Steve Rice skribis je 2005.12.06 10.41 ptm...
> [Sidebar: "euroclone" has become about as meaningful a term as "Aryan" when 
> used by a Nazi: it's a bigoted, ignorant term. In my usage, euroclones are 
> languages in the Interlingua or Sermo mold, relying heavily on Anglo-
> Romance vocabulary and quasi-Romance grammar. 

This was, in fact, the original meaning of "Euroclone", or so I 
understand from the individual (who wishes to remain modestly anonymous, 
ahem!) who coined the word, probably in a letter to a Loglan-88 
newsletter a decade and a half ago. It was intended to emphasize not 
only the vocabulary of the languages in question, but also their slavish 
devotion to Western language structures, including but not restricted to 
the ever popular past passive participle (which is not always past, and 
not always passive, and needs a couple of auxiliary verbs to make it 
work semi-properly though not always unambiguously).

As with the ever-popular "politically correct" (which was invented by 
somebody in the left half of the political spectrum, primarily to twit 
other people over on the left), the term got picked up by others, and 
evolved to the point at which it was used as a club to pound its very 
inventor and his favorite planned language.

> For example, despite frequent claims to the contrary, if some one language 
> is imposed, it will soon guarantee the extinction of most or all others. 
> For if The Auxlang doeth all things, why bother with these others? They 
> would linger only through sentimentalism and curiosity, and neither is 
> strong enough to maintain a living language. 

I've made this argument in the past, myself, and I consider this a 
danger -- but not necessarily an unavoidable one. An easy-to-learn IAL 
doesn't have to be learned and used from earlier childhood; children 
could be raised speaking only English or Lakota Sioux, and start 
learning and using Esperanto at age fourteen, strictly as a second 
language, let's say, and the ethnic languages would then survive.

... Well, for a while. But a world in which such an IAL was very, very 
useful would also be a world in which there was a lot of cross-cultural 
intercourse. Such intercourse would, almost inevitably, become physical 
as well as intellectual. The result would be an awful lot of kids raised 
in homes whose parents had the IAL as their primary common language; and 
in such circumstances, the children would grow up speaking the IAL, a 
phenomenon that in the long run would erode the ethnic languages. You 
can see this in miniature today in the Esperanto movement. So far, it's 
not dangerous even to the children, since the moment they step out of 
their front doors they are exposed to local (ethnic) languages, and are 
forced to learn and use them. But in an environment in which the IAL was 
widely used on every side ...

-- 
-- Don HARLOW
    http://donh.best.vwh.net/
    http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/Literaturo/Tarzan/
    http://www.harlows.org/don/