Great example! Thanks, Michael!

It’s interesting to see that Esperanto is evolving to have masculine suffixes as well as feminine ones. I believe there used to be an offshoot called Ido but I don’t know if it still has any adherents. If it were adopted as a universal lingua franca Esperanto would probably also go through many changes. Plurals, verb tenses, case endings (eg the accusative -n in Esperanto) would probably drop away since many other languages do quite well without them. Other features common to non-European languages might be adopted, such as “evidentiary” morphemes — in some languages you can’t just say “Michael is drunk”, you have to specify whether you saw me down half a bottle of whisky, or someone told you I was drunk but you have no personal evidence of it, or the fact that I am slurring my words and tripping over my feet leads you to assume that I am drunk.
I think it can be illusory to think that different languages work the same way. I had an opportunity many years ago to look closely at a language correctly referred to as Tok Niugini, incorrectly called Pidgin English. It is a creole, not a pidgin, because it is a fully developed language with monolingual speakers. Most of the vocabulary comes from English, but that can be misleading to an observer. There are two words for siblings in Tok Niugini, “brada” and “sista”, which obviously come from “brother” and “sister”. But while the English words refer to the sibling’s personal gender, the Tok Niugini words refer to relative gender. “Brada” means a sibling of the same gender as the person referred to, while “sista” is a sibling of the opposite gender. So “brada blong Michael” translates as “Michael’s brother” and “sista blong Michael” is “Michael’s sister”, but “brada blong Nicole” would be “Nicole’s sister” and “sista blong Nicole” translates as “Nicole’s brother”.
Now that I think about it, my idea of a Euringlish created by a committee in Brussels isn’t really how languages develop and change over time. English itself is a good example, as is Tok Niugini.

I studied a couple of Asian languages, they really don’t work that much differently from European languages. What you mention are very minor problems. In English also the word for woman is man with 2 added letters, so are you saying that English shouldn’t use the word “woman” because it is based on the word “man”? Furthermore some Esperanto speakers already use a suffix for male, so that the root is gender neutral. It is not officially accepted yet, but it could if big numbers would consider that a real problem. “Scienco” is a hard to pronounce word, but those words are very rare in Esperanto. And it wouldn’t be a big problem to take the first c out of that word to make it much easier to pronounce. We don’t need to wait for a perfect solution, which might never come, but we need something much better than the use of English in international communication.

I agree there is an attractiveness to the idea of a neutral language of international communication, but is that even possible? Esperanto is full of Euro-centric assumptions about how languages work. It also assumes masculine gender as the norm and feminine as other: vir – virino, patro – patrino, frato – fratino, onklo – onklino, knabo – knabino. The phonology is also a problem – how many native Chinese speakers can pronounce “scienco”?
Without a single member State that considers English its “own” language (Ireland and Malta have their own national languages), the EU could transform English into Euringlish in any way it wanted. Maybe the rest of the world could then catch on. Fixing the spelling would be like a declaration of independence, and would be easily done in a world where the vast majority of texts exist in digital form and could be transliterated at the touch of a button. Ĉiuokaze, vivu ĉiuj lingvoj (I had to run that through Google translate, sorry).

So true! I wish I had more time to take a deep dive into all the languages and cultures I’m interested in …

I agree that English spelling could be simplified. That would help a bit, but not enough. Change takes time. I don’t suggest that people would change over to Esperanto immediately, I think it should take about one generation to make the switch, so that children not yet born would then spend much less time on English and would be able to learn in addition to Esperanto a variety of languages according to their real interest. Now the anglo-saxon culture is studied way too much at the expense of many other cultures from smaller countries that do have nevertheless very interesting cultures. Who has now time to study hungarian culture, icelandic culture, etc.

You raise an important question of course. Is a 100% fair solution possible? I doubt it. There could be a language that takes a few words from each existing language, but that would make it difficult for everyone. Even though Esperanto’s vocabulary is based on European languages, mainly Latin roots, but nevertheless also germanic and slavic roots, the grammar is not that European. I study Chinese and found quite a few similarities, the way the numbers work is exactly like in Chinese, the Chinese compound words are often quite similar to Esperanto. The good thing about Esperanto is that it is much easier to learn than other languages, because the grammar is very regular, no exceptions, the spelling is phonetic and lots of prefixes and suffixes means that there are less words to memorise. It is true that a French person will find Esperanto a bit easier to learn than a Chinese person. But the important bit is that Chinese people find Esperanto much easier to learn than English, so Esperanto would considerably diminish the unfairness, even though it would not be a perfectly fair solution, but if the choice is between English and Esperanto, Esperanto would be a big improvement concerning fairness.

One problem is that people tend to look only at the short term. Esperanto would benefit mainly the next generation and I think it is important to prevent the next generation from having the same problems that they have now. That is spending hundreds, thousands of hours studying English to be able to publish while native English speakers can concentrate on their chosen subject without all the hours other people need.

Nicole, you raise a valid point. In all the interviews and discussions I have had on the book, no one has ever raised the question of Esperanto and so I appreciate your doing so. Esperanto, as a truly neutral language, in the least deserves a mention. That said, it is not a practical solution or option at this point as a matter of policy given the dominance of English globally, the time and effort people across the globe have invested in learning it, and the massive amount of knowledge created in it.

In the podcast you do ask what could be done to diminish the unfairness.

In fairness, the book is about English and the reasons and consequences of its spread in various countries and domains …

I don’t understand how a serious researcher doesn’t even speak of Esperanto, a very important alternative to the problems of using English as an international language. Listening to the podcast I see that at least she acknowledges the unfairness of the situation, but she seems to say that there is not that much that can be done to prevent it. There is. Why on Earth do linguists not take Esperanto seriously and think that it doesn’t even deserve a mention? That is ridiculous and not very scientific to just ignore a possible solution, improvement.

Hi Nicole,
no, unless I missed something, there’s nothing about Esperanto.