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A universal language exists but it never really caught on – here's why
Business Insider spoke with Philip Gooden, language expert and author of "May We Borrow Your Language," who talked about the possibility of one, universal language. He also spoke about the language "Esperanto", a 19th-century attempt at creating one language that all Europeans could speak.
Read the full transcript below:
"There had been attempts to create artificial languages in the hope perhaps that one day they might be universally spoken, but all those attempts have failed. The most famous is probably Esperanto."
"Esperanto was a deliberate creation - I think towards the end of the 19th century - and it was a sort of fusion of various European languages so that the creator - or the theory behind it was that you took a bit from one language, a bit from another language, a bit from a third and a bit from a fourth and so on; and you had a kind of "mosaic" of different terms which would somehow appeal to everybody, because they would recognise bits of their own language in it."
"It had some success. There were certainly Esperanto societies, but its faded, as have all other attempts to make up languages. Languages have to grow from the ground up. You can't kind of build them like a house, they actually have to grow naturally or organically out of the ground. "
"And though there seems on the one side, on the one hand, to be a tendency to clump languages together and kind of, a greater uniformity, a sort of coming together. There's also a tendency in the opposite direction as well. People fight to preserve their own languages and they develop new forms of the languages that they already speak, so language never stands still. "
Filmed and Produced by David Ibekwe. Research by Fraser Moore.
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