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Neo-Romanticism in Language Planning <br>
by Edo Bernasconi <br>
from <i>Esperanto a Interlingua</i>, La Chaux-de-Fonds: Kultura Centro
Esperantista, 1977, pp. 66-85 <br>
<a href="http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/novlatin.html" eudora="autourl">
http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/novlatin.html</a><br><br>
Somehow I previously missed the interlinguistics section of the late Don
Harlow's indispensable web site:<br><br>
<a href="http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/" eudora="autourl">
http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/</a><br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
Here are some statements quoted in this articles I don't recall from
yesteryear:<br><br>
1. "This culture . . .is felt to be a typical expression of the
culture of the white races." -- E. VON WAHL <br><br>
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
<br><br>
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 <br><br>
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 <br><br>
5. "In every individual example, the language-variants (<i>i.e.</i>
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<br><br>
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 <br><br>
7. I don't have a quote from the horse's mouth for this one; here is what
the author says:<br><br>
''According to Alphonse Matejka, as quoted by Alessandro Bausani,
(<a name="rfn10"></a>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."' <br><br>
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 <br><br>
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 <br><br>
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 <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The author sums up this ideological orientation thusly:
<dl>
<dd>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.
<br>
<dd>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. <br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>There are two dangers: on the one hand, that we will be limited in
our search for a neo-Latin <i>ursprache</i>, 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.
</dl>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 <i>in situo</i>, and then only in
context of <i>real </i>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Bernasconi goes on to demolish the other essentials of Gode's
pseudoscientific argumentation, most importantly, the claim to extract a
prototypical Standard Average European <i>Ursprache</i> 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. <br><br>
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 <i>a posteriori</i> borrowing from a set
of languages targeted as maximally international) is optimal for a
constructed language.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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