[Membroj] Neo-Romanticism in Language Planning

[Ralph Dumain]

Neo-Romanticism in Language Planning
by Edo Bernasconi
from Esperanto a Interlingua, La Chaux-de-Fonds: Kultura Centro 
Esperantista, 1977, pp. 66-85
http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/novlatin.html

Somehow I previously missed the interlinguistics section of the late 
Don Harlow's indispensable web site:

http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/

This is material I've not much concerned myself with for the past 35 
years or more. I now find that either I have a bad case of amnesia 
regarding my former hobby, or I miraculously missed out on a major 
ideological issue in the international language movement.  I don't 
know how this could have happened.

Now I am familiar with an old debate in the interlinguistics 
community, posed as schematism vs. naturalism, or regularity and 
consistency in language design vs. the slavish mimicking of the 
features of a privileged group of parent languages--either the 
Romance languages alone, or the Romance languages + English and maybe 
German. I read all the arguments on this decades ago, and at this 
point I have no particular interest in their particulars. There are 
philosophical differences and guiding assumptions behind both 
philosophies, but somehow I had forgotten how extreme were the 
justifications behind the naturalistic school, i.e. those preoccupied 
with latinizing constructed languages.

But without even approaching extravagant philosophical claims, one 
can at once argue that the very term "naturalism" and some of the 
justification behind it is purely arbitrary, pseudoscientific, and 
misleading. That is so even if one accepts the pragmatic argument 
that a constructed language should stick as close to western European 
standard languages as possible based on their influence on modern 
science and technology and intellectual discourse as a whole. Maximum 
internationality is after all relative, and even were there such a 
consensus on what this could practically entail, it would pertain to 
scientific, technical, and theoretical discourse of all kinds, and 
not necessarily to other areas of discourse. A century ago nobody 
took into account the ramifications of popular culture, nor did they 
realize the overwhelming influence of the USA that was to come.

That is, different mixes are possible with respect to the origins of 
the lexicon,  the creation of morphemes, and their combination 
directly traceable or not to a privileged core set of languages. And, 
if I recall correctly, all the different possible combinations have 
been tried. Even professional linguists have acted on arbitrary and 
unjustified premises, and those who began with justifiable criteria 
did not necessarily execute them in an unimpeachable manner. And one 
could go in the direction of greater schematism--i.e. logical 
consistency--than the reverse. For example, Esperanto's word 
derivational system is far from consistent and logical, as Couturat 
noted a century ago, and this implies a lack of schematism rather 
than too much.

All this is old news, and I'm not going to rehash something I 
dispensed with decades ago. Aside from pseudoscientific and low-level 
misleading philosophical claims, there is a more outrageous dimension 
to these old arguments than I had remembered. I'm not interested in 
the obvious and relatively trivial manifestations of "Eurocentrism", 
i.e. the bias towards a certain set of linguistic raw material as a 
standard for internationality. There's a dimension of this issue that 
is much worse.

Here are some statements quoted in this articles I don't recall from 
yesteryear:

1. "This culture . . .is felt to be a typical expression of the 
culture of the white races."  -- E. VON WAHL

2. "Today . . .because our culture is based on the historical 
foundations of Rome, it is clear that the bases of the 
(international) language must be the same Latin foundations." -- E. VON WAHL

3. ". . . modern interlinguistics is an applied science [which] works 
out elements which cannot be changed at pleasure, because they have 
been utilized for centuries; this means that this science must use 
the words of the international cultural vocabulary, common to all 
languages of culture." -- Engelbert PIGAL

4. " . . .the best international languages is the easiest language 
for the greatest number of people  . . . . it concerns only Europeans 
or the inhabitants of other parts of the globe who are either of 
European origin or possess a civilization based on European 
civilization itself." -- Otto JESPERSEN

5. "In every individual example, the language-variants (i.e. the 
etymologically related words in the different Romance languages) have 
become for me a sort of symbol of the cultural variants within the 
Western world; the final international term was the symbol of the 
homogeneity of the Latin world -- or, if we prefer -- of the 
Romanian-Germanic world." -- Alexander GODE

6. "Our Western civilization is a doubly millenial heritage of 
Greco-Roman antiquity. Esperanto is a mere masquerade of this 
heritage, while Interlingua offers us everything that deserves being 
saved from this heritage." -- Ric BERGER

7. I don't have a quote from the horse's mouth for this one; here is 
what the author says:

''According to Alphonse Matejka, as quoted by Alessandro Bausani, 
(10) the international auxiliary language should be a phenomenon and 
ideal of "higher civilizations," which the author opposes to the 
lower ones. Western civilization, then, would be "higher."'

8. "The new interlanguage will be the determining factor in not only 
the cultural but also the economic and political integration of the 
peoples who belong to what we today call Western civilization, which 
we consider the most dynamic." -- Stefano BAKONYI

9. "An international auxiliary language for the cultured nations of 
the West cannot be anything other than a language which reflects 
their culture ... The needs and the customs of the Western nations 
will be the determining factors: of these, then, and not those of the 
other civilizations, ancient or eastern, Negro or Papuan . . . The 
East is daily becoming more Westernized. If nationalists in Nagasaki 
protest against this evolution, that's no more important than a 
bird's chirp in a storm. Today it is Western civilization that is 
global . . . The eastern peoples have neither their own science nor 
their own technology. These are Western, and a language which aims at 
being useful to them can only be Western." -- A. Z. RAMSTEDT

10. "For me, it is clear: either Bolshevism will conquer, and with it 
the new culture of Esperanto will be victorious; or Bolshevism will 
not conquer, and then the complicated Neo-Romance languages, which 
conserve the elements of the two-thousand-year-old European culture, 
will triumph." -- E. DE WAHL

Thus is summarized one major ideological dimension of the 
issues.  (There are others pertaining specifically to Gode's 
Interlingua, which I will get to later.)  Did I simply not read any 
remarks of this kind 35-40 years ago? I doubt I could have forgotten 
them if I had. Now please note what matters to me here. There are 
purely pragmatic arguments for singling out the Romance or West 
European Romance and Germanic languages as privileged source material 
for an interlanguage in the modern world, which have nothing to do 
with cultural superiority or civilizational essences. The purely 
linguistic aspect, separated from the metaphysical folderol, needs to 
be debated on different grounds than these. And Esperantists have 
been and remain as guilty as others in making outrageous bogus 
cultural claims based on linguistic facts alone. To put it another 
way, Eurocentrism of a purely linguistic nature may or may not be a 
non-issue, but it should not be confused with the Eurocentrism that 
really counts, which is not about language at all.

There is no warrant for making any of the grandiose civilizational 
claims cited in the above statements. One does not have to believe or 
promote any of this nonsense to make a practical claim for the 
privileging of a latinate (or graeco-latin) lexicon based on its 
prevalence in contemporary scientific, technological, and theoretical 
discourse. In the old days people could get away with such shameful 
statements; now only the extreme right does so. One should note, 
however, that the history of Esperanto is not innocent either, with 
regard to out-and-out racism in former times or more subtle 
ethnopluralist propaganda today.

The author sums up this ideological orientation thusly:
Now we can begin to understand the manner of thought of the adherents 
of Interlingua. For them there is a Western-European linguistic 
unity, which might be rediscovered and reconstructed, and later 
forced on all other peoples because of the superiority of Western 
civilization. We therefore first take note of a political choice, 
which is concretized in a Eurocentric perception of the world, and 
realized in the elaboration of a methodology suitable for 
construction a "Western" language.
While modern linguistics, ethnology, psychology, psychiatry, etc., 
are becoming ever more interested in those facts called 
"transcultural," the Neo-Romanticists are becoming ever more enclosed 
in their ivory tower in Western Europe.
It is, then, clear why the language planning methodology of this 
school owes nothing to modern linguistic methods. It much more 
closely resembles the sometime classical philological methods 
elaborated in the 19th century.

There are two dangers: on the one hand, that we will be limited in 
our search for a neo-Latin ursprache, and subordinate everything to 
that search. This happened to Interlingua's author, Alexander Gode. 
On the other hand, we take note of the danger of falling into 
linguistic and cultural imperialism, which puts the values of the 
"others" in the shade, and ends its career in racism, which in the 
facts negates the intrinsic values of a planned international language.
This covers what is essentially wrong about this type of thinking. 
"Linguistic and cultural imperialism", however, is a red herring as 
an abstract notion. What is linguistically or culturally 
imperialistic can only be judged in situo, and then only in context 
of real imperialism--economic, political, and military. Otherwise, we 
end up with the ethnopluralist mysticism borrowed from the European 
Right, which has sadly infected the propaganda of the Esperanto movement.

The author successfully demolishes all the fraudulent conceptual and 
linguistic arguments of the "Neo-Romantic" school. He also makes that 
important point, which I made in preceding paragraphs--that language 
is not to be equated with culture or civilization, and that a 
civilizational or cultural essence is a bogus notion in the first 
place. And Esperantists need to take note of this with respect to 
their own propaganda as well.

Bernasconi goes on to demolish the other essentials of Gode's 
pseudoscientific argumentation, most importantly, the claim to 
extract a prototypical Standard Average European Ursprache and to 
fashion Interlingua as a natural outgrowth of its organic 
development. Gode's Platonic notion of linguistic essence is 
manifested also in his embrace of the most dubious formulation of 
linguistic relativity, that of Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Bernasconi also has to take issue with the "naturalistic" arguments 
of bona fide linguists such as Jespersen.  All in all he does a 
pretty creditable job. He shows up all the arguments of the 
naturalist school to be philosophically and scientifically bogus. 
This does not, in my mind, prejudge what combination of "schematism" 
and "naturalism" (or a posteriori borrowing from a set of languages 
targeted as maximally international) is optimal for a constructed language.

One final note on Eurocentrism. The linguistic issue in my view, 
should not be framed only in terms of which language is easier to 
learn on the part of non-European language communities. That is one 
possible consideration, but the fundamental issue is that 
"naturalism" is not even a valid standpoint from within the 
Indo-European language family, or more narrowly, within the Romance 
or Germanic subfamilies. Systematicity and regularity as principles 
of learnability and elegance are as much of concern to native 
speakers of Indo-European languages as they are to others. 
Conversely, the recognizability of lexemes which have already crossed 
the boundaries of language families--the lexicon of a globalized web 
of technology and popular culture--is also a consideration.






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://esperantosocieto.org/pipermail/membroj_esperantosocieto.org/attachments/20090903/2decbb9f/attachment-0001.html>