Anyway, going for maximum sensationalism with minimum expenditure of effort, a few years back I read an article about the emotional reaction that people have when someone talks about - brace yourselves - Esperanto, the planned secondary language. Now, I can guess what the reaction of at least one of the people reading this far into this post will be, though I doubt he'll get much farther before his attention deficit kicks in. I know because, being the bad sort, as soon as I read the article I decided to put it to the test on a ready-made, voluntary group of human guinea pigs, an, admittedly, non-random sample of the mid to high brow educated population of the English speaking peoples. I posted a few comments in Espearanto, letting it be known that was the language I was commenting in and that I'd been a sekreta esperantisto (samideano) for a couple of decades.
Now, as my readers and even a few non-readers as mentioned in the previous paragraph, will know that I'm extremely skeptical of the scientific nature of psychology, not to mention psychoanalysis. The more I read of it the more skeptical of it I've become. The author of the article, Claude Piron was, by profession, a psychoanalyist - after years as a translator at the United Nations and, after, an employee of the World Health Organization and one of the most interesting of authors in Esperanto*. However, overcoming my skepticism of psychology, I found his ideas interesting enough to try to elicit the responses he theorizes happen when the word "Esperanto" is used.
To a psychologist investigating reactions to the word "Esperanto" two facts are immediately apparent: a high percentage of those invited to give their opinion have a great deal to say about it; and they regard as self-evident, and in many cases cite without prompting, various statements which are contrary to verifiable reality, for example: "no one has ever written a novel straight into Esperanto", "Esperanto is a language no one speaks", "there are no children who have it as the mother tongue", etc. Such convictions are well illustrated by a reader's letter in Time magazine from Peter Wells of Singapore:
Esperanto has no cultural history, no indigenous literature and no monolinguals or even first-language speakers. (Wells, 1987).
In addition, many of those questioned display every sign of emotional involvement. Some react enthusiastically, fervently. But the majority are patronising towards Esperanto, as though it were obviously childish. The person concerned makes it clear that Esperanto is not to be taken seriously, and his tone is disdainful, ironic or humourously condescending towards the "simple souls" who take it up.
If, in order to get a control reaction for comparison, the researcher asks the subject to give his or her opinion about Bulgarian or Indonesian in the same way, he gets quite a different response. The subject takes about a minute to recount in a perfectly neutral tone of voice everything he has to say about them, usually that he knows nothing.
You can read more about those in M. Piron's article.
The predominant reaction I got was a surprising degree of anger. It was clear that I'd found yet another taboo to break, one of the more hilarious ones that is commonly found among the supposedly broad minded, almost uniformly monoglot**, educated class of the English speaking people, it would seem. I mean real rage in some cases. Especially in one Brit who was a regular at a couple of blogs I tried it at, though another Brit seemed to take it with no negative reaction at all. Though, as can be seen in the article, it's not an exclusively British trait:
And why does the reaction, so frequently, become so emotional? This involvement of the emotional range is not restricted to individual conversations, as witness the following quotation taken from an article on the teaching of Latin, an article otherwise expressed in a neutral and informative tone:
Gloire donc au latin, et à bas l'espéranto, mixture aux relents d'artifice et aux espérances déçues! (G.P., 1985).
(Long live Latin, then, and down with Esperanto, that hotchpotch stinking of artificiality and hopes betrayed!)
That sentence, unrelated to the remainder of the text, seems like an emotional eruption unexpectedly boiling up out of who knows what kind of depths. Why should this be?
As I said, I've been an Esperantist for decades, learning it for a lark well after I'd left grad-school with its 3 foreign language requirement a serious prerequisite. I'm not an enormous advocate for it, never having joined any of the promotional organizations, but I read several books and many articles and short stories and poems in the language every year. It lets me read the thinking of people who speak languages I'd never learn, Croatian, Finish, Mandarin Chinese (the translation. made by Chinese esperantists of Lu Xun's stories is wonderful) unfiltered into a language with considerably more cultural baggage than the far more neutral Esperanto.
My mother's cousin's husband once told me that when his Catholic high school administration was approached in the 1930s by someone wanting to start a hockey team, the pricipal said, "Are you crazy. Giving Irish boys on skates clubs so they can play against the English?" I don't know if it's true or not but it was a mistake for these guys to point me to that particular button to push. I ran the test a number of times over a couple of years and the expected response was near automatic. Instant upper-class style rage. I do have to confess that made me smile sometimes. It still does.
* Claude Piron's specialty was writing articles, short stories, novellas, novels and even scholarly works in fluent Esperanto using a very small number of word roots Many of them with fewer than five or six hundred words which can be easily read after a minimal amount of study.. The grammar and structure of Esperanto makes the use of such a small corpus of word roots a practical possibility that Basic English couldn't accomplish.
Piron's didactic mystery story, Gerda Malaperis, has become widely used in an early reading course, though I'd recommend you go through one of the many free elementary courses, self-taught or guided online, before going through it. I recently watched a movie based on it
and am still impressed at how fluent it is within the tiny corpus of word elements used. Piron's collection of stories written as the next step after Gerda Malaperis, Vere aŭ fantazie, is even more fluent.
** My dear old obnoxious-atheist Latin teacher told me that the monoglot state of the English speaking educated class, as seen in the bibliographies of the general run of their papers and books was shameful. I don't know if it is his telling me that decades ago that colors my perceptions, but it does seem to be true as compared to the bibliographic content of most French and German, not to mention Esperanto, scholarship I've looked at.
In a nutshell, limousine liberals don’t want to hear about Esperanto.
ReplyDelete