Is Scholarly Communication Possible in a So-called “Artificial” Language?

Important for the status of any language is its function as a scholarly language. Are “artificial” languages, i.e. “international planned languages”, available for such a function? This article demonstrates that they are. Among planned languages, language planning, and research on scholarly language there are several connections, particularly demonstrable through the example of Esperanto. This language, from as early as the beginning of the 20th century, has had available to it scholarly texts in journals and other publications, and oral scholarly discourse through individual communication among individual scholars and in the context of organizations and other communities of discourse on various subjects, today also web-based. Characteristics of the language, particularly its word-formation, tend to favor the flexible naming of notions and the creation of terms in line with the criteria of ISO/TC 37. Such stabilized scientific vocabulary is recorded in over 200 dictionaries covering some 90 fields. The Universal Esperanto Association seeks to coordinate work on terminology and collaborates with the principal international terminological institutions. Outside their own range of discourse, planned languages have served to stimulate work, for example, in decimal classification, in nomenclature, and in terminology science. There is a broad scholarly literature in the field

How Not to Reinvent the Wheel: The Essential Scholarly Literature in Interlinguistics and Esperantology

Studies of interlinguistics written in ethnic languages – particularly research on planned languages – are often insufficiently grounded in the essential scholarly literature. English-language studies frequently fail to consider scholarly literature in German, Russian, French, and other languages. An important part of this specialized literature is written in planned languages (particularly Esperanto) and all too frequently remains unknown. For lack of knowledge of actual planned-language praxis, misunderstandings arise, for example on the relations between a language and a language project, a language and a language community, language and culture, expressibility in planned languages, and so on. For scientifically valid studies, specialized materials written in planned languages (approximately 95 % of them in Esperanto) are essential. This article provides an overview of the principal accessible sources of scholarly literature on interlinguistics and Esperantology and, inter alia, gives information on specialized libraries and archives, bibliographies, major monographs, anthologies, conferences and conference proceedings, university studies and dissertations, periodicals, internet materials, and handbooks for interlinguistics specialists

Comment s’informer sur la littérature spécialisée en interlinguistique et en espérantologie

Les travaux d’interlinguistique écrits dans des langues ethniques – notamment les études sur les langues planifiées – ne s’appuient souvent pas suffisamment sur la littérature spécialisée de base. Dans les études écrites en anglais, les travaux spécialisés écrits en allemand, en français, en russe et dans d’autres langues ne sont pas suffisamment pris en considération. Une partie importante de la littérature spécialisée est écrite dans une langue planifiée (surtout en espéranto) et reste de ce fait trop souvent méconnue. À cause de l’ignorance dont est l’objet la pratique réelle des langues planifiées, des malentendus apparaissent, par exemple concernant la différence entre langue et projet de langue, concernant le rapport entre langue et communauté linguistique, entre langue et culture, concernant les capacités expressives d’une langue planifiée, etc. Pour des études scientifiques de qualité, du matériau spécialisé écrit dans une langue planifiée (en espéranto dans environ 95% des cas) est disponible. L’article fait la liste des principales sources disponibles pour la littérature spécialisée en interlinguistique et donne des informations concernant les bibliothèques et les archives spécialisées, les bibliographies, les monographies essentielles, les anthologies, les colloques et les actes de colloques, les études universitaires et les thèses, les périodiques et les manuels d’interlinguistique, les sources sur internet.</jats:p

Causes of the relative success of Esperanto

Among what are now more than 1000 efforts to create an international language, primarily the project of L. L. Zamenhof (1887) has developed into a living and flexible language. Although Zamenhof’s hopes for a language accepted worldwide were not fulfilled, Esperanto proves that in principle it is possible to create a new language through language planning and bring it to practical use. This is an important fact for linguistics. Esperanto’s success also lies in the fact that so far it has been able to resist competition from other systems of planned language. The factors that explain this success relate in part to linguistic structures (e.g. the system’s potential for development) and in part to sociolinguistic and language policy considerations. Of particular significance was Zamenhof’s language-policy role: he saw language as primarily a social phenomenon, he linked humanistic ideals to his language, and he passed Esperanto on to an emerging language community with all of its evolving and varied communicative needs. Zamenhof intuitively understood several important factors that contributed to Esperanto’s stability, for example the need for a standard and its codification. Over the past decades, the scholarly literature of Esperanto studies has grown in quality and is regularly recorded in the bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA).</jats:p