One World, One Voice Project.org

I have been reading some of the discussion that’s going on about “One World, One Voice” in usegroups like “auxlang”.

Evidently, people are curious as to how we arrived at our “subjective criteria” and they are offering their own opinions on the matter.

Well, once again we have to use Esperanto as an example.

If you ask someone who is not involved with Esperanto (or do some serious searching on the internet, or show an Esperanto text or audio recording to a random group of people) you’ll find that most of them are not all that enthusiastic about it. They say it sounds weird, or that it sounds harsh, or that it doesn’t sound pleasant, or… or… or.

As we’ve said before (for better or for worse) perception is truth. So, it doesn’t matter how strongly someone believes that they are right, the truth will prove otherwise. So, if we give in to pressure by a particular group, to use their language when the general population considers it yucky, which is a technical term by the way , we’re going to have a marketing nightmare on our hands.

The only way we could circumvent this is by using force, and we all know that that’s just ridiculous. No one in their right mind would expect Esperantists (for example) to try to force the use of their language on people.

So, if we want to be successful, then we will have to select a language that meets the largest number of objective linguistic criteria, as well as subjective factors, like being practical, sounding pleasant, being visually appealing when written, etc. etc.

This is not OUR choice, and these things are not under our control. We can either fight them, or work with them.

You can understand that we chose the later.

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