Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

That reminds me of this old joke [1]:

> The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.

> As part of the negotiations, the British and American government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement. Consequently, they have adopted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as European English (Euro for short). In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c."

> Sertainly sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also the hard "c" will be replased with "k." Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

> There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the second year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f." This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.

> In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will encourage the removal of double leters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful and they woud go.

> By the fourth year peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by "v." During ze fifz yer, ze unesasary "o" kan be droped from vords containing "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinatins of leters.

> Und after ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German lik zey vonted in ze first plas.

I never knew it was based on a Mark Twain quote. Then again, Mark Twain's philosophy I didn't hear much of either (I'm from Europe, don't think I learned any American philosophy on high school).

[1] https://alt.jokes.narkive.com/I7hqyPoJ/a-joke-a-plan-for-the...

> This happens in software, you are limited in what you can create and do by what concepts you can easily express

Because the computer isn't really thinking. It's just mechanically following what the language says. So of course what you can do is limited by what the language can express, because that's all there is.

Human minds don't seem to be the same. They can have ideas without necessarily needing to start with language to build the idea on.

For one thing, we've all experienced having a thought but being unable to think of the word for it. Despite being unable to articulate it, you can look in the dictionary at possible words and tell from their definitions whether they match.

You could say that this is just our brains thinking in terms of that word without being able to recall its concrete form. (The essential meaning of a word and the spelling/sound of it might be handled separately by the brain.) Maybe that's why sometimes, but it's also possible to have a thought and not know that there is a word for it. You might tell a friend about someone who has an annoying habit of rigidly following and enforcing the rules even when that serves no constructive purpose, and your friend might tell you that's called being legalistic.

Still, you could argue that's still language-based thought because all you did was compose together several pieces of language ("rigidly following", "constructive purpose", etc.), and that your new vocabulary word is really just a shorthand for that composition. Maybe that is true for some words, but it can't be true for all of them. If words can only be introduced by reference to language, then there's no way language could have formed in the first place. There must have been a first word.

Another approach is a thought experiment: does a feral child (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child) have thoughts? If a human grows up with no exposure to language, that will have profound effects on them, but I don't think those effects go as far as making it impossible to have thoughts.

Having said all that, do I think that language heavily influences thinking? Definitely. For one thing, exposure (and non-exposure) to certain ideas has a big influence on thinking. Words convey ideas, and when you learn a word, you learn its idea. It may also be true that ideas are easier to think about (internally) if they have a corresponding word. And it's certainly easier to discuss ideas if there are words for them, so those ideas will be discussed more often.

There have been studies, and I know this also anecdotally from native speakers, that e.g. "business English", at least in non-English countries, becomes its own, more restrictive variant of English because of the high percentage of non-native speakers. I know that some such native speakers have said that they feel their English got worse after living abroad for a while.

Of course, overall, this is a very slow process. People don't stop applying the rules or simplify vocabulary over night or even within the span of a couple of years, but there is growing evidence in general that the more speakers a language has, the more it tends to simplify structurally, e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181274

Thanks, I didn't know it was called that. And yes, I had the same impression about spelling contests

> Expecting to go anywhere and speak English is rude.

I would just like to clear this up: I do not support the notion of any universal language, and that includes English. My observation that English is relatively more universal than Esperanto is not an endorsement of the premise of universal languages being a laudable goal.