...if You Do...

Late last year I bought a T-Shirt that says "I'll Learn Esperanto if You Do".  I actually have three of them now, but I only bought one.  Long story.

Anyway, I bought this T-Shirt because I thought it was a fine joke.  The point of Esperanto is that we all agree to learn it for the sake of communicating with other people.  No one has to learn it - no one needs to learn it.  It's just something you choose to do, which only really works if other people choose to do it, too.

However, I recently learnt that there's a deeper level to the joke on my shirt.  When Zamenhof first published his little book trying to convince people to take up a brand-new language, he put something in it:  a form people could sign and return, promising that they would learn the language if 10 million other people agreed to learn it as well.  Right from the very beginning there was an "I'll learn it if you do" challenge built into the language.

According to Okrent, less than a thousand people sent the form back (actually, I seriously doubt the book - which was only published in Russian at the time - would have been printed in a big enough run for ten million forms to even exist...) but that's still around a thousand people who were willing to say "Sure, I'll learn it if someone else does".

And that's how Esperanto works.  That's how any constructed or planned language works - a bunch of people all agree to learn it and speak it, and - hey presto - there's a language.  Without people agreeing to speak it, it's just an academic activity.

I'm reading Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages at the moment, and thoroughly enjoying it.  However, I do have one niggling complaint.  Okrent writes like an apologist who has forgotten what an apologist does.  Instead of saying: "hey, this deserves to be given some respect because it is terribly interesting", she seems to be saying "I'm only looking at this because it's quite interesting, but please don't think I personally have any connection to these people apart from scientific curiosity (I wouldn't want you to think I was weird, or anything)".

I don't know, there's just something about the way she writes that makes it seem like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without getting stuck eating lunch with the nerds every day.

Or, occasionally, it seems more like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without losing the opportunity to laugh at the nerds for enjoying such nerdy things.

There's always something vaguely sad about someone who has to qualify "I'm interested in this" with "but I'm not one of those people who are interested in this".