A SENSE OF ENGLISH

Esperanto and Universal Grammar

A thought that has crossed every language learner’s mind at some point is: “What a nuisance it is that the world doesn’t share one common language.”

Think of the time we could save if we didn’t have to study any other language. Think of the misunderstandings that would be avoided.

Imagine the changes to the school curriculum and the layout of bookshops and libraries across the world.

And perhaps spare a thought for the many teachers, interpreters, linguists and authors like myself, whose services would cease to be required.

Genesis (the first book of the Bible) includes a brief story about how the human race moved from communicating in one language to the forming of many.

The account is found in chapter 11 of Genesis, and the first sentence there affirms that the whole earth shared a common language.

God became angry when settlers in a place called Shinar started to build a tower that was supposed to reach to heaven – The Tower of Babel.

He put an end to this human endeavour by coming down from heaven to scatter the people over all the earth and confound their language. Or so the story goes.

The Biblical account is very sketchy, and there are other historical records which give more detail.

How the world of multi-language that we live in today has come about may be of interest to some, but what is of importance to all of us is that it is the reality with which we have to live.

In the late 19th century a young student at a secondary school in Warsaw, Ludwik Zamenhof, began work on the creation of an international language – Esperanto.

He was born in a town in Poland (Bialystok) where Poles, Germans, Belarusians and Jews lived alongside each other.

Zamenhof witnessed much tension and distrust between the four ethnic communities and attached great significance to the part that language differences played in that.

His goal therefore, was a noble one: to create a universal language that would engender greater international tolerance of cultural and ethnic difference. A constructed language that would provide a neutral arena of communication.

Zamenhof’s vision of this need came about as a result of the differences he perceived between the languages themselves. But what about the similarities between us ourselves, as humans, and as students of language (I’m including our native language in this line of thought).

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that an awareness of language structure is inbuilt within our brain and therefore not learnt.

When as babies we start to learn our mother tongue, we do so with a rapidity that is disproportionate to our exposure to the language itself, suggesting that the brain contains a built-in capacity to organize language.

This theory appears to be backed up substantially by the fact that damage to particular parts of the brain can affect specific linguistic functions, like the ability to link up words coherently, for example.

Even if this were only true to a limited degree (namely, that we possess this innate function to organize language) we are still confronted with an encouraging universal aspect to language study.

As students of language, we share an ability to relate what we learn back to a common structure. Linguists call this universal grammar.

Does this have implications for how we approach studying other languages? Let’s continue to consider this next time.