An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

7 L ANGUAGE 
TREATMENT 
(
TRAITEMENT DE
L ANGUES
/ARTIFICIAL L ANGUAGES)
‘If you are to go to the trouble of learning a language you need to feel that you will
get a return for your toil this very year. A man may plant an orchard and wait six
years for his apples; but six months is long enough to wait for verbs and
prepositions to bear fruit.’
(I. A. Richards 1943: 155)
Utopianism, that millennial belief in the perfectibility of human language so that
communication is facilitated, logic encouraged and language learning made readily
(and easily) accessible to all is an old story. When there is a natural language which
has become the language of wider discourse through imperial success (Latin until the
seventeenth century, English in the twentieth century), the appeal of the problem-
free invention or modification diminishes. But in the seventeenth century when
Latin went into decline in the West, the search for an improved international
language increased.
Artificial languages have two major advantages over natural languages: they are
not the property of any state who claim priority of possession since it is their mother
tongue; and they can be constructed on a logical basis. If an artificial language is
composed entirely of invented elements (and therefore known as an 
a prior
i artificial
language), it is more likely that it will fulfil the logical criterion (since it can be
designed as if it were some kind of mathematics); if it is based in part on elements
of grammar and vocabulary from one or more natural languages, it is known as an
a posteriori
artificial language. The 
a posteriori
variety may be less strong on logic
(and therefore not meet the second criterion of an artificial language) but its part
dependency on natural languages gives it the right feel for learning and perhaps for
development. Many artificial languages have combined features that are both 
a priori
and 
a posteriori
.
The most successful artificial languages are Volapuk, Esperanto and Interlingua.
Schleyer’s Volapuk combined 
a priori
and 
a posteriori
elements: the vocabulary was
largely taken from European languages, mainly English, modified so as to make it
easier to learn by ‘old people, children and Chinese’: thus ‘red’ became ‘led’ and ‘rose’
‘lol’.
Here is the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in Volapuk:
O Fat obas, kel binol in suls,
paisaludomoz nem ola.
In spite of the modifications, Volapuk (the name modified from the English for
‘world’ and ‘speech’) proved too difficult to learn and was overtaken by Esperanto,
also created in the 1870s. Esperanto was more deliberately 
a posteriori
, based on the
Romance languages, with smaller roles for other European languages. Esperanto has
been very successful, with some 10 million speakers world wide. Zamenhof, the
inventor of Esperanto, in very near all cases used existing Romance vocabulary and
yet made the rules sufficiently flexible that the language could incorporate new words
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to meet new needs. As such, Esperantists do have some justification when they call
it a living language. Whether they are also justified in their view that Esperanto
provides the solution to the world’s communication needs is questionable. Their
claim is based on the following factors:
1. Esperanto has been shown to be capable of written and spoken development
in a number of fields, in science and literature.
2. The language can be quickly learnt, no doubt because it cleverly combines
features of a natural language with the logic of a constructed one.
3. It is internationally acceptable. The merit of this argument is less obvious
and it seems likely that Esperanto remains less acceptable to speakers of
non-European languages. There is a view that Esperanto is slowly changing its
base as non-European speakers learn it and introduce their own vocabulary.
But there is an irony there: if Esperanto does change in ways such as this, it
could render it less easy to learn in the future by Romance speakers.
4. It has survived for 100 years and gained considerable support. But again, that
support is not in any sense mass support. Those who have learnt the language
and use it tend to be those who are interested in Esperanto rather than in
international communication.
Interlingua takes the Esperanto idea a stage further in that it contains very little