The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the ...increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global lingua franca. Many individuals and social movements competed to create an artificial language unencumbered by the political rivalries that accompanied English, German, and French. Organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the Comintern, and the League of Nations intervened in the debate about the possibility of an artificial language, but of the numerous tongues created before World War II, only Esperanto survives today.
Esperanto and Its Rivalssheds light on the factors that led almost all artificial languages to fail and helped English to prevail as the global tongue of the twenty-first century. Exploring the social and political contexts of the three most prominent artificial languages-Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido-Roberto Garvía examines the roles played by social movement leaders and inventors, the strategies different organizations used to lobby for each language, and other early decisions that shaped how those languages spread and evolved. Through the rise and fall of these artificial languages,Esperanto and Its Rivalsreveals the intellectual dilemmas and political anxieties that troubled the globalizing world at the turn of the twentieth century.
Sotos Ochando’s language movement Garvía, Roberto
Language problems & language planning,
12/2019, Letnik:
43, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract Usually relegated to a footnote in the historical accounts of planned languages, Sotos Ochando’s Lengua Universal was most likely the first to give rise to a planned language movement. ...Contrary to later language movements, Sotos Ochando’s had no competing planned language movements to challenge it. Sotos Ochando’s Lengua Universal was also unique in that it was a philosophical language, much like those created in the 17th-century. This article explains the reasons behind the emergence and collapse of this movement. It explores the perceptions of contemporaries regarding the possibility of philosophical language projects, as well as other extralinguistic factors that determined the fate of this movement.
Abstract This article explores the shifting relations that took place from the last decades of the 19th to the first years of the 20th century between two of the most innovative language movements of ...the time: the spelling reform and the artificial language movements. The article focuses on the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. Although both movements shared a similar language ideology which run counter to the organicist perception of language and emphasized its democratic function, the article shows how the shifting political environment in which they operated affected their relation. The article identifies three stages. In a first stage, and convinced that the reform of the spelling and the promotion of an artificial, neutral language were not mutually exclusive projects, the spelling reformers were favorably inclined towards artificial language projects. In a second stage relations began to skew when some reformers advocated for the “natural Esperanto” solution, which implied the promotion of a small language to the status of the international lingua franca. In the last stage, when nationalist sentiments and international rivalries mounted, the spelling reformers broke ties with the artificial language movement and worked to improve as much as possible the international standing of their own languages.
The linguistic immersion policy implemented in Catalan schools, whereby Catalan is the only language of instruction (llengua vehicular), has been the focus of an intense debate in both Catalonia and ...Spain. Notwithstanding the political saliency of this debate over the last decades, no research has studied the preferences of the Catalans on the linguistic regime in the school system. This article is the first to consider Catalan opinions about this issue. Based on a survey of a representative sample of the Catalan population (N=2,200) launched in 2016, this article examines the preferences of the Catalan population regarding linguistic immersion and alternative linguistic policies. Results show that even when support for linguistic immersion and alternative policies are divided, preferences about the distribution of Catalan, Castilian and English teaching hours in the classroom are not polarised. The article also explores the alignment of preferences regarding linguistic policies and pro-independence sentiment in Catalonia, as well as the demand for English as a language of instruction.
Why do people play the lottery? Since lottery tickets are assets with negative expected return, lottery play challenges the basic assumptions of economic theory. This article approaches lottery play ...from a networks perspective and focuses on syndicate play. A comparison of the development of lottery markets in Germany, Austria, Spain, and Portugal from the 17th century onward shows that lottery play declined with rising incomes except in countries in which syndicate play diffused widely, namely, Spain, and to a lesser extent, Portugal. Although syndicating originated among the relatively poor as a response to an increase in lottery prices, it persisted even when individual play became affordable. This article contends that syndicating endured because of an institutionalization process by which lottery tickets have transformed from purely economic assets into symbolic carriers of interpersonal ties that convey membership and status position in relevant social networks. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article follows the approach originally pioneered by Juan Linz to the empirical study of nationalism. We make use of original survey data to situate the emergent social division around the ...question of independence within a broader constellation of power relations. We bring into focus a variety of demographic, cultural, behavioral and attitudinal indicators with which this division is associated. We emphasize the special salience of language practices and ideologies in conditioning, if not determining, attitudes towards independence. We stress the continuing legacy of what Linz famously referred to as a “three-cornered conflict” among “regional nationalists, the central government and immigrant workers,” which has long conditioned democratic politics in the region. More concretely, we show how the reinforcing cleavages of language and class are reflected in, and indeed have been exacerbated by, the ongoing political conflict between pro-independence and pro-unionist camps in Catalonia. At the same time, we highlight that near half of the Catalan citizenry has come to register a rather intense preference in favor of independence, and we conclude that this sociological reality renders it quite difficult for Spanish authorities to enforce the will of the Spanish majority without appearing to tyrannize the Catalan minority.
We ask why people play the lottery in syndicates. Sharing lottery tickets with co-workers, friends or relatives may create agency problems related to opportunism in addition to the fact that playing ...the lottery in general is tantamount to buying an asset with negative expected value. Although it might be argued that people share lottery tickets in order to maximize their chances of winning a prize, it is also plausible that they engage in this practice to enact, cement or reproduce social ties and interpersonal trust. Using survey data on representative samples of the adult population in Spain and the United States, we adjudicate between these two hypotheses, and show that people play the lottery in syndicates primarily for social reasons.
La literatura sobre corporativismo ha señalado la escasa probabilidad de que surjan acuerdos de tipo corporativista en el ámbito del bienestar. Esta literatura ha anticipado que, en caso de emerger ...un acuerdo de este tipo en el ámbito del bienestar, este acuerdo será promovido por organizaciones profesionales que operan en este ámbito. En contra de esta predicción, este artículo analiza un caso desviado, que hace referencia a la organización de ciegos españoles (once), que monopoliza la representacióin de intereses de los ciegos y la provisión de servicios de bienestar a los mismos. El artículo examina brevemente la naturaleza del acuerdo corporativista que tiene lugar entre el estado y la once, y explica como este acuerdo, limitado originariamente al caso de los ciegos, se ha expandido sobre el conjunto del área de las minusvalias, de tal modo que la once ha conseguido no sólo controlar y gobernar el sistema de represenación de intereses de otros grupos de minusvalidos, sino también asumir políticas públicas que afectan a estos otros colectivos.
What kinds of ideas and motivations drove artificial language promoters to face the skepticism, if not the mockery, of public opinion and advocate for one or another artificial language as the best ...solution to the communication predicament of the world? Were they purely instrumental ideas, or were they part and parcel of a distinctively religious agenda? This article contends that very much like other social and political movements of the turn of the twentieth century, such as Socialism, Nationalism, or Positivism, the longing for an international language, at least in the way it was conceived of by Ostwald and Zamenhof, also shares the basic characteristics of a secular religion: a message of meaning, a set of moral principles, and a message of salvation. More concretely, this article analyses Ostwald’s connection with the German Monist movement, and explains the role of Ido in his new religion, “Energism.” Similarly, it explores the connection between Zamenhof’s “Homaranism” and Reform Judaism, as developed by Abraham Geiger and Hermann Cohen.
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