Japanese indigenous ethnic group has
only a handful of native speakers. Twenty years ago no-
body thought that a revival movement would ever get
started. However during the 80s Ainu language courses
were organized, and a movement began to abolish the law
which discriminated against the Ainu. The new law on
this matter, which became valid in May 1997, still pres-
ents many problems. But by means of this new law, now
money is flowing from the state budget for courses in the
Ainu language, and so the Ainu begin to regain a positive
image of themselves and their language.
The third lecturer, HUZII Konosuke, dealt with the fact
that in Japan there is no law which addresses the status of
Japanese Koreans relative to their use of their ancestral
language. There are no Korean-language media or instruc-
tion in Japan, so Koreans are allowed to learn only Japan-
ese. The government must formulate a clear linguistic
policy for people of diverse origins.
Finally TANI Hiroyuki, an Esperantist and specialist on
the Mongolian and Uighur languages, presented the re-
lations between linguistic rights and Esperanto. He argued
that the linguistic imperialism of the large languages is
nothing other than the highest step of. linguistic national-
ism; and that Esperanto offers an alternative to them both
by contributing to the formation of a tolerant, multi-lin-
gual society. This is also the goal of attempts by small
languages to guarantee linguistic rights for themselves.
There are plans that a non-Esperantist sociolinguistic
publisher will publish the reports of this symposium. This
has not happened in Japan during the last three decades.
The workgroup which coordinated this symposium within
the Japan Esperanto Institute intends to continue with
similar efforts, thereby enabling the expansion of the nor-
mally tight-knit Japanese Esperanto movement, initiating
dialogues with various non-Esperantist groups, so that
these latter may recognize that the Esperanto movement
is not a collection of Utopia-chasers, but rather people
who are occupied with current problems.
USUI Hiroyuki (representative of the workgroup which
sponsored the symposium) (this is excerpted from the re-
port which appeared in the January issue of Revuo Orien-
fa)
ENGLI/H DROPPED IN HONG KONG
Reports indicate that many secondary schools in Hong
Kong that have used English as their language of instruc-
tion are being required to switch to Chinese, following a
government decree in late 1997. Some in Hong Kong fear
that this move will lead to a significant erosion of English
literacy in the city. More than 230 secondary schools have
switched to Chinese from English in the past two years,
bringing the total to 310 schools where basic instruction
is now in Chinese. However, 114 schools have been given
permission to retain English as their language of instruc-
tion, after demonstrating to inspectors a high level of En-
glish competency and usage by staff and students. Of
course, not everyone in Hong Kong is pleased with the
language change. Recent polls indicate that over 70% of
parents feel that an English-language education would
better prepare their children for the future. In response to
the criticism, the Chinese government has substantially
increased the funding of English instruction programs in
Chinese-taught schools. Most commentators believe that
ultimately all of Hong Kong's public schools will use
Chinese for their basic instruction. [The International Ed-
ucator, Feb 1999]
EJPERANT© NEW/
NEW RECORD FOR PAS PORTA SERVO
Every year for the last 25 years, the World Esperantist
Youth Organization (TEJO) publishes Pasporta Servo, a
list of Esperantists who host visiting Esperantists. This is
one of the most popular services of TEJO. This year Pas-
porta Servo reached a new record of participants: 945
hosts in 76 countries are included. Anybody who is listed
in the booklet, or anybody who purchases it, can stay for
free for a few days at the dwelling of anybody listed.
This project also shows to the outside world that Esper-
anto is useful. Many people learn Esperanto just so they
can travel using Pasporta Servo, thereby having close,
meaningful contact with the residents of foreign lands, ra-
ther than staying in hotels and only talking with clerks in
broken English.
For more information about Pasporta Servo, see http:
//home.wxs.nl/~lide/paspserv.htm
For general information about TEJO, look at http:
//www.esperanto.org/internacia/tejo
MORE NEW WWW SITES
YAHOO! A NEW NET-CLUB!
There is now an Esperanto "club" at http: //clubs.
yahoo.com/clubs/esperanto
Here you can post messages, chat, announce your own
web-pages, etc. It is worthy of visiting at least once, and
as more people visit, it becomes even more worthy! It is
a fun place to hang out on the Web. Beginners are wel-
come. (From Christopher M. A. Zervic, President of the
Esperanto Society of Chicago)
ESPERANTO WEATHER
Care to see weather forecasts in Esperanto? Check out:
http://esperanto.wunderground.com
ESPERANTO COMMERCE
A new site deals with international trade in Esperanto:
http://komerco.com
ESPERANTO CALENDAR
For a complete list of all the international meetings in Es-
perantio, have a look at: http: / /www. hungary. net/
esperanto/kalendar.htm. In 1998 there were 2627
visits to the site, making it one of the most popular in Es-
perantio.
ESPERANTO IN THE AMERICAS
For an ongoing discussion of the role of Esperanto in the
Americas, go to: http://www.dejanews.com/
"esperanto tutameriko
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