Translator: Karine Breault Reviewer: Kelwalin Dhanasarnsombut
In 1982, when I was 12 years old,
my parents gave me my first computer.
It was the famous Spectrum,
the first computer affordable by middle class families in Europe.
Right from the first look, it was incredible. Imagine!
It had 48 kb of RAM
and the screen was 256 pixels wide!
My dream back then, creating video games, seemed possible at last,
because the Spectrum had an easy programming language.
I learned to program on it.
It only took me three weeks, and my life changed completely.
That little computer and its synthetic language
were the opposite of my teachers.
It never shouted, never embarrassed me, never was unfair or arbitrary.
In fact, it never made a mistake.
If something didn't work, the cause was surely something I'd done wrong.
Thanks to the Spectrum, I learned how to resist frustration.
I learned how to learn, and that with good software, I could do anything.
That's why I want to talk to you today about the most widely-used software
in the world: language.
Language is the software we use to debate and think.
It's the protocol we use to find our peers.
It's the tool we use to learn and build contexts together.
That's why language is very important for me.
I'm a member of a worker cooperative.
Cooperatives, like any kind of economic democracy,
only really work if they are based on a true community of peers.
We all understand that what makes us complementary to other people,
what makes us feel like peers with our companions,
isn't that they use the software that our old school used,
or the software our parents know,
but rather, ideas, ways of doing things, and ways of thinking.
So physical or linguistic proximity shouldn't limit
who's part of our community.
The cooperatives in our group don't seek out
people from the same country
or people from a particular culture or origin.
We seek out peers.
So, the problem isn't what language people inherited from their parents
or what language they learned at school
but rather what language we choose for our community.
Many criteria appear possible: the commercial value of the language,
the number of speakers, the language of the creators of the community...
So, in our group of cooperatives, when we "Indianos" thought about this,
the first temptation was to choose a "natural language".
But Spanish, English, German
and other languages had two fundamental problems:
In the first place, native speakers always speak "better" than others,
always seem "more attractive," "smarter" than the rest.
Secondly, since they're using the same "thinking software" they've always used,
the tool doesn't help them imagine new things.
On the contrary, it probably brings them back to their original contexts.
So, if we accept a natural language as the basic software of our community,
native speakers will think "the same as always" and the rest "worse".
Simply put, natural languages are not optimal
for a transnational community,
they are not a good starting point.
Why not use a language that helps us
to be on the same level and think "better?"
There are languages out there that are defined as
the "free software of languages".
They're called "planned languages".
They're also part of the commons
and are developed by hacker communities that improve them and use them.
In fact, the oldest and most important of all of them,
Esperanto, is organized like a free software community:
email lists, foundations, distributed contact networks,
local user groups...
The main difference is that it started
almost a century before the WWW changed our lives.
Also, the creator, L.L. Zamenhof, like today's programmers,
cared a lot about "user-friendliness".
You can learn it in three months
and reach full bilingualism in less than a year,
because it's perfectly regular
and the vocabulary has its origins mainly in European languages.
Zamenhof thought of Esperanto as an "international auxiliary language",
everyone's second language.
It's no secret that he failed regarding that objective...
like those who thought the success of Linux
would turn Windows and Apple into minority operating systems.
What makes a language international is unrelated to the language itself,
but rather, has to do with the geopolitical and economic
weight of the states that use it as an official or commercial language.
Unfortunately, in international relations,
armies and banks are still more important than grammar.
But your world, our world,
is not a world of interstate or international relations.
Our world is not international, Our world is P2P.
The EU uses Windows, but we "Indianos" use Linux,
because Linux lets us work better and be freer.
We don't worry about the language of governing councils
or the language of the general staffs of the great armies of the world.
We should only worry about...
which tool is most useful and makes our community the most free.
Linux taught us that.
It's not necessary for a tool to be used universally,
or used by the state, or preferred
by big businesses to be what's best for us.
On the contrary, what's universally imposed
is oftentimes related to the gigantic and inhuman scales of power,
but it doesn't meet the needs of hacker communities that just want
to "learn more," think "better," produce more in the P2P mode,
and find new peers.
So, three months ago, in our cooperative, we started learning Esperanto.
(Applause)
It wasn't hard, because, thanks to its regularity,
it takes advantages of the natural learning process.
For example, if you know that all nouns end in o,
all verbs end in i, and all adjectives end in a,
if you learn the word... "help".
You also automatically learn the verb... "to help"
and the adjective... "helpful".
In fact, normally, you'll learn to make all the the verb tenses in your first week
and by learning 14 elements,
with no great effort, you'll be able to express 45 different ideas.
You only need a dozen roots to build millions of words.
Millions, really millions.
Oh, and, it's important, in Esperanto, there's no "right" accent.
So yours is always right.
Once again, the wonders of free software! Don't you think?
We "Indianos" think that our experience shows that we can ask of languages
what we ask of software: to work well and be free,
but also to let us all be on the same level, and especially,
let us be and collaborate as peers.
It's been an honor for me. Thanks!
(Applause)