Interlinguistics and Esperanto Studiesin the new millennium

Federico GobboAmsterdam / Milano-Bicocca / Torino

hF.Gobbo@uva.nli

27 mar 2015 – ACLC Seminar

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Introduction

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About me: three universities, three disciplines

c�2013 Michele Gobbo

Why interlinguistics is so fascinating for me

⌅ from the point of view of linguistics, it o↵ers a set of case studies –in particular Esperanto – where theoretical questions can be posedin a controlled way, in order to be validated, and various challengesto the area of language policy and planning (LPP);

⌅ from the point of view of philosophy, it o↵ers an entire line ofreflection on the nature of knowledge, the relation betweenlanguage and the world (epistemology) and a reflection onlanguage an power (ethics);

⌅ from the point of view of computer science, the regularity of alanguage like Esperanto simplifies its encoding for the purposes ofmachine-readability, compared to natural languages.

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What is interlinguistics? Back to the old days. . .

A new science is developing, Interlinguistics – that branch of thescience of language which deals with the structure and basicideas of all languages with the view to the establishing of anorm for interlanguages, i.e. auxiliary languages destined fororal and written use between people who cannot makethemselves understood by means of their mother tongues.

Otto Jespersen (1931)

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major International Auxiliary Languages

⌅ Volapuk (1879) launched by Johann Martin Schleyer;

⌅ Esperanto (1887) launched by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof;

⌅ Latino sine Flexione (1903) launched by Giuseppe Peano;

⌅ Ido (1908) launched by Louis de Beaufront and Louis Couturat;

⌅ Occidental (1922) launched by Edgard de Wahl, then Interlingue;

⌅ Novial (1928) launched by Otto Jespersen;

⌅ Basic English (1930) launched by Charles K. Ogden;

⌅ Interlingua (1951) launched by IALA, mainly after the work byAlexander Gode.

We should also add to the IALs the supporters of Latin as a livinglanguage (Latino lingua viva).

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An unorthodox branch of language science

Interlinguistics is an unorthodox branch of language science.The researchers are found in universities, post-graduateinstitutes, and the research departments of software companies,but also in libraries, volunteer language movements, and in theirprivate studies.

Klaus Schubert, 1989

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The importance of the ‘interlinguistic wars’

When Jespersen defined the discipline, in 1931, we were in the middleof the ‘interlinguistic wars’ (himself being involved with Novial): a lotof di↵erent IALs, and a hot debate to about the qualities of them.

The question was: how to choose the best IAL?

Many of the reflections of this time address problem of what now wecall Language Policy and Planning (LPP), as noticed at first byValter Tauli: how to (re)shape the corpus of a language, how topromote its status, how to establish (again) the community ofspeakers. I adopted the conceptual tools of LPP and appliedbackwards to classic IALs of the first half of the past century (e.g.,Gobbo 2008).

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After the ‘interlinguistic wars’

In sociolinguistic terms, Esperanto has won the interlinguistic wars:after the Second World War, the only other IALs with tinycommunities were Ido and Interlingua, with less than 1,000 activespeakers in the world, while Esperanto has at least 10,000 activespeakers, according to the estimates of most scholars.

So, the most interesting phenomenon in interlinguistic is without anydoubt Esperanto, and that’s why we talk about Esperanto Studies(originally in German as Esperantologie, a neologism by EugenWuster).

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Legacy of classic interlinguistics

(1879-1951)

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From a historical and philosophical perspective

1. roots in the Scientific Revolution;

2. history of science, in particular the language policy of the(scientific) communication in the past;

3. history of ideas: what does mean to be ‘international’ and ‘neutral’in the case of an IAL?

4. the need to document past attempts, often published in unusualsetting, or in “strange” languages.

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The roots in the Scientific Revolution

In the history of ideas, a lot of ‘philosophical languages’ were proposedby scholars, especially in the 17th century. In particular, Descartes andLeibniz. At the UvA, there is Jaap Maat who deals with these topics.

These ‘philosophical languages’ are very di↵erent from IALs, beingwritten taxonomies of knowledge, not languages that can be spokenaloud. Therefore, they are more interesting for philosophers thanlinguists.

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Language policy of scientific communication

Before the rise of English as the main language for scientificcommunication, many di↵erent languages were used by di↵erentscientific communities, since the Scientific Revolution.

French, German, Latin, Russian, and also Esperanto were used besideEnglish. The book entitled Scientific Babel by Michael D. Gordin (toappear in 2015) reconstructs “the experience of doing science in thepolyglot past”.

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History of ideas behind IALs

All IALs have in common two key concepts:

1. internationality

2. neutrality

How these two concepts are declined by the various proponents ofIALs? The interpretations are not unique, and they change throughthe time. A description of this evolution is still to be written – anidea for a scriptie if you attended my class(es).

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Documentation: all IALs are correlated

When a new IAL was proposed, it had the previous IALs as points ofreference, either in a negative or positive sense: all IALs arecorrelated, and so they should be studied in comparison andcontrast.

An example: Alfred Michaux (1859–1937) was a French pioneer ofEsperanto, and a personal friend of Zamenhof. Being a lawyer, heproposed Esperanto as the international language for law. On theother hand, he had his own IAL proposal, called Romanal (1909), unelangue internationale anglo-latine, which should combine thesimplicity of Latino sine Flexione and the clearness of Esperanto.However, he remained an Esperantist.

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Zamenhof and Michaux, in a postcard, 1906

CC� Wikipedia

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Perspectives on

Esperanto Studies

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Internal and external Esperanto Studies

We can distinguish two macro-areas of Esperanto Studies:

1. internally, Esperanto can be investigated in its linguistic features,on the di↵erent levels (phonetics and phonology, morphology andsyntax, semantics and pragmatics);

2. externally, Esperanto can be investigated in its sociolinguisticfeatures: how is it used by its speakers, who are all at leastbilingual? Which position in the linguistic repertoire? How can ita↵ect mobility? Are there any issues of inclusion and identity?Moreover, there are experiences in using Esperanto for machinetranslation purposes.

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Phonetics and phonology

There is a pioneeristic study by John Wells (1989) and some paper byMarc van Oostendorp mainly in the 1990s. However, there is noserious, comprehensive study or description of the language on thislevel.

For example, there are phenomena of reduction or semplification inthe informal pronunciation:

⌅ spontanea ! spontana (now entered the PIV, the monolingualdictionary of reference)

⌅ biero is pronounced [’bjero] instead of [bi’ero]

Furthermore, there are sociolinguistic aspects without any study yet.For example, can we talk about ‘foreign accents’ in the case ofEsperanto? How to evaluate a “good” pronunciation?

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Morphology and syntax

Morphology is the most peculiar part of the Esperanto grammar,being in many parts original, not borrowed from the source languages(Romance, Germanic or Slavic) and it is the most studied part of thegrammar.

Syntax is far less studied compared to morphology. My predecessor,Wim Jansen, has investigated transparency and the reflexive under theperspective of FDG. Still, a comprehensive description of the syntaxof Esperanto under a modern school of linguistics is not yet available.

Based on the Structural Syntax by Lucien Tesniere (1959/2015), meand Marco Benini (Insubria, Italy) have elaborated the ConstructiveAdpositional Grammar (CxAdGram) approach.

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The role of Esperanto in Tesniere’s syntax

From Tesniere (1959/2015:58-59):

33.2 We adopt the following representations:

O NounA AdjectiveI VerbE Adverb

33.3 It should be noted that these four letters correspond to the endsof the four corresponding types of words in Esperanto: -o for noun,-a for adjective, -i for infinitive, and -e for adverbs.

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Constructive Adpositional Grammars in a nutshell

We elaborated on the Tesnerian Structural Syntax, taking the fourgrammar characters and the centrality of the verb and its valencyvalue, so do describe a language in lexical semantic terms. Finally weobtained a formal grammar based on constructive mathematics. Ouraim was to find a way to understand better natural languagescompared with CxAdGrams.

From Cognitive Linguistics, we take the concept of constructions,meaning morphosyntactic paradigms paired with concrete usage in agrammaticalization continuum, and the dichotomy ‘trajector /landmark’ of Langacker to treat information prominence.

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An example of dependency-like adtree

Mi (ne) satas futbalonO

1

E I 2 O2

verb

neg

who likeswhat liked

Futbalo (ne) placas al miO

1

E I 2 U O2

verb

neg preposition

what liked

who likes

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A real-world application of CxAdGrams

I have applied this framework in a Montessori primary school inMilan, Italy (without the formal details) in order to let pupils comparegrammars of di↵erent languages – not necessarily Esperanto isinvolved – as in the English-Italian pair:

⌅ I like football (the model of mi satas futbalon)

⌅ Mi piace il calcio (the model of futbalo placas al mi).

Pupils (8-10 years) trace the arrows as if they were playing, and theybecome more aware of metalinguistic concepts like subject, object, orpreposition.

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Sociolinguistics of Esperanto

Research about Esperanto and the Esperanto movement has,until very recently, been related almost without exception to oneof three areas: historical, the linguistic, and the literary. [. . . ]For many social scientists, even to contemplate a study of theEsperanto Movement constitutes a highrisk strategy verydi↵erent from undertaking the study of other social movementsor group phenomena. To write about the Movement is to inviteassociation with it.

John Edwards (1986)

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Esperanto and plurilingualism

It is di�cult even to count the Esperanto speakers, not to mentioncontemplate a survey or other sociolinguistic studies. However, wecan consider congresses, festivals, and meetings in local clubs as the‘language territories’ of the language, where the community membersgather.

One of my Master’s students in Torino is writing a thesis on theattitudes of the Esperanto speakers toward multilingualism, throughsemi-structured interviews. Preliminary results show a great attentionto language rights in general and to minority languages in particularamong Esperantists, regardless of their origin.

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Esperanto and minority languages

Esperanto is not an o�cial language anywhere, and it is alive thanksto volunteers in many cases, like other lesser-used languages.Analogies and di↵erences with minority languages are a debated topicin recent literature. Some similarities in the attitudes can be found.

I will present a talk about the sociolinguistic situation of Piedmontese(minority language of the region of Torino) and Esperanto incomparison in an international congress dedicated to language rights(Teramo, Abruzzi, Italy).

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Esperanto as a family language

Another topic of recent interest is the use of Esperanto in the family.Sometimes parents decide to speak also in Esperanto to fosterbilingualism to their children, or they have met through Esperantoand they ‘naturally’ speak it among them.

From a psycholinguistic point of view, it is interesting for instance tonote phenomena of hyperregularization in child speech. Sabine Fiedlerand Cyril Brosch (Leipzig) are working on it in the context of theEU-7FP-funded project MIME (Mobility and Inclusion in MultilingualEurope) where I am also part at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

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Gender issues in Esperanto: presentation

Almost all IALs were made by men, not women – notable exceptions:Ladaan by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 and the lingua ignota byHildegarda von Bingen).

Esperanto has a preference for the masculine gender: ‘mother’ ispatrino, derived from patro (‘father’), and similarly fratino, filino, etc.Sometimes ?matro or ?parencoj instead of gepatroj are proposed.

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Gender issues in Esperanto: pronouns

The pronominal system of Esperanto is borrowed from English:

mi (‘I’) ni (‘we’)vi (‘you’) vi (‘you’)li (‘he’), si (‘she’), gi (‘it’) ili (‘they’)

Sometimes you see use of sli (‘s/he’), isi (‘they-women’) or the moreradical ri (underspecified s/he), part of the riismo (Reguligo kajsenseksismigo de Esperanto). Nowadays, any young Esperantists nowbelong to LGB(T) or at least they are more sensible to the topic,compared to the past generations.

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Esperanto and Artificial

Intelligence

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Esperanto and Machine Translation: the pioneers

The link between Esperanto and Artificial Intelligence is very old:Petr Trojanskij was a Soviet scientist who build a machine forautomatic translation using Esperanto for the encoding (Soviet patentin 1933). It was rediscovered by Hutchins around the year 2000.

In the 1980s, a Dutch project, called DLT (Distributed LanguageTranslation) was launched, having Esperanto as the pivot language. Afeasibility study was commissioned by the European CommunityCommission to the BSO (private software company) for 100.000 ECU(circa 250.000 guilders). A prototype was produced in 1987.

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Esperanto and Machine Translation: now

In 2005, an open source project called Apertium (GPL licence) waslaunched in a consortium of Spanish Universities. After dealing withthe di↵erent languages present in Spain, it started to include others,and Esperanto too.

The company GramTrans, founded by Eckard Bick, researcher at theSouthern Danish University, o↵ers language translation pairs ofScandinavian languages mainly, but it includes Esperanto too. It isbased on Constraint Grammar systems.

Esperanto became the 64th language supported by Google Translatein 2012.

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The point of view of the Google Translate team

The Google Translate team was actually surprised about thehigh quality of machine translation for Esperanto... ForEsperanto, the number of existing translations is comparativelysmall. German or Spanish, for example, have more than 100times the data; other languages on which we focus our researche↵orts have similar amounts of data as Esperanto but don’tachieve comparable quality yet. Esperanto was constructed suchthat it is easy to learn for humans, and this seems to helpautomatic translation as well.

Thorsten Brants, Research Scientist, Google Translate

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Esperanto for machine translation: an evaluation

In the case of rule-based systems, like DLT, Apertium, or GramTrans,the high level of regularity in the Esperanto morphology speeds up theprocess of encoding the language in any machine translation engine.

in the case of statistical or example-based systems, like the one byGoogle, Esperanto permits high quality standards even with not solarge corpora.

Students of A.I. are welcome to work on the use of Esperanto inmachine translation in their scripties.

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Frontiers of Interlinguistics

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Hollywood languages

The emerging field of Interlinguistics is ‘Hollywood linguistics’ and itslanguages. The first one has been Klingon, in the Star Trek universe,prepared by Marc Okrand in 1985.

Klingon became the reference for all the other Hollywood languages,like neo-Sindarin and neo-Orcish for Peter Jackson’s movies based onTolkien’s Middle-Earth, or Na’vi prepared by Paul R. Frommer forJames Cameron’s Avatar, or the recent Kryptonian by ChristineSchreyer for Man of Steel.

David J. Peterson, formerly a student in Interlinguistics ad UC SanDiego, became the first professional in this field (“alien language andculture consultant”): he prepared Dothraki and Valyrian for Games ofThrones, and now Castithan, Irathient and others for Defiance – bothTV-series.37 de 43

Hollywood linguistics in the classroom

I brought this topic in University level courses for the first time ever inTorino (Gobbo 2014). For students in language science, planning alanguage as if it were used for a Hollywoodian movie or TV-series isan interesting exercise in language planning, which involves manyaspects of linguistics, all at the same time.

In particular, three students of mine here at the UvA, SophieBrouwer, Susannah Dijkstra, and Emma Konijn (all women) workedon the Ancient Language of the Inheritance Cycle of ChristopherPaolini. They work was so good that I suggested them to contact theauthor via email.

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What happened

c� 2015 Paolini.net

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Final remarks

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Interlinguistics is heterogeneous

Schubert’s advice is still valid: interlinguistics is still “unorthodox” inmany respects. Linguistics, philosophy, history, computer science canintertwine with this discipline in various ways.

Some research was done previously, and a lot is still awaiting to bedone.

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Still a lot to be written. . .

c� Ch. M. Schultz of Snoopy and the Peanuts

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Thanks for your attention!

Questions? Comments?

If not now, send afterwards to:

hF.Gobbo@uva.nli

Download and share this presentation from here:

http:/federicogobbo.name/eo/2015.php

CC� BY:� $\� C� Federico Gobbo 2015

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