“The ‘foreign’ language you already know”

Image credit: drbrd.com

The other day, while wandering aimlessly down the dusty by-roads of the internet, I found myself reading an article on Esperanto. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Esperanto is a “constructed language” which means it has been deliberately created rather than, as with other languages, having evolved naturally from our Neanderthal gruntings and nether-scratchings.

The rationale behind constructed languages is twofold:

Firstly: Being ‘constructed’ they can be designed with a completely regular grammar structure, thus making them easy to learn.

Secondly: In theory a constructed language is ideal for international negotiations and treaties as, not being native to any one country, it doesn’t carry any associated cultural baggage with it and is thus, essentially politically neutral.

Any roads up, whilst reading said article about Esperanto, I was surprised to find out just how many other constructed languages there are [Wikipedia lists nearly forty], including several versions of Esperanto itself.

There are several variants of Esperanto

[Digression: I remember a long time ago, in my callow youth, I made a half-hearted attempt to learn Esperanto. What dissuaded me in the end was not any inherent difficulty in learning it [or even the ultimate pointlessness of learning any constructed language, as they seem doomed never to be anything more than a linguistic exercise and intellectual curiosity]. No, what put me off Esperanto was that it just felt so… well… “artificial”. All those circumflexes over letters and -OJ endings on words. It looked like something a kid would invent in a game about space aliens.]

This is what I remember Esperanto looking like. [Image credit: livescience.com]

But, back to the present day and the subject at hand:

One of the constructed languages that caught my eye in the aforementioned list was Interlingua, mainly because it is described as being ‘naturalistic’ and was designed to be a distillation of the most common vocabulary from the most popular European languages [with a bit of Latin thrown in as well] –all wrapped up in a simple and very regular grammar structure.

With Interlingua, an objective procedure is used to extract and standardise the most widespread word or words for a concept found in a set of control languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, with German and Russian as secondary references

One of the claims made for Interlingua is that it is often comprehensible “at first sight”, especially for folks with an understanding of one of the Romance languages upon which it is based.

Since I went to school back in the days when you got Latin and French beaten into you for three years, whether you liked it or not –and later voluntarily studied Spanish to A-level [with a bit of fore-warning to allow practice, I can still be fairly fluent], I thought I’d put these claims to the test. So I fired up a random article on the Interlingua edition of Wikipedia and had a go. Here was the article in question:

[Apologies for the long quotation, but I think it helps make my point]