Hace algún tiempo que tengo en papel esta traducción de un ensayo de Claude Piron que apareció en “Heroldo de Esperanto”. La traducción fue hecha por Bernadette Harman. Como me resultó imposible encontrarla en Internet, la agrego a mi blog. Actualmente sólo está en inglés. Quizá la traduzca al castellano si es que me hago el tiempo…:-)
¡Disfruten!
Antaŭ kelke da tempo mi ekhavis surpaperan tradukon de eseo de Claude Piron, aperinta je “Heroldo de Esperanto”. La tradukon faris Bernadette Harman. Mi aldonis ĝin en mian blogon pro tio ke mi ne trovis ĝin Internete. Nuntempe ĝi anglaĉas… sed eble poste mi hispanigos ĝin. Nu… se mi iam havos tempon... :-)
Ĝuu!
Someone gave me this paper with an essay written by Claude Piron which appeared in “Heroldo de Esperanto”. This English translation was made by Bernadette Cejana Harman. Since it was impossible for me to find that same essay on the net I thought it might be cool if I add it to my blog. Right now it’s only in English but I might translate it into Spanish if I ever have enough time…:-)
Enjoy!
Claude Piron
The psychological resistance to the International Language
Imagine a conference between ministries that has been commissioned to deal with the problems of inter-city communication. There is a lot of talk about the cost of messengers, about the savings that could be made by grouping messages together, about whether it would be preferable to send the communications by rail, car, or helicopter. And in the middle of this serious discussion a voice is heard saying, “But why aren’t you considering the telephone?” Then everybody bursts out laughing, failing even to understand that the speaker meant it seriously. But soon he is snowed under with various comments, spoken as if directed to a silly little boy: “Yes, we once heard about this brilliant idea, but everybody knows it was a flop.” – “The telephone is an artificial thing, how could you call for help with it in an emergency?” – “The telephone didn’t evolve in a human and natural way. We’re talking about authentic communication, about communication of feelings, love, poetry, and of complex technical matters,” and so on. When the first speaker protests, “But I swear you, it works for all this. I’ve used it myself,” everyone replies: “We haven’t come together to argue about kid stuff, but to deal seriously with a serious problem.”
This attitude is characterised by an honest, sincere, well-meaning, refusal to check verifiable assertions. However astonishing it is from a logical point of view, such attitude is a fact in today’s society with respect to the language problem in international communication. Esperanto exists. It functions to the complete satisfaction of its users, but its potential for the solution of communication problems between nations and even peoples is nullified: people do not consider it seriously.
Many factors contribute to this phenomenon. I will not discuss those which operate in political, economic, pedagogic, social and other such areas. I will concentrate my attention on the mechanisms which act psychologically; first, because none of the other factors would be effective if they couldn’t join with inclinations in everybody’s personality which go in the same direction, and secondly, quite simply, because psychology is my field.
The considerations are based on a lengthy exploration of these facts. At the beginning I did not especially wish to give scientific study to the problem of resistance to Esperanto. I was living simultaneously in two environments. In one, that of Esperanto, intercultural communication worked without difficulties. In the other, that of international organizations – at that time I worked at the UN – it was extremely unsatisfactory, in spite of the huge sums of money spent on translation and interpretation. In other words, I found myself in the situation of a person living in an environment where a telephone would be useful in many ways, but surrounded by people who make fun of it and even deny its existence. I was struck by the fact that these people who behaved so strangely are nevertheless very intelligent, and I was very curious about the motives which block their intelligence when they consider this reality which presents no problems to me. I changed my professional orientation, moving from international translation to psychology (specialising in personality and depth psychology), because I wanted to study a field which might shed some light on what I regard as the unintelligent conduct of so many intelligent people.
Clinical discussion
Within the framework of my training I learned the technique of the so-called ‘clinical discussion’, in which one chatters on, constantly inventing hypotheses about the psychological factors involved, and checking these hypotheses by encouraging the person to express himself further on this or that point. I discussed the language problem in this way with about 70 people encountered at random. I did this, of course, with their permission. I never net a person to whom I said the following and who refused to chat with me: “I am doing a psychological study and would like to know what do you think about the problem of international communication by means of language, and how you react to this or that suggestion in this field.”
Because our theme is the resistance to an international language, I will not deal with people who were immediately favourable to this idea. I will consider only those who took an unfavourable viewpoint toward it. Furthermore, in this lecture I shall not distinguish among those who reject the idea of an international language generally, and those whose criticism is directed more precisely to the particular language called Esperanto.
The fact which perhaps struck me most among people sceptical towards Esperanto is their feeling of certainty. By this I mean that it is evident for them, plainly evident, that a language like Esperanto cannot be suitable. Because of this certainty, they don’t check the facts, they don’t dedicate any time to thinking about the problem, and because of this certainty they regard a person who thinks differently as not to be taken seriously.
Consequently it is incomprehensible for them that one can seriously propose Esperanto as a way to solve the problems of international communication. Such an idea annoys them, as they would be annoyed by the interruption of a little boy chatting about a newly found treasure, while they were making complicated calculations about how to balance the budget.
Their attitude can be expressed in this way: “Esperanto could not be suitable, because a language is not like that. Esperantists don’t have an understanding about something indefinable, inarticulable, which in some way is the essence of language, and which can only be missing in a planned language.”
Delving into the study one realises that this attitude actually involves profound notions which form a kind of “myth of language”. And when one explores how this myth of language came into being, one sees that it is in existence in every personality, a very old, archaic concept, and that it has the roots in the earliest years of life.
The phenomenon “language”
As happens with many other notions, the way in which the average adult understands the phenomenon ‘language’ presents itself as a joining of structured elements, which became attached during the evolution of the personality to a beginning nucleus which appeared in earliest childhood. This beginning nucleus is stamped by the magical atmosphere of these first years. Compared to the baby which can only cry and swing its hand, an older child which can say “finger hurts” or even only “hurt there” together with pointing the finger, has an extremely profound feeling of ability, of power, of efficiency, if one can translate in to adult words of impressions not thought out to such a degree. The ability to communicate through speech is a treasure to which a child attributes extraordinary value.
But the child errs in its judgement, for nothing makes it possible for it to discover the conventional character of language. It receives the language as a whole, in a magical way (the child assimilates the language without being conscious, at least at the beginning, that it learns) and it receives the language also as a whole which one is not allowed to modify. Very early it will learn that “one says it not this way, but that way”. It does not feel the social norm as something social or conventional, but as a defined by an external power, in relation to which the individual is nothing. These two elements – magical effectiveness (in comparison to a non-articulated cry) and the complete superiority of language with respect to an individual – constitute the affective, emotional nucleus of the concept ‘language’.
When a child enters school, the instruction about the mother tongue and how to write it only fortifies the conviction that language is not something created by humans but something received ready-made. To be understood is not accepted as sufficient criterion of correctness. The message which the society transmits and which the child absorbs unconsciously is that language itself is something other than a means to communicate: it is a holy tradition. When the child progresses in studies and literature, a whole group of aesthetic considerations is added to these first notions. They complete this network of ideas and feelings embedded from the beginning of childhood into a coherent whole, and the study of foreign languages further confirms this process also here: “one says it not this way, but that way”.
Even if the child feels that this or that feature of the language it is learning is something stupid, illogical or irrational, this never implies that one has the right to modify something in it consciously. The conclusion, general but unconscious, of this long evolution is that language appears to be a magical gift, received to be handed over without change, having an indefinable soul. Language appears surrounded by a kind of mystical halo out of reach of the decision-making power of individual people.
The affair becomes complicated through the fact that we received this magical gift from our family, the people around us: that is from those who little by little help us to define out identity. Bit by bit the child discovers that there are differences among humans, and it becomes more and more necessary for him to know which category he belongs to. These categories, which define our identity, the group to which we belong, are not very numerous. They’re mainly sex, race, religion, social stratum, country and language.
I only want to emphasise this: Language is so profoundly tied to our feeling of belonging that people are not ready to attribute the status of a real language to a medium of expression which never became attached to an identified ethnic group. They react to Esperanto as if this language wanted to take away their ethnic or cultural identity. The unconscious reasoning goes more or less this way: Esperanto is not bound to an ethnic identity; if I adopted it, I would accept a manner of thinking and feeling which is not connected to my ethnic identity; therefore I would become someone without an ethnic identity.
Culture
Similar reasoning presents itself about culture. Culture is based very profoundly on language, and culture necessarily must be many centuries old. Therefore, if I learned a language without a centuries-old culture, I would learn to feel and think without culture, I would become an uncultured human being.
Seen this way, Esperanto appears as an aggressor. It is a robber who wants to seal away from us out linguistic identity and the culture to which we owe so much. It is a bandit, who wants to destroy centuries of artistic creation and in some way violate our soul itself, which he wants to squash flat, dead, uncultured, inhumanly flat. Esperanto is even more terrifying than a robber, he at least is living, while a planned language evidently cannot pulsate as blood does, cannot have a beating heart. It can only be a robot, a monstrous automaton probably jealous of the real languages, for they live and not it, and therefore it wants to destroy them hatefully.
When one puts these feelings into words, the childish, irrational, atmosphere of the position concerned immediately becomes evident. They are the fears of a child, the nightmares of a boy terrorised by the idea of some kind of monster, wolf, thief crawling into his room to carry him away and devour him. Possibly you think that I exaggerate and that such irrational pictures do not exist in the minds of people who are against Esperanto. Nevertheless, I found in my research that most often, when one invites an adversary of Esperanto to freely expound his thought, to let his ideas spontaneously associate with one another, one soon gets this kind of imagistic expression of his feelings. By the way, here is a quotation from a text which appeared in ‘Foreign Language Annals’, an US review for language instructors, and owed to one Norman D. Arbaiza:
“Language, like love and soul, is something living and human, however difficult it may be; it is the natural product of the spirit of one race, not of a human being working alone (…) Artificial languages are abominable and grotesque, like people with metal legs or arms or with a pacemaker sewed into the heart. Dr. Zamenhof, like Dr. Frankenstein, created a monster made from living parts and pieces, and as Mary Shelley tried to warn us, nothing good will come of it”
Due to these reactions the question arises: are these people right? Do they possibly perceive instinctively a reality or danger which the Esperantists blindly overlook?
This kind of question merits scientific, objective treatment. And the method of replying to it is easy: In suffices to determine, among people who have learned Esperanto and use it, whether these losses of culture and identity do in fact occur, whether these people lose some human characteristic and transform themselves into cultureless, lifeless shadows. Really, no such thing is revealed. Quite to the contrary. Users of Esperanto generally have a particularly strong sense of ethnic identity and often a higher cultural standard than other people of the same social stratum. As in a childish nightmare, the menace is purely imaginary.
Psychological blockage
This is the root of the psychological blockage. If the person concerned confronted the problem and said to himself: “But finally, I know nothing about this Esperanto, I should go and see how it functions in practice”, the imagined menace would soon fade away. The person could even understand why he reasoned wrongly, and how these irrational nightmares became grafted onto his ways of conceiving language communication between different ethnic groups. But it is not easy to confront the menaces of the night. When one is lying alone at night in an isolated cabin, and hears strange cracks and vague noises, what is the most normal reaction: to get up and check what’s happening, or to curl up under the blankets at the bottom of the bed and hope that soon the noise will stop?
People and society act similarly towards the language problem. It relates to too-dangerous zones of their personality, touching on the relationships with their parents, with school, therefore, with authorities, and the desire to express themselves according to their own rules. Furthermore, the language problem also touches such ticklish points as identity, the right to create, and the risk of being deprived of the protection which language barriers, like all barriers, provide; that is to say, protection against the danger of meeting another culture in such a direct manner that we will have to reconsider our weltanschauung. Consequently one prefers to waste millions and face difficult situations while travelling in foreign countries, rather than confronting face-to-face this language onto which one projected any kind of nightmarish elements from childhood.
In order to understand that one misperceives the problem, it is necessary to dedicate to it a certain amount of unprejudiced consideration. Two kinds of difficulties hinder an immediate correct understanding: intellectual on one side and emotional on the other.
The main intellectual difficulty consists in this: it is complicated to integrate in one’s reasoning realities, which belong to different levels. If we consider, for instance, the question of language and identity, we notice that one can have several identities on different levels. This is best understood by people who speak a dialect. For instance, a Frisian, who speaks Frisian, feels himself to be Frisian in relation to other Dutch people; he has a Frisian identity. But he also feels himself to be Dutch, he also speaks the Dutch language, and has lived through all kinds of experiences – like military service, school, political events – together with other Dutch people. This is in contrast to Germans, Russians or Italians whom he might meet. He therefore has also a Dutch identity, which is on another level than his Frisian identity. Similarly, if someone learns Esperanto and participates in the international life in this language, he will acquire a third identity, that of a human being, of a ‘planetarian’, of an earthling. If he does not have any special psychological problem, the three identities are not in conflict with each other. They respond to different situations and different feelings are attached to them without any problem.
For a person who by his own experience knows this situation no difficulty exists. But for others it is not as easy, because to think on many levels is a more complex action than to reason on one level. This is the reason why, for instance, France in the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century forbade the children in Brittany to speak Breton among themselves during recesses. The idea was not acceptable for them that one can be at the same time favourable to the French and to the Breton language. Due to their perception anyone who was pro-Breton had to be against French. They were unable to integrate the different levels.
One could apply similar reasoning to culture. To learn Esperanto does not mean at all that one ceases to be interested in cultures which evolved in regions of different national languages. On the contrary. One can perfectly well learn Esperanto to use this most agreeable tool of communication with speaker of other languages, and proceed to study national languages because of their cultural interest. Experience even shows that Esperanto stimulates this further study of languages.
Emotional difficulties
So much for the intellectual difficulties. We now go over to emotional problems. Actually these are so numerous that it is not possible to review them completely. I should mention, for instance, the fear of liberty. This fear perhaps sounds strange to you, but after all it is real. People have the confused feeling that if a language is purely conventional, it must be less rigid than languages which generations of grammarians, teachers and parents have weighted down by very diverse rules which have to be obeyed. Well, obedience gives security – one knows what one has to do, doesn’t one? – While liberty causes insecurity. Or more correctly, liberty is at the same very much desired and very much feared. Very much desired, because doing that which one wants to do, according to individual likes, well this means owning yourself, this means to rule your life and to participate in the power of gods. Very much feared, because experience taught us, when we were two, three or four years old, that when one does everything as one desires, time and time again one causes oneself painful catastrophes. Language liberty therefore appears as the forbidden fruit. It is a desire of the creative part of us, but it is also against the whole pressuring educational process against the long conditioning from which we retained the feeling, that we little beings have no right to intervene in language. Language is untouchable. To invent grammatical rules means to presume a power only to our forefathers, to God. Therefore, to create a whole language is simply sacrilege.
Naturally, I oversimplify. The matter is more complex at the bottom, because if one is afraid of liberty, one is also afraid of strictness. One is confusedly inclined to attribute to Esperanto here too much liberty and there too much rigidity, because it is not easy to imagine a successful balance between liberty and strictness such as is found in Esperanto.
Another emotional element worth mentioning is the fear of chaos. When our personality forms itself, we have to create a unity, a harmony out of very diverse tendencies, out of psychic elements which pull us helter-skelter towards goals difficult to reconcile, as, for instance, to please ourselves, to please our mother and to please our friends. Therefore every one of us, more or less had to overcome with varying degrees of success that which psychologists call ‘disintegration anguish’ or cracking up, if you prefer. Therefore something which is linked in our mind with our own identity, that is, language, and which at the same time evokes a very strong heterogeneity – a mixture of parts originating from very diverse places – something like this evokes at the same time the unpleasant feeling that our personality is not very strong and risks falling apart. This touches the unconscious level of out psyche, in which we very much aspired to unity, harmony and to the absence of conflict. Since according to popular belief Esperanto is a mixture of various languages, we project onto it our dislike for something wrongly, clumsily and therefore dangerously constructed.
Actually, if one submits Esperanto to a linguistic analysis, one realises that is it no les homogeneous than the other languages. It assimilates foreign elements much better than English and French, for example, but to demonstrate this would lead us too far from our theme.
Among the emotional elements blocking a relation without fear to Esperanto I should perhaps mention also the fear of risk. It manifests itself in several ways. For example, to study the language problem at all means to risk seeing that one erred about it in following one’s first impulse. And often to become conscious of one’s own error is a humiliating experience, and this risk one prefers not to place upon oneself. Further there is the risk that other people might mock us. Even if we privately recognise that Esperanto is not a silly fantasy would we be courageous enough to proclaim this publicly in today’s intellectual atmosphere? There is also a risk that if we favour Esperanto, we logically will have to learn it. And if one has already so many occupations and a complex professional live, the idea of becoming a student again does not seem very inviting. And there is a risk, if we chose to learn Esperanto, that it still may not receive the official usage which would justify the effort invested to learn it, and we would have laboured in vain.
For the majority of people, these elements are neither clearly conceptualised nor often verbalised, but muddled together they form a nebulous zone of negative feelings, which govern the viewpoint the moment the language question arises.
To make it better understandable for you how these emotionally and intellectually childish reactions mingle together to create an a priori rejection of Esperanto, perhaps it would be wise now to introduce the concept of a miracle.
Esperanto is a miracle.
A miracle is something so improbable that it is difficult to believe it. Well now, the fundamental problem about Esperanto is precisely that it is miraculous. Language is such a complex and delicate affair that perhaps not even one person out of ten million has the necessary talent to establish successfully the basis for a viable language. But moreover, a person working alone could not create a language, since a language is always the result of an anonymous, collective unconscious process. In order that a project of a speakable and writable means of communication could transform itself into a real living language, it is necessary that one collective accepts the proposed language nucleus. One must begin to use it and solve, either consciously or unconsciously, the many questions to which the strength of a single person does not suffice to give an answer.
The spontaneous psycholinguistic inclinations which exist in every individual can freely manifest themselves in this practice. The collective preserves out of their concrete creations only these new words, idioms or linguistic structures which are acceptable to the language feeling of the collective. This process evolves naturally, generally unconsciously, and a certain linguistic striving for equilibrium – whose basis is the desire to communicate – coordinates the different contributions.
The probability that all this will happen on a global basis are minimal. Therefore I say that the existence of Esperanto, a language perfectly suitable for interethnic communication, used by people in Japan and Brazil, in Iceland and in Iran, one hundred years after the first project was published, that this is purely and solely a miracle.
Well, about miracles one can react in three ways. Those who have heard about the miracle, but who didn’t experience it themselves remain most generally sceptical. Those, who because of this or that chance experienced the miracle themselves, can’t do anything else but to believe it. They feel frustrated when they find out that they cannot communicate to sceptics the miraculous event, which they themselves have experienced. And there is in existence a third category: people not having an especially open mind who only partly experienced the miracle, but who believe, even believe very much of it, and who try to convince the whole world of its value. Only because they very much need to believe in something, they identify themselves with the miracle and obtain a feeling of pleasure from the exaltation of a fanatical relation to it.
Society is now in the following situation with regard to the problem of an international language: the great majority has no contact with the miracle and therefore relates to it only sceptically. A small number has experienced it, cannot deny the testimony of eyes and ears, and feels frustrated that the external world does not approve. And another small number has experienced the miracle, either partially or wholly, and out of this evolved to a more or less fanatical missionary activity, because this way of living satisfies several psychological needs, about which I don’t have the time to speak.
