For many years attempts have been made to simplify language so that disperate communities can communicate easily among one another. This can happen naturally through the development of creoles or pidgins, but several attempts have been made to devise languages artificially in order to simplify translation.
To illustrate the incentive, in the European Union (EU) nine languages are spoken from the Indo-European family. In the European Parliament there is a need to translate from and to each of the member languages, making 72 different translation tasks in all. This involves a great deal of work and skill in translation (using more than half the EU administrative budget). Sometimes translators of appropriate languages are not available for infrequently used languages. The whole process of translation could be simplified or even eliminated using an artificial language that is spoken by all.
The most famous artificial language was devised in 1887 by the Polish physician Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof. It is Esperanto and is a combination of Latin and elements from the Romance and Germanic Indo-European families. Esperanto is the most widely spoken of the artificial languages. There are several newspapers and journals in the language and a variety of books translated into the language. It is sometimes used at international conferences and occasionally on shortwave. Despite many people taking up the language, which has a reputation of being easy to learn, it still does not have official status as an international language.
The following paragraph was contributed by Maggie Hernandez e-mail: kamaka@aol.com
"In the late 1800's thousands of people were migrating to the Utah Territory in what is now the States of Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico of the Unitied States of America. These people came from several different European countries speaking several different languages. They were converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and were gathering to Utah to be with the body of the Church then. The President/Prophet of the church at that time, Brigham Young, was very concerned that all these disseperate peoples be unified and worked hard to find a way to overcome the language barriers. Young created a new phonetic based lauguage and called it Deseret, he called this language's alphabet the ''Deseret Alphabet.' It is repoted to have been very effective in cutting through the language barriers, esp. with the written word. As a language is was not successful mainly because of the area's rapid assimulation into the Unitied States and the people being requried to transact with the rest of the nation in America's version of English. "
Other attempts to produce an artificial language include: Basic English devised in the 1920s, this was English restricted the vocabulary to 850 words but proved too inaccurate to use; Volapuk (another combination of Latin, Germanic and Romance languages) invented by the German bishop Johann Martin Schleyer; Interlingua created in 1951 by the International Auxilliary Language Association (this is a combination of English and the romance languages); Glosa, invented by W.Ashby and R.Clark in 1981 uses a 1000-word vocabulary derived from Greek and Latin roots.
[Articles/_private/langnavbar.htm]