Is the EU multilingualism bubble a chance to establish Esperanto?
kelle poolt qwertz, 10. detsember 2009
Postitused: 12
Keel: English
qwertz (Näita profiili) 10. detsember 2009 16:25.30
Saluton,
Is the EU multilingualism bubble a chance to establish Esperanto as an 2nd bridge language aside English?
What do you think?
Actually, there doesn't and can not excist equality of all EU languages in practice. There excist a 45 minute technical briefing (ec.europa.eu/avservices) by the DG translation department for that issue. It's very interesting background information about the current (Feb 19/2009) EU translation process. I can't list everything right now what is mentioned at this technical briefing. But feel free to mentioned the time line position (XX:XX minute) with your comments.
To get the mp3 you should browse to the ec.europa.eu/avservices audio > thematic > multilingualism section or you can download the regarding mp3 file from [url=http://hotfile.com/dl/20173804/457679a/I_E_b_a_r_l... ]here[/url] (40MB) .
"Is English becoming a rare language?": technical briefing
Thematic: Multilingualism (REF: 61902)
Don't use headphones for listening, otherwise you get the first minutes french from the right and english from the left. But after that the briefing is hold in english.
In my opinion one day this "EU multilingualism bubble" will burst with a big bang. Every new EU member will change the EU construction and brings us closer to this situation. Because, how long most non-english EU member will accept missing official discussing papers translated into their native language?
EU multilingualism in practice at 01:13 minute by a french MEP:
"There is a answer sheet which is in english available only ... it's not intented usally to be translated?"
ghb,
Is the EU multilingualism bubble a chance to establish Esperanto as an 2nd bridge language aside English?
What do you think?
Actually, there doesn't and can not excist equality of all EU languages in practice. There excist a 45 minute technical briefing (ec.europa.eu/avservices) by the DG translation department for that issue. It's very interesting background information about the current (Feb 19/2009) EU translation process. I can't list everything right now what is mentioned at this technical briefing. But feel free to mentioned the time line position (XX:XX minute) with your comments.
To get the mp3 you should browse to the ec.europa.eu/avservices audio > thematic > multilingualism section or you can download the regarding mp3 file from [url=http://hotfile.com/dl/20173804/457679a/I_E_b_a_r_l... ]here[/url] (40MB) .
"Is English becoming a rare language?": technical briefing
Thematic: Multilingualism (REF: 61902)
Don't use headphones for listening, otherwise you get the first minutes french from the right and english from the left. But after that the briefing is hold in english.
In my opinion one day this "EU multilingualism bubble" will burst with a big bang. Every new EU member will change the EU construction and brings us closer to this situation. Because, how long most non-english EU member will accept missing official discussing papers translated into their native language?
EU multilingualism in practice at 01:13 minute by a french MEP:
"There is a answer sheet which is in english available only ... it's not intented usally to be translated?"
ghb,
ceigered (Näita profiili) 10. detsember 2009 18:25.03
I personally think that before EO they would need to make it so certain languages are spoken in certain wide areas based on the popularity of certain languages.
E.g. Northern Europe would probably speak English and German, Western Europe French and Spanish, Southern Europe Italian and one of the slavic languages (be much easier if a slavic interlanguage like slovioski or what not was introduced at an official level), North-East probably Russian, Polish and Czech. And then add in languages for areas that get left out of the net.
That way you'd need less translators. The foremost goal in Europe should be a stable, efficient and effective EU, and a mess of languages doesn't help that. Language diversity and culture of course is incredibly important but neither help the running of a 21st century state.
Another option would be to simply place language education as a priority and create decent and effective free language courses for every EU language to allow people in Europe to actually understand each other, no matter how obscure a language.
(of course I'm biased coming from a largely monolingual country)
Edit:
Dare I say this - Rather than Esperanto, how bout' a more "European" solution built using reconstructed Proto Indo European terminology, but focusing on Indo European vocabulary and pronunciation etc that is more native to Europe than other IE regions e.g. Asia.
Of course it'd have to have fairly simple grammar, at least as simple as a hypothetical regularised English
E.g. Northern Europe would probably speak English and German, Western Europe French and Spanish, Southern Europe Italian and one of the slavic languages (be much easier if a slavic interlanguage like slovioski or what not was introduced at an official level), North-East probably Russian, Polish and Czech. And then add in languages for areas that get left out of the net.
That way you'd need less translators. The foremost goal in Europe should be a stable, efficient and effective EU, and a mess of languages doesn't help that. Language diversity and culture of course is incredibly important but neither help the running of a 21st century state.
Another option would be to simply place language education as a priority and create decent and effective free language courses for every EU language to allow people in Europe to actually understand each other, no matter how obscure a language.
(of course I'm biased coming from a largely monolingual country)
Edit:
Dare I say this - Rather than Esperanto, how bout' a more "European" solution built using reconstructed Proto Indo European terminology, but focusing on Indo European vocabulary and pronunciation etc that is more native to Europe than other IE regions e.g. Asia.
Of course it'd have to have fairly simple grammar, at least as simple as a hypothetical regularised English
jan aleksan (Näita profiili) 10. detsember 2009 20:27.22
ceigered:I'm not convinced by the potential result
Edit:
Dare I say this - Rather than Esperanto, how bout' a more "European" solution built using reconstructed Proto Indo European terminology, but focusing on Indo European vocabulary and pronunciation etc that is more native to Europe than other IE regions e.g. Asia.
Of course it'd have to have fairly simple grammar, at least as simple as a hypothetical regularised English
There is not only indo-european languages in europe: Hungarian, Finnish, estonian, saami, basque, and maltese
Rogir (Näita profiili) 10. detsember 2009 22:34.29
Any solution that puts certain national languages officialy above others is simply unacceptable in the European model. Also, how much different would a 'more Indo-European language' be from Esperanto?
Frankouche (Näita profiili) 10. detsember 2009 22:55.08
jan aleksan:I'm not convinced by the potential resultI prefer learn Klingon
ceigered (Näita profiili) 11. detsember 2009 5:51.45
Rogir:Any solution that puts certain national languages officialy above others is simply unacceptable in the European model. Also, how much different would a 'more Indo-European language' be from Esperanto?
Like I said, I'm biased coming from a monolingual society which has Indonesia, China, Japan, Vietnam, and America all nearby - all of which having heaps of different local languages, yet a single "branching" language. It works in all those countries (although it more or less gets undermined in some of them due to various other problems). And in Indonesia it seems that language diversity is still as strong despite everyone speaking a malayan language (although some languages do need a bit of propping up to help with their use in modern education).Vocabulary wise, EO is too Italic, which only really benefits speakers of Latin-based languages and maybe some Celtic speakers (although Celtic speakers generally speak English or French anyway).
@ Jan: Yeah I'm not convinced by that project either
Furthermore its very complicated. I'm more a fan of Sambahsa's approach but that has a French influence in the orthography which probably isn't too helpful for all Europeans 
I'm aware of the non-indo-european languages in Europe, but from my study of some of them (mostly the Finnic ones - sorry forgotten the proper name) they share many similarities with IE languages (minä (I) in Finnish looks extremely close to the m- stems in many other European vocabulary). Effectively if the simiarities are drawn out and vocabulary is chosen based on the most widespread understanding (shouldn't be too hard to survey people or vote on something like that) then one could end up with a nice compromise - in theory.
In the end I think Frankouche might have the best solution fullstop
qwertz (Näita profiili) 11. detsember 2009 10:49.00
Rogir:Any solution that puts certain national languages officialy above others is simply unacceptable in the European model.Yes, but that still seems to be unofficialy the current situation inside the European Parliament (EP). Probably that situation has to published more offensivly by national news agencies. If I open the official www.europarl.europa.eu webpage I can see only 22 of 27 national welcome homepages. And if I try to test if some official headline news (or whatever) are translated to all other EU languages you will casualy get "not translated" states. (Use the language switch at the right upper i.e. "pt-português" switch.) And this is just the situation for non-instantly written information. (written translation versus live interpreter)
Furthermore, due to the mentioned technical briefing above most offical EP documents will translated to English and French only. Even German doesn't play any role anymore. What about Spanish, any east-european language? etc. In my opinion, that's no good situation to make supra-national EP agreements and could provoke any misunderstanding. In my opinion there is a high demand for a bridge(s) languages discussion. We don't need any new wars more in the EP hemisphere due to a language misunderstanding issue. Don't tell me that there are no nationalism-parties around who could not provoke that. This bridge(s) language issue is definitly a weakness of the European Parliament democracy.
ceigered:What means "fullstop"? To crash something? To drive something against the wall?
In the end I think Frankouche might have the best solution fullstop
jan aleksan (Näita profiili) 11. detsember 2009 13:04.39
qwertz: webpage I can see only 22 of 27 national welcome homepages.In fact that's nearly ok, only the Irish is missing, because there is 23 official language in EU (unless you consider that the belgian french and the french french are not the same)
qwertz (Näita profiili) 11. detsember 2009 13:27.36
jan aleksan:Thanks for that. I missed reading of the How many languages are used in the European Parliament? statement.qwertz: webpage I can see only 22 of 27 national welcome homepages.In fact that's nearly ok, only the Irish is missing, because there is 23 official language in EU (unless you consider that the belgian french and the french french are not the same)
"... These 23 official languages make a total of 506 possible combinations, since each language can be translated into 22 others. In order to meet this challenge, the European Parliament has set up highly efficient interpreting, translation and legal text verification services. Very strict rules have been put in place to guarantee the efficiency of these services and to hold the budgetary cost down to reasonable levels..."
Incredible. Who makes the decisions about "reasonable levels" and controls this "very stict (language policy) rules"? I assume this special "text verification services" folks. I'm very interested to get more information about their workflow policies.
For me that sounds like we EU citizens have a second "translator & interpreter" Shadow-European-Parliament. Yes, I have a lot of respect to this translater & interpreter jobs. But... it's not transparent for the public.
http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/languages-of-europe/
"... Due to time and budgetary constraints, relatively few working documents are translated into all languages. The European Commission employs English, French and German in general as procedural languages, whereas the European Parliament provides translation into different languages according to the needs of its Members ..."
western-european "procedural languages" versus "EU Multilingualism"?
Interesting: The European Union Anthem (en.wikipedia.org) doesn't have official lyrics "... Due to the large number of languages used in the European Union, the anthem is purely instrumental, and the German lyrics Friedrich Schiller wrote and Beethoven based the melody upon have no official status..."
KoLonJaNo (Näita profiili) 11. detsember 2009 20:21.01
Hello!
Kolonjano
qwertz:full stop (BE) = period (AE) = Punkt (Satzzeichen)ceigered:What means "fullstop"? To crash something? To drive something against the wall?
In the end I think Frankouche might have the best solution fullstop
Kolonjano