Esperanto and Its Rivals

The Struggle for an International Language

Roberto Garvia, Roberto Garvía

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812291278
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global lingua franca. Many individuals and social movements competed to create an artificial language unencumbered by the political rivalries that accompanied English, German, and French. Organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the Comintern, and the League of Nations intervened in the debate about the possibility of an artificial language, but of the numerous tongues created before World War II, only Esperanto survives today. Esperanto and Its Rivals sheds light on the factors that led almost all artificial languages to fail and helped English to prevail as the global tongue of the twenty-first century. Exploring the social and political contexts of the three most prominent artificial languages—Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido—Roberto Garvía examines the roles played by social movement leaders and inventors, the strategies different organizations used to lobby for each language, and other early decisions that shaped how those languages spread and evolved. Through the rise and fall of these artificial languages, Esperanto and Its Rivals reveals the intellectual dilemmas and political anxieties that troubled the globalizing world at the turn of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1

The Emergence of Linguistic Conscience

Social scientists use the term “critical junctures” to describe those historical periods when the power of standing institutions weakens and societies are forced to choose among new institutional trajectories.¹ In the recent history of the European linguistic regime it is possible to identify two such critical junctures. The first took place in the late seventeenth century, when Latin was abandoned as the lingua franca and replaced by a competing, unstable array of vernacular languages. The second was in the late nineteenth century, when English, French, and German competed to become the first global language. Meanwhile, the rediscovery and reinvention of an array of new languages stirred by the nationalist élan of the time produced a new Babelization of Europe.²

Interest in and research on artificial languages was particularly intense at these two critical junctures, when the need for an international lingua franca was so evident. This interest did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. It co-evolved with ideas about how languages work, how they relate to the people who speak them, and how states should think about or handle their populations’ linguistic repertoires.

The decline of Latin in the first critical juncture is easy enough to track. In 1687, Newton published his Principia Mathematica in Latin. Some years later he sent his Opticks to press in English. He followed the example of Galileo, who decided to publish his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in Italian, when he had previously written his Siderius nuncius (The sidereal messenger) in Latin. Descartes wrote his Rules for the Direction of the Mind in Latin, only to later publish his Discourse on the Method in French.

Beyond philosophical and scientific circles, Latin eroded in other spheres of life. Inspired by the emergence of the modern state, a new literary genre emerged, devoted to the questioning of Latin, particularly in Protestant countries, and the exaltation of the national languages.

This literary genre initiated a new epoch of linguistic conscience. Language had scarcely been a political issue in antiquity and the Middle Ages.³ France, striving to become a world power, most colorfully illustrates this linguistic conscience. In 1549, Joachim Du Bellay published his La défense et illustration de la langue française, in which he claimed that the language of the French royal court could more than satisfactorily compare not only with Greek and Latin, but also with Tuscan. Rabelais, Montaigne, and others also paid homage to the mother language, but those with closer court contacts, or looking for social recognition, did so most energetically. This was true with François Malherbe, or Le Labourer, who, in his Avantages de la langue française (1667), claimed:

Our language is so beautiful when one knows how to use it! If you are careful with it, Sir, it derives more from the spirit and depends less on the organs of the body than any other language. . . . One must not speak from the throat or open the mouth too wide or strike with the tongue between the teeth or make signs and gestures as it seems to me most Foreigners do when they speak the language of their countries. . . . Beyond that, the various terminations of our words give our language an amenity, a variety, and a grace that other languages lack, and that is what makes [French] Poetry so beautiful, for its lines, sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine, create through their mingling and commerce a harmony that exists nowhere else. . . . And if you consider the way in which we construct words, you will find that they stand in relation to one another in the order that nature lays down.⁴

And for just one example of the salesmanship of an Englishman promoting his language, William Bullokar insisted that “in all Europe, I dare well say, (for true orthography) no nation hath so plaine a way, to write their speech truly.” This is a curious assessment, to say the least, for a language whose native speakers find spelling so challenging they would later make spelling bees part of their popular culture. But in this international contest for the preeminence of one’s own vernacular, the limits were never very clear. The Portuguese João de Barros, for example, claimed that “the Spaniards weep, the Italians howl and the French sing,” indicating than only the Portuguese talk. To which French Jesuit Dominique Bouhours replied, “The Chinese, and almost all the peoples of Asia, sing; the Germans rattle; the Spaniards declaim; the Italians sigh; the English whistle. To be exact, only the French speak.”⁵

Linguistic pride heralded the ethno-linguistic nationalism of the nineteenth century and had a political rationale. Modern states needed to standardize, codify, and purify whatever language variation had been chosen to become the official language, and, to this end, they founded language academies. The first language academy, that for Italian, was established in 1582 in Florence, followed by academies for French (1635), Spanish (1713), Danish (1742), Portuguese (1779), Russian (1783), and Swedish (1786). In any case, by the end of the seventeenth century, the erosion of Latin seemed irreversible. Around 1650, 67 percent of the books for sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair were published in Latin; in 1700, only 38 percent were.⁶

Scientists and philosophers worried about the abandonment of the lingua franca and the corresponding Babelization of science in the seventeenth century, but they were mostly responsible for their own predicament. When Latin was still widely used in law, religion, and diplomacy, natural philosophers came to believe that the language was unfit to keep pace with advances in science and technology. A dead language, Latin was cumbersome, ridden with irregularities, ambiguities, redundancies, and syntactical complexities. It also lacked the necessary richness, logicality, and precision that natural philosophers demanded. For these reasons, vernaculars took the lead in the scientific world. And with the vernaculars came the Babelization of science.⁷

To cope with Babelization, some proposed to give Latin a last chance and translate the main scientific works into this language. Thus, Descartes’ benefactor, the friar and mathematician Mersenne, conceived of an academy in every country entrusted with this task, somewhat akin to the Toledo School of Translators in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.⁸ But these academies never came to be. Instead, scientific journals emerged. They tried to keep readers abreast of scientific progress by translating and publishing articles and book reviews from one vernacular into another. The French Journal de Sçavans, established in 1665 under the sponsorship of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was the first of its kind, and set a good example for other countries.⁹

Or, scholars could become multilingual, but this was deemed impractical. It would have required a reform of higher education, which still concentrated on instruction in classical languages. Also, languages were conceived in the seventeenth century as mere instruments for communication, rather than repositories of cultures or worldviews. Learning another language was considered tantamount to tedious memorization of new words and grammatical rules. Progress in the study of nature required a concentration on nature itself, rather than on the many ways different people arbitrarily referred to the same natural phenomena. Time and effort could be most efficiently invested in the improvement of the description or explanation of nature, not on its linguistic replication. Romanticism was still distant, and rather than view language diversity as a token of the endurance and creativity of the human race, scholars and the literati considered it a curse.

A third solution, championed by some of the most powerful minds of the era, was to invent a new language, more rational and suitable for communication than Latin or existing vernaculars. That such a language could come to exist was already suggested in the utopian literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his Utopia, originally published in 1516 in Latin, Thomas More had inhabitants speak a language that was rich, precise, perfect, and pleasant to the ear. Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels used a language that was so well constructed and easy to learn that Gulliver could converse with the natives in three months.

Renewed interest in Chinese script reinforced the feasibility of a new language. Contemporaries knew that, although Chinese people spoke different languages, they could communicate in writing. It would be useful to have a similar script for Europeans. This was Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) proposal: a language based on a system of “real characters,” which conveyed the real essence of things and concepts, would solve the problem of international communication. A system of real characters would help solve another problem. Once we discovered, enumerated, and arranged all the basic, irreducible concepts that convey the essence of physical and non-physical phenomena, we could achieve an unequivocal transmission of meaning. A language of real characters would be the antithesis of natural languages, which were redundant, deliberately ambiguous, and full of inconsistencies and meaningless terms. By helping to distinguish between real and imaginary concepts—invented for the purpose of extending and elaborating futile theological or philosophical disputes—a language of real characters would accelerate knowledge.

There were others, however, who thought that a language based on real characters was out of the question. Such a language, argued Descartes, would require a previous and complete knowledge of the components of the world, a necessary prerequisite to differentiating between real and unreal characters. In the absence of that knowledge, and without criteria to distinguish between the irreducible or real and the not so real things, the whole project was inconceivable.

Despite Descartes’ warning, more enthusiastic people got down to work and crafted artificial languages based on real characters. The most influential of them came from members and friends of the Royal Society, such as George Dalgarno (1626–1687) and John Wilkins (1614–1672). Isaac Newton also outlined an international language, but, as with much of his writing, he did not publish his ideas.¹⁰ Dalgarno’s proposal came first, with his Ars Signorum (1661). He divided physical experience into seventeen irreducible categories, each denoted by a letter. Second and third letters conveyed further subdivisions of those categories. For example, the natural world was subdivided between animate and inanimate things. The former included plants or animals. Animals fell into the categories of aquatic, aerial, or terrestrial. Dalgarno placed human beings in a different category and then differentiated between terrestrial creatures with a cloven hoof and a single hoof, like a horse or “nηkv,” in Dalgarno’s vocabulary. Word order rules denoted when a word was a noun, an adjective, or an adverb, and special suffixes indicated verb tenses.

Wilkins’s proposal resembled that of Dalgarno, his erstwhile collaborator. The Royal Society, which he helped to establish, had commissioned his work. In his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), Wilkins enlarged the number of irreducible categories to forty and increased the number of subdivisions. Wilkins also paid more attention to grammar, which he made a little more complex. Like Dalgarno’s, Wilkins’s language could be spoken. He published an alphabetical dictionary that first distinguished various meanings of English words to later refer to them by their exact location on the tables of real characters.

Significantly, this endeavor provided the basic infrastructure for a thesaurus; namely, a list of words, arranged by categories, distinguished by their meaning. In fact, Peter Roget’s Thesaurus, first published in 1852, is a spinoff of these artificial language projects.

Leibniz surpassed Dalgarno and Wilkins, ambitious though they were, in his dreams about the content and goal of an artificial language. Leibniz aspired to curb the number of words and give them the precise and unequivocal meaning that scholarly exchange and international communication demanded, but he had more ambitious ideas about the ultimate goal of an artificial language. In his youth, Leibniz had tried to create a set of real characters, but he gave up, since there was no way to be certain that things or concepts deconstructed could not be fractured yet further. This was a quite natural concern for the discoverer of infinitesimal calculus. Rather than a language based on real characters, intended to univocally represent meaning, he imagined one whose characters, or “primitives,” represented basic reasoning operations. Combined in an algebraic fashion, this language of primitives, advanced for ease of calculations, would directly adjudicate between truth and falsity. Leibniz envisioned the construction of a logical language, an algebra of thought processes that could augment our reasoning capacities. (A similar research program emerged in the early twentieth century under the name of symbolic logic, which engaged Bertrand Russell, Couturat, and Peano, among others. We meet them later.)¹¹

These first artificial language projects rested on the idea that words stand by themselves, that there is an unequivocal relationship between the word and its referent, as the myth of the Adamic language suggests, where words directly convey the essence of things. The book of Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, light and darkness, just by naming them. In the Adamic myth the things and their names are one and the same. Likewise the artificial language projects of the seventeenth century were based on a narrow conception of language. Their goal was to create a perfect language: a language that conveyed the true essence of things and concepts straightforwardly, as if naming something were tantamount to giving it a distinctive identity.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Emergence of Linguistic Conscience
• Part I. Volapük
• Part II. Esperanto
• Part III. The Esperanto Cluster: Same Language, Different Communities
• Part IV. Ido and Its Satellites
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments