Finding Common Ground

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It is a tricky thing to achieve when nobody is willing to budge. Right Wing and Left Wing Supporters lock horns all the time. Government and the Opposition are always at loggerheads. Countries sharing borders are always in an argument about which side owns that particular amount of land. Unless the land is ‘Bir Tawil’. Coke and Pepsi can never come to the same table in a restaurant. Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan can never join the same party. Covishield and Covaxin, despite have Co in their names, are finding it difficult to co-operate against Covid.

But I recently came across an attempt (from over 100 years ago) to have a language that could be spoken by everyone. Esperanto is a language that was devised to be a language of no country in particular but a language for all. It is an International Auxiliary Language which can be used as a bridge language. Say you are a French person in Spain and you wish to interact with a German person who has just returned from Russia. To interact in your native language would have an aim so futile, it would be like keeping England in the EU and Scotland in Great Britain. Esperanto could be the common ground here.

I wondered why I never came across it earlier. It is even present on Duolingo as it has plenty of speakers across the world. It resembles the European languages (which do resemble Indo-European languages, which do have some loan words in East Asian languages but they are all different) as the originator of it was a Portuguese named Zamenhof. However, it is unlike all of the existing languages.

However, people have found flaws in this too. Apparently, all of the words related to females are derivates of the words for males. Secondly, the lovers of this language forgot that languages are so dear to the natives, they can fight wars over them. Even when they know that the language they speak is so dynamic that it would refresh its vocabulary every few years.

Finding common ground is a good attempt but might not succeed in most cases. The only way to move forward is to keep moving forward and only when there is a deadlock and nobody can move, sit together and discuss finding common grounds together.