Applied linguistics and language use
LANGUAGE TREATMENT (TRAITEMENT DE LANGUES/ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES)
‘If you are to go to the trouble of learning a language you need to feel that you will get a return for your toil this very year. A man may plant an orchard and wait six years for his apples; but six months is long enough to wait for verbs and prepositions to bear fruit.’
(I. A. Richards 1943: 155)
Utopianism, that millennial belief in the perfectibility of human language so that communication is facilitated, logic encouraged and language learning made readily (and easily) accessible to all is an old story. When there is a natural language which has become the language of wider discourse through imperial success (Latin until the seventeenth century, English in the twentieth century), the appeal of the problem free invention or modification diminishes. But in the seventeenth century when Latin went into decline in the West, the search for an improved international language increased.
Artificial languages have two major advantages over natural languages: they are not the property of any state who claim priority of possession since it is their mother tongue; and they can be constructed on a logical basis. If an artificial language is composed entirely of invented elements (and therefore known as an a priori artificial language), it is more likely that it will fulfil the logical criterion (since it can be designed as if it were some kind of mathematics); if it is based in part on elements of grammar and vocabulary from one or more natural languages, it is known as an a posteriori artificial language. The a posteriori variety may be less strong on logic (and therefore not meet the second criterion of an artificial language) but its part dependency on natural languages gives it the right feel for learning and perhaps for development. Many artificial languages have combined features that are both a priori and a posteriori.
The most successful artificial languages are Volapuk, Esperanto and Interlingua. Schleyer’s Volapuk combined a priori and a posteriori elements: the vocabulary was largely taken from European languages, mainly English, modified so as to make it easier to learn by ‘old people, children and Chinese’: thus ‘red’ became ‘led’ and ‘rose’ ‘lol’.
Here is the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in Volapuk:
O Fat obas, kel binol in suls,
paisaludomoz nem ola.
In spite of the modifications, Volapuk (the name modified from the English for ‘world’ and ‘speech’) proved too difficult to learn and was overtaken by Esperanto, also created in the 1870s. Esperanto was more deliberately a posteriori, based on the Romance languages, with smaller roles for other European languages. Esperanto has been very successful, with some 10 million speakers world wide. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, in very near all cases used existing Romance vocabulary and yet made the rules sufficiently flexible that the language could incorporate new words to meet new needs. As such, Esperantists do have some justification when they call it a living language. Whether they are also justified in their view that Esperanto provides the solution to the world’s communication needs is questionable. Their claim is based on the following factors:
1. Esperanto has been shown to be capable of written and spoken development in a number of fields, in science and literature.
2. The language can be quickly learnt, no doubt because it cleverly combines features of a natural language with the logic of a constructed one.
3. It is internationally acceptable. The merit of this argument is less obvious and it seems likely that Esperanto remains less acceptable to speakers of non-European languages. There is a view that Esperanto is slowly changing its base as non-European speakers learn it and introduce their own vocabulary. But there is an irony there: if Esperanto does change in ways such as this, it could render it less easy to learn in the future by Romance speakers.
4. It has survived for 100 years and gained considerable support. But again, that support is not in any sense mass support. Those who have learnt the language and use it tend to be those who are interested in Esperanto rather than in international communication.
Interlingua takes the Esperanto idea a stage further in that it contains very little a priori elements. The alternative name for Interlingua, Latino sine flexione (Latin without inflexions), makes clear that the language is Romance in grammar (without gender and without inflexions), and Romance and/or English in vocabulary.
Gode, who developed Interlingua in the 1950s, was never interested in the replacement by Interlingua of any natural language. Rather, he saw it as a useful addition. He intended it to be used for science and technology and above all for translations, abstracts and summaries, for largely passive use. Once again, as with Esperanto, the ambition to make international communication easier is unreal precisely because the language favors those who themselves have a Romance back-ground and at the same time does not offer the abundant advantages (not only for passive reading of science and technology abstracts) that learning a natural ‘international’ language (such as English) must offer.
Volapuk, Esperanto and Interlingua are all artificial languages in that they all make use of some a priori elements and they combine several natural languages rather than being based on one only. Modified languages differ from artificial ones in that they have no a priori elements and they are indeed based on one natural language. The best example is Basic English (C. K. Ogden 1937). Like Interlingua, the purpose of Basic English was to promote mainly technical communication: hence its name B(ritish) A(merican) S(cientific) I(nternational) C(ommunication). It consists of 850 English words, ‘selected to cover everyday needs … the working principle is that all words not on this list can be replaced by words that are … The simplification of the vocabulary is achieved at the expense of a more complex grammar and a greater reliance on idiomatic construction’ (Crystal 1995: 356).
Basic English was found to be easy to learn to read but difficult to write in with any facility, perhaps because it was fundamentally a means of vocabulary selection and control, leaving the learner (especially the non-English-speaking learner) to grapple with the complexities of circumlocution. It has been remarked that Ogden simplified the vocabulary at the expense of the grammar. Furthermore its claim to contain only 850 words was flawed in that those 850 were head words, which meant that there were in fact very many more which were based on those head words.
Applied linguistics has shown little interest in artificial and modified languages, unless we are to claim that Zamenhof, Gode, Ogden and the other inventors were themselves applied linguists. In the sense that they have made use of linguistic principles for an extra-linguistic purpose, in this case wider communication, they certainly have a claim to being applied linguists. But it would seem that their approach to applied linguistics is from the linguistic end, that they are being linguists applied rather than applied linguists. And it is indeed the case that the artificial languages, notably Esperanto, have attracted support from linguists on the grounds that they can meet certain of the criteria we have already discussed and furthermore actually look natural. Modified languages, on the other hand, seem more likely to appeal to non-linguists, rather than to linguists, who take exception to all forms of simplification. Hence their appeal to politicians such as Churchill and Roosevelt, both of course first-language speakers of English.
But the applied linguist has shown little or no interest. Why is that? Large maintains:
The very number of artificial languages invented indicates a deeply-felt need, at least among the linguistically inclined, to impose order and rationality on the haphazard instruments which have evolved for human communication. Points of syntax are disputed endlessly, yet there is very little debate about the way in which the international auxiliary or the world language would actually be chosen and implemented. Perhaps this is not very surprising: it is a shame to sully the intellectual discussion of language with the grubby facts of political reality. If supporters of an international language are to win credibility, however, reality, no matter how unpleasant, must be confronted. (Large 1983: 157–8)
And since the focus of the applied linguist is on language in context, he/she is likely to regard artificial languages with a jaundiced eye. We made the basic argument that for the applied linguist, language problems involve more than language, listing the factors that must be taken into account.
Confronted by this list of factors that must be taken into account we can wonder that artificial languages were ever considered viable. We have quoted Large on the political aspect but an equally strong case against artificial languages can be made on the other grounds, for example educational (providing the necessary resources for teaching and learning), sociolinguistic (natural languages provide a major source of identity for their speakers: it is difficult to see how this can transfer to an artificial language, which has as one of its purposes the denial of local identity), psychological (how motivated will people be to learn a language that, at least at present, has very little to offer, not many speakers, no films, no pop songs, few books and so on), cultural (natural languages are culture bearing but how can an artificial language fulfil this function until it too becomes a natural language and then prone to all the problems that artificial languages seek to avoid).
Crystal (1987) is not optimistic about take up for artificial languages, even on semantic grounds where he points to the lack of semantic matching across languages: ‘Speakers of different languages may translate their mother-tongue words into an artificial language, but this does not necessarily mean that they understand each another any better. The figurative, idiomatic and connotative uses of words will differ: for example, American and Soviet attitudes to a word like capitalism will not alter simply because both sides agree to use the same artificial language label’ (Crystal 1987: 355).
The applied linguist has been accused of being seduced by power, of furthering the spread of dominant languages and not giving sufficient support to the declining languages of minority groups. That may or may not be the case: for many applied linguists it seems perfectly possible to support language spread as a means of furthering wider communication as much among the minorities as elsewhere and at the same time to offer support and expertise to the speakers of declining languages in their attempts to survive. But above all the applied linguist is likely to take a realistic view of the situation; and in the case of language treatment, if the factors we have suggested he/she must take into account are relevant, then it is likely that projects to develop artificial languages and modified languages such as Basic English will be regarded as both flawed and irrelevant to the solution of language problems.
