On Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:19:41 -0500, Sam Ewalt wrote: > On Mon, 31 Mar 2003 12:00:18 -0500, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
>> I remember back in the late 1950's and early 1960's there was >> an international movement to adopt Esperanto as an international >> language. The proponents of the movement said that Esperanto > Esperanto was invented in 1871 by a Polish doctor for use as an > International second language. According to the Encyclopedia > Britannica it has around 100,000 speakers, is used by around > twenty professional orgainizations and over 100 periodicals. > Not bad. But not really sucessful. I didn't know that Esperanto had been around for so long. The only thing I knew about it was that it was an invented and contrived language and that there was a movement to attempt to make it popular back in the late 1950's. >> For use as an international language, why don't they consider adopting >> Latin instead of Esperanto? > Latin is of limited usefulness and hard to learn I'm told. English > is the de facto international language now and the second language > of choice around the world. If people want to communicate, do business > internationally, study the latest advances in science, medicine, > engineering, the arts, then they will learn English. Yes, it is somewhat hard to learn in my opinion insofar as the grammar is concerned, but the vocabulary is very easy for most speakers of English and also for speakers of many other European languages because so many of the words in those languages come down to us from Latin. I don't think its usefulness would be at all limited except when one would want to discuss or write about the things of modern technology for which no Latin terms exist. > People are doing that with great enthusiasm all over the world. > This certainly isn't because of any inherent virtue in the language > or in it's native speakers but because it's so useful and of obvious > economic benefit. Learning to master the speaking and writing of English will be of little economic benefit for those who lack skills and knowledge and experience in the highly lucrative vocations. An immigrant who is is a manual laborer is not likely to be able to get a higher paying job just because he learns to speak English. Employers for those kinds of jobs only care about how dependable the laborer is and they care about how well and how fast he can do the job. They don't care if he can't speak English because that is not what he is paid to do. Americans on the work crew who don't work as well as the immigrants will get fired. There is no shortage of hard working immigrant laborers to replace lazy American workers. English speaking shopkeepers and merchants in foreign countries are not very likely to benefit from my patronage. I have found that I can almost always get a better deal from a merchant who doesn't speak English. Most of my fellow Americans are aware of the fact that there are much better deals to be had in foreign countries by doing business with merchants who don't speak English. Unlike me, most of my fellow Americans who travel in foreign countries have much more money than I and they don't care about the price. What they care most about is the pleasure of being able to do business with a merchant who knows how to communicate very well with his American customers, even if they know that the English speaking merchants charge much higher prices for the Americans. Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser: http://browser.arachne.cz/
