Thankyou, Brian Barker, for sharing this clip.
Here, Claude Piron, psychologist and former UN and WHO translater, speaks about the language of Esperanto and the value in adopting it as the universal language, not instead of our own languages but as well. According to Piron, Esperanto is a lot quicker and easier to learn than other languages. The structure is simple, and regular. As someone who has spent years learning French, a language quite similar to my native English, without gaining fluency, I can definitely see the value in this language.
Both Wikipedia and Google have versions in Esperanto. According to Wikipedia, Esperanto is 'the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language, meaning it did not evolve but was designed for its purpose. This purpose is to provide a language which is accessible worldwide, requiring minimal resources to access and learn it. I'm certainly interested in a language whose name means 'one who hopes'.
You can find Esperanto tutorials on Youtube.
Interestingly, Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers, that the reason it is widely believed that Asian people are the best at maths is because their number structure is much simpler than that of English, or other languages. Gladwell quotes Stanislas Dehaene's book The Number Sense:
'Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second... The memory gap between English and Chinese is apparently entirely due to this difference in length.'
And goes on to state:
'It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed... The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.'
Because of these simple differences, Chinese students get ahead in primary school and it snowballs from there. Outliers is a fantastic book, informative and inspiring. Despite being non-fiction, it's a real page-turner. I highly recommend it.
Esperanto is a lot more than just a good idea.It offers some remarkable practical benefits. Personally, I’ve made friends around the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate with otherwise. And then there’s the Pasporta Servo, which provides free lodging and local information to Esperanto-speaking travellers in over 90 countries. In the past few years I have had guided tours of Berlin and Milan and Douala in Cameroon in the planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I’ve discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, and so on.
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