Given that international auxiliary languages allow for more efficient cooperation; I think more people should consider using an easily learnable IAL, like Esperanto.
IALs would reduce the English dominance that gate-keeps software development to English persons; and hence allow more potential software developers to better develop software. The English language is mostly dominant in software development because of linguistic imperialism.
Ĉu vi scias Esperanton? Esperanto ne estas perfekta, sed la Angla estas pli granda malordo. Mi vere dubas ke la Angla estus tiel facila kiel Esperanto.
Esperanto is ignored for political reasons, not because its bad.
Dude, I said English was harder. Seriously, try to keep up! I just said it’s not much harder and comes with the benefit of people actually speaking it so that learning it isn’t a waste of effort.
Further, Esperanto is ignored because it’s not much easier than natural languages to huge swathes of the world’s population, but at least has the benefit of being utterly useless to learn.
Learn a few languages from places that aren’t Indo-European ones. Learn how you can have grammars with little to no declension, for example: no verb tenses, aspects, voices, genders, cases … not even declining by count. Then consider:
On top of this:
PolishEsperanto.And I’m out of steam already. There are a whole lot of hidden linguistic assumptions in Esperanto that are alien to language speakers from outside of the Indo-European milieu, or difficult for such speakers to actually perform. To someone in steeped an Indo-European linguistic environment these are invisible. They’re “natural” or even “logical”. But they are absolute tongue-twisters and conceptual mountains for those coming from outside of those environs. And if you’re going to climb those conceptual mountains and twist your tongue in service of these phonetic horrors, where do you think it’s best to expend your efforts:
If you’re sane and value your time, you pick literally almost any natural language in the world for better return on investment, even though it may, in the case of some of those (coughIndo-Europeancough) languages, be a little bit more difficult than Esperanto. (Yes. A little bit.)
You raise some excellent points in your response, on every point besides 2 and 6 we are generally in agreement. 6 is outside of my experience, and so I don’t have a meaningful opinion. 2 is one of the things I like about Esperanto, though you might well be right. I intend to study Mandarin, and since you mentioned it perhaps that will change my opinion regarding #2.
I did say that Esperanto isn’t perfect, truly it is itself flawed. Even besides the points you made, even in the foundation there are irregularities which exist which are scarcely justifiable:
…to name but the things that come to mind.
And certainly if we’re going by head-count there is little reason to learn Esperanto instead of a natural language. But there is more to a language then just the number of people who speak it, there is also the question of who your going to be talking to and why. In that analysis depending on the particulars, almost any language can be about equal, even a “toy” language like Esperanto.
But it must not be forgotten what the original subject is: the question of the future of software development. Arguing in favor of any national language is like arguing for the domination of a national system of measurement, instead of metric. Certainly you probably are right that the euro-centricity of Esperanto makes it ill suited as a international language at it’s very core, and in this you and I would be in agreement, but so too in that way no national language should enter into the equation.
You might like Claudepiron’s articles on Esperanto (here are some of them):
Any second language used only for programming purposes is going to be doomed from the outset anyway. I work in a Chinese engineering firm. They work with Chinese people (and me). They sell their products to Chinese firms. What possible incentive could they have to make all their engineers use a different language than Mandarin to communicate in? If they grow to the point that international markets are a concern, they’ll have to i18n their products anyway (because their customers won’t be speaking some conlang!) and given the costs of that, updating the design documents in another language is a minor cost.
Conlang IALs are a solution in search of a problem for an overwhelming number of professionals. They present a high-cost initial barrier of entry (the time it takes to learn the conlang to fluency) with a very low payout in the short- and medium-term for almost all involved people. And even if the engineers in question did learn the conlang do you genuinely believe they’ll use it when doing work among other speakers of their own language? Do you genuinely believe the conlang will be the primary communication tool?
Idealism is a good thing. A great thing. Provided that it is, in some fashion, compatible with reality. A conlang IAL for programming is not compatible with reality.
Not if it’s consistently used by everyone.
They don’t and that’s fine.
Yep, including conlangs.
In search of what problem?
Where’s your proof?
Learning English and Mandarin also has a high-cost initial barrier of entry; IALs are however better designed for inter linguistic speakers.
yes.
IALs, yes.