Prof. Probal Dasgupta

President of the
Universal Esperanto Association

english | esperanto | dansk

Meddelelse til "Sprogenes sammenløb" (Confluence of Languages)

Det at I alle sammen er kommet for at fejre mangfoldigheden af Indiens sprog, er i sig selv en præstation, og vores første pligt - og jeg siger 'vores', fordi nogle af os som ikke kan komme, er ikke desto mindre til stede i ånden - er at takke Ganesh Devy og andre medarrangører for at gøre denne bedrift mulig. At det er lykkedes dem at organisere et sammenløb, betyder at de ved, hvordan de skal overlevere det til alle der er med, således at grænsen mellem arrangører og deltagere udviskes.

    Inden er et land med udviskede grænser. Grænserne bliver ganske vist udtrykkelig fastsat, men derefter fortsætter vi med at behandle dem som en slags semi-realiteter, der er til forhandling. Dette er en kunst. Det har holdt vores kulturelle mangfoldighed i live - herunder sågar stammesprog, som aldrig har fået nogen støtte fra lovgivningen, hverken i det gamle eller det nye Indien. Nogle af os er nu ved at glemme, hvordan man spontant opretholder forhandlet mangfoldighed. Så mangfoldighedens kunst er nu en kunst, vi må lære at praktisere bevidst. Vores evne til offentlig debat og formulering må vokse med opgaven. Vi må være omhyggelige med at formulere vilkårene for forhandlet mangfoldighed. Først da kan vi tage udfordringen op i større omfang.

    Uddannelsesinstitutionerne og de veluddannedes arbejdsmarked kan bruges - det har vi vist i praksis - til at skabe en kløft mellem eliten og masserne. Historien viser, at undervisning i denne form holder stammesprogene i en tilstand af permanent fratagelse af stemmeret. Mange af os, der ikke er stammefolk, har ikke noget imod det, for vi er forelsket i det moderne mainstream-Indiens succeshistorie.

    Tiden er nu kommet til at tage udfordringen op og vise, at vi kan bøje uddannelsesinstitutionerne - og de økonomiske virksomheder, hvor de studerende kommer til at arbejde som voksne - så meget, at de kan skabe venskab over denne kløft snarere end fjendtlighed. Bøje dem så meget, at de kan få alle de mindre sprog frem i lyset i stedet for at tvinge dem ud i mørket. Bøje dem så meget, at vores litterære udgivelsessystem begynder at frigive energien i de mundtlige traditioner i vores lands stammeområder, energien i de historier og remser, som vores kvinder en gang kun delte indbyrdes, men nu vil gå med til at dele med en ny følsom og interesseret offentlighed, og alt det andet som trykkesystemet i fortiden forviste fra det offentlige blik. Vores opgave er også at bøje vores offentlighed, således at den vokser sådan som institutionerne vokser, i retning af en rummelighed, der skal ses, før man vil tro den.

    Rent fagligt, så arbejder jeg inden for det indiske sprogvidenskabelige fællesskab; med folk som Khubchandani, Annamalai, Kelkar og Bhat har vi al mulig grund til at være stolte af vores ældre generation, og nogle af vores yngre sprogforskere har vist deres evne til akademisk stringens og demografisk rummelighed. Jeg håber, at den indiske offentlighed, som generelt har savnet forståelse for, hvad sprogforskere skal gøre godt for, vil begynde at indse, at denne nations enestående mosaik af sprog og kulturer bør værdsættes, og at sprogforskere kan hjælpe os til at imødegå udfordringen med at bevare og dyrke denne skat.

    Jeg taler også for fællesskabet af esperantobrugere, hvis sprog er designet til at være let at lære, og til at fungere som en maksimalt neutral bro mellem land og land, mellem mennesker og mennesker. Esperanto-samfundet er fast besluttet på at bevare den rigdom, som verdens sprog er, med fokus på de mindre sprogsamfund. Det er derfor at sådan nogle utrættelige minoritetssprog-aktivister som Tove Skutnabb-Kangas og Robert Phillipson er med os.

    Rent formelt skriver jeg denne besked i min egenskab af nuværende formand for Verdens-Esperantoforeningen UEA, en NGO med konsultative forbindelser til UNESCO - og tilknyttet halvfjerds landsforeninger verden over. Forsvar for samfund, hvis sproglige rettigheder bliver krænket, er blevet det vigtigste emne i vores indlæg til UNESCO og De Forenede Nationer. I 2008 afholdt vi et symposium om sproglige rettigheder i FN's kontor i Genève for at fejre dels vores eget hundredår, dels tresårsdagen for Verdenserklæringen om menneskerettigheder. Vores hovedtaler var Tove Skutnabb-Kangas; vi var glade for at skabe et forum, hvor også repræsentanter for oprindelige folk kunne formulere deres synspunkter om deres ret til at bevare deres sprogs kulturelle og intellektuelle rigdom.

    Esperanto er et vigtigt medium for oversættelse, som gør det muligt at sammenligne noter blandt verdens mindretalssprogs-aktivister, og at gøre hinanden bekendt både med den kulturelle og kognitive mangfoldighed i vores kunst og viden, og med de menneskelige værdiers grundlæggende enhed. Dette giver et varigt grundlag for fred; esperanto er i alt væsentligt en fredsbevægelse med et sproglig ansigt. Det er ikke almindeligt kendt, at Indien i 1921, hvor det var fuldgyldigt medlem af Folkeforbundet, sammen med Argentina, Persien og fire andre nationer luftede ideen om at antage esperanto på internationalt plan. Efter at den daværende assisterende generalsekretær for Folkeforbundet, Inazo Nitobe, havde undersøgt sagen og skrevet en positiv rapport, var Indien medforslagsstiller til en formel resolution til fordel for esperanto; den blev skudt ned af et fransk veto, med briterne medskyldige bag kulisserne. For os i esperantoverdenen forekommer det, at nutidens indere, over for den udfordring det er at bevare Indiens rige mosaik af sprog og kulturer, ville gøre klogt i at overveje at tilføje esperanto til deres værktøjskasse - i det mindste som en del af den fælles kamp, som esperanto presser på for, og også rent intellektuelt og kunstnerisk. I modsætning til den gængse opfattelse har vores bevægelse et tæt samarbejde med mange venner, som ikke selv har lært esperanto; esperanto er også en kultur, en kogekunst, der lærer os at sætte pris på den æstetiske mangfoldighed, som vores menneskelige enhed er klædt i.

    Jeg takker for jeres opmærksomhed. De fællesskaber, jeg repræsenterer, ønsker jer alle et vellykket sammenløb såvel som en seriøs og bæredygtig opfølgning. Lad os vide, hvordan vi sprogfolk - og vi esperantister - kan hjælpe med.

This year marks the centenary of Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) and the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of language. We also remember 1998, the year in which Lee Chong-yeong, then president of UEA, organized a pioneering symposium in the UN Office in Geneva to celebrate the UDHR's golden jubilee. We thank our predecessors - the idea of a sequel, in fact, came from Lee Chong-yeong, who was speaking as an Asian to a fellow Asian. But 2008 is important in its own right.

The UN has declared 2008 as the International Year of Languages to address the alarming loss of languages and erosion of communities. The fact that UEA views the neutral character of Esperanto as a resource for the conservation of endangered languages is well known. But what exactly is UEA up to in the domain of language rights? Outside our special concern with the teaching and use of Esperanto, just what goals connected with language rights do we share with other stakeholders?

One of our traditional domains of joint action has been scholarly research. When it became clear, for instance, that a bottleneck in the study of language policy, official and otherwise, was holding up serious discussion, UEA started a journal in the sixties to encourage academic work in that domain. That journal, Language Problems and Language Planning, has come to be seen as a pioneering periodical that helped establish language policy as a social science.

Advances in social science research on language rights since then have been dramatic. In the economic, political, legal and sociological study of democratic societies, academics concerned with language rights today have a reasonable understanding, over a wide range of contexts, of the various issues, accomplishments, and gaps to be filled. But the title of my presentation suggests that I think this paradigm may not be entirely equal to the task.

To see why not, let us consider an idealized picture. Imagine all speech communities suddenly attaining formal equality in the language rights domain. You get to talk to authorities in your mother tongue; they reply in the same language. Is that ideal world - possibly spiced up by many speakers using Esperanto to reach foreigners - precisely what our movement is trying to bring about? Are we to regard English and Esperanto as being in principle parallel candidates for world language status differing only in that English is "owned" by a speech community? Can scholarly debate about their respective merits rest on such a basis?

For contemporary discussion to face language diversity loss as an aspect of the environmental crisis, it is important not to confine ourselves to the economics-focused characterization of the problem. And indeed the goal around which our work as Esperantists is to be understood, the goal that we hope we share with our current and future partners, has to do not just with access to democratic forms, but with extending the substantive social welfare of citizens to the linguistic domain.

We have always based our advocacy for Esperanto on the ease of acquiring and using it, which is a substantive property. A closer look may be necessary in order to grasp the role this factor plays in the debate as we view it. Given that Esperanto words highlight the work done by affixes - for instance, the word for 'stationery shop' is skrib-il-ar-ej-o, whose movable pieces mean write, instrument, aggregate, place, noun - the learner can acquire just a few word-making pieces and can then puzzle out, and produce, a very large number of words.

Does this pedagogic facilitation save time only in the learning of Esperanto? Of course not; the fact that such word formation sharpens the learner's ability to perceive word structure means that learning some Esperanto first speeds up a learner's subsequent acquisition of a foreign language, the so-called propaedeutic effect. Based on this relatively old discovery, some of us have taken up foreign language teaching initiatives in Europe and Asia. Our traditional partner UNESCO has explicitly encouraged this component of our programmes in connection with the International Year of Languages. Esperanto serves as a unique resource for the heightening of language awareness, then.

Language awareness is not just a factor in foreign language learning. All environmentalists recognize that if we are to sustainably raise the quality of our social and psychological environment, we need to cultivate awareness of how we are connected to our physical and mental surroundings. Contributing as it does to such cultivation, Esperanto goes beyond mere usefulness as a foreign language learning facilitator.

Consider, for example, measures for maximizing public access to the legal system that stress the language facilitation issue even in the case of a single language. The United States under Jimmy Carter initiated plain language legislation making it mandatory to post plain language descriptions of the responsibilities of the administration and the citizen's rights. The movement of India's dalits - the Hindu system's former "untouchables" - for social dignity has been pressing for a reversal of elite-driven vocabulary opacity in academic and official texts in Indian languages. In Japan there have been some successes in expanding the space, in publicly visible written material, for the use of the relatively easy-to-read syllabic characters. Only initiatives based on the prototypically easy link language Esperanto make it meaningful to seek a common thread - and a connection with language rights - in these attempts to maximize the transparency of language use even in monolingual contexts.

Why raise such points in a discussion of the inadequacy of the formal construal of the right of citizens to use their mother tongue in communications with the state? I am coming from the idea that the crisis management mode often leads us into panic-driven inappropriate responses. The world is indeed losing many languages, and many individuals are experiencing the personal loss of mother tongues and assimilation into more powerful speech communities. Even in the face of this crisis, it would be a mistake to confine ourselves to the important - but too narrowly law-focused - enterprise of viewing the notion of language rights (in the governmental domain, construed as including education) simply in terms of the right to use the mother tongue. Even an entirely successful campaign to promote formal equality of rights is unlikely to bring about substantive democracy.

It would have been possible to illustrate this claim by mentioning what has and has not followed from the laws that were supposed to help the Dalits, the best known victims in India's history. But time constraints make it inappropriate to invoke material that will look opaque to many of you: I would like to reason with you on the basis of what looks rational in the light of examples you will not find opaque.

Let us then consider Canada's method of translating its Francophone and Anglophone populations into formal equality since the so-called quiet revolution of the sixties. A recent study by Sherry Simon shows¹ that government sponsored literary translations strike readers in Quebec as clumsy and overzealous. Given this reflex reaction, those who want to write - and read - authentic translations are compelled to find ways around this response, and to fashion alternative ways of translating.

Governments, being astute, easily come up with tricks so that mechanically speaking they can implement the feel-good legislation that many of us pin our hopes on. If they implement future mother tongue conservation laws by arranging for bureaucratic, xeroxlike mass translation from powerful languages, minority language speakers will only appear to have access to their mother tongue - without being able to receive serious input in it in the official (including the educational) domain. We need intellectual tools capable of diagnosing as pathological such non-serious implementation of linguistic human rights legislation. The economics-focused social science approach to the problem, though an important advance, does not provide the right diagnostics in such scenarios.

Minority speech communities need to increase their self-confidence to the point of discursive creativity: they need to make sure their ideas are articulated and heard. We in the Esperanto movement take the position that such a process must involve not just their mother tongues per se, but also the necessary negotiation between easy and difficult registers within the languages they use. It is in this connection that we see some relevance for the linguistic element awareness enhancing function of Esperanto at the substantive interface between the social science approaches and the humanities approaches to our shared academic concerns. This is not the time to inform you about the interdisciplinary "substantivist" approach to these issues developed by some of us in and around technical linguistics. Instead, I thank you for your attention to these introductory remarks; I say hello to Geneva, which gave the world Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structural linguistics, and I remember his brother René de Saussure, who was responsible for our sophisticated understanding of the versatility of word formation in Esperanto. By way of greeting and thanking the organizers of this symposium, I come to the real point - which is to hand over the microphone, and the discursive rights at this symposium, to the real speakers.

¹ Simon, Sherry. 2006. Translating Montreal: Episodes in the life of a divided city. Montreal and Kingston/ London/ Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press.