This whole section is licensed under the Dnghu® General Open Academic Licence (GOAL), as it was written mainly by anonymous contributors in the Dnghu's wiki sites.
We have included this section to facilitate the work for those who will want to criticize the Europaio option, so that they can think about new original arguments.
A. These are the most frequently encountered alternatives to Europaio as the official language for Europe, from more to less important:
1. One natural, living language: English or German. It is clearly the best option in practice after Europaio, as it imposes one language, wether that known by the majority of the International Community as second language, English, or the language which have more speakers than the others in the EU, German. I personally prefer German, but this option is clearly out of question, since the French and the English would probably never accept it. English should, then, be the one.
FOR: English and (to some extent) German are already known by many, and there is a huge number of English and German translators which should keep their jobs.
AGAINST: This option imposes the language of a minority to the whole, and it will always be a strange language for all but for the present speakers, never more than a lingua franca.
EUROPAIO: It is already the grandmother tongue of the larger part of Europe (those who speak modern IE dialects), and it would become the national language of the Europeans - not merely their lingua franca -, coexisting with present-day national and regional languages.
2. More than one natural, living language. This is the present situation, and is obviously the most respectful of the bad options the EU had before the revival of Europaio, but possibly not sustainable in the long term. There are lots of initiatives being currently held, such as the one which states that every European should speak at least three European (wether official or not) languages, apart from their official and co-official ones. Multilingualism seems thus to be the aim of the new Europe, at least in theory, because there are more than twenty official languages which can theoretically be spoken at the EU Institutions, but only three are the de facto official (euphemistically called 'working') languages: English, German and French.
FOR: It respects (theoretically) the linguistic diversity, keeping each language (those officially recognized not to be only dialects) alive. Many translators will work thanks to Europeans' needs of understanding each other.
AGAINST: That all Europeans will be able to use their official mother tongues in all European Institutions is a known utopia, just as the assertion that Europeans will speak three official languages apart from their own/s. And, if more than one is to be official, why not just two languages? English and German are obvious selections, but, French? what about Spanish, which is the world's third most-spoken language? and if there should be four official languages, why not Polish and Italian, too, which have a number of speakers similar to Spanish in Europe? and why not Portuguese nor Dutch? and...? It is, then, above all, an unstable system, in which every speaker of a non-official language has a reason to protest against it, and an incentive to look for more spending in their national or regional language.
EUROPAIO: No single European language will be officially (or officiously) classified as better than the others, there is no discrimination of speakers. The budget for translations/interpretations will be minimized. There are no multiple linguae francae, but one national language. It is a stable system, where no single speaker has an incentive to ask for anything else. Even those who speak non-IE languages won't have an incentive to choose other options, as the whole Union takes advantage of the new linguistic unity, being thus able to concentrate their educational efforts on their own cultures.
3. One natural, dead language: Latin. The common assertion is that Latin has been the lingua franca in Europe for centuries, and that many European countries still teach it, so that it would not be very difficult to use it.
FOR: Latin is a known example of an old European language, used in the Roman Empire and later as lingua franca until the 18th century, and it is more or less still used, as Greek, for Academia and Science purposes.
AGAINST: Latin is only the ancestor of the Romance languages, and is thus an Indo-European dialect, such as Germanic or Old Greek. It is also the historical language of the Catholic Church, and Protestants and Orthodox (not to talk about Muslims) wouldn't consider it the best choice. It was a lingua franca in the past, as it is now English, and there is no reason to come back to a dead lingua franca, when we have a living accepted one.
EUROPAIO: It is the ancestor of all Indo-European languages, not only of the Romance ones. And the concept of Europaio is that of a living language (now living dialects) of a Union, not a lingua franca between nations.
4. One artificial language. Some - surprisingly not few - have proposed that known artificial languages, such as Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua or Interlingue be used as lingua franca in the EU. Again, as in Latin, we have already a living and used lingua franca, i.e. English. And if we had to choose another, not living language, Latin would be the one. And, by the way, if we had to choose one of those invented by one man, why not Lojban, or Idiom Neutral, or Glosa, or Novial, etc.? and why not even Quenya, Klingon, or Ewokese?
B. The most frequently encountered criticisms about the theoretical assumptions of Europaio are the following, again from more to less important:
I. Some argue that IE III was spoken by a prehistoric society, and that no genuine sample texts are available. It was observed fifty years ago that comparative linguistics was not in the position to reconstruct a single well-formed sentence of IE III.
That is partly true, as it is said about IE III, and we cannot know how it was spoken. However, we are not looking for IE III, the prehistoric language, but for Europaio, a reconstructed system based on the old language, as Hebrew is a modern system based on an old language, from which there are no original written remains. In fact, we know very well how to reconstruct a language that is mother of most of the present-day spoken languages in the world; that was not so easy to do with old, dead Hebrew, as almost the whole system had to be reinvented from texts written centuries after its death, to adapt it to modern needs. To put it simple, while with Europaio we just have to eliminate the thousands of innovations of modern derived languages, with Hebrew one had to reinvent it almost altogether - and they did it well!.
What is true, however, is that Europe lacks today a social or political movement similar to that of Zionism one hundred years ago. We have, however, very strong political and economical reasons, with the EU in the edge of becoming a real National entity; as well as new media (such as the Internet and the Television) to make this task still better and at a quicker pace than the Israelis a hundred years ago.
II. Related to the above criticism, there are some assertions about the impossibility of achieving an accurate Europaio from the old languages, as it would be from the romance languages to derive Vulgar Latin (the spoken Latin, not the artificial and highly stylized, mainly literary, Classic Latin).
This is true. As it is true that there was no accurate Vulgar Latin, but only dialects. Even when Rome was only made of some provinces under a Classic Latin system, different dialects were already spoken, and they split up into dialects, and so on until today. What we could do without having written Latin texts is to reconstruct a language based on the common features of the written remains of old romance languages and the spoken modern languages. The output language would certainly not resemble Classic Latin, but it would reflect better than it the old, common spoken dialectal system. We could then create a language system based on the most successful living dialects: wouldn't it be more natural and easier to learn for speakers of Romance languages than Classic Latin?
Furthermore, compared with Latin (and with any other known language ancestor), we have a huge amount of evidence of lots of IE dialects, dead and alive. We think that, even if we had written tablets of IE III (as with the Anatolian dialects), the choice would have had to be made between a) to reconstruct an IE III based on the known sample texts, or b) to make this same Europaio, based on the information of living and dead languages that we have, so that a more natural, living Europaio could be obtained.
III. Others dislike our approach to the Europaio, as they have their own theories about how the common ancestor should look like.
We firmly believe we include (and will keep including) almost every single reasonable view -wether from scholars or not- about the forms reconstructed, we even try to give alternating possibilities; but we have to take decisions to keep working. Sometimes consensus is just impossible.
IV. A few argue about the possibility of obtaining an earlier Europaio, before the third stage, and make a modern Europaio based on IE II or even on PIE.
Although possible, it would not give any advantage but for a supposed rather simpler system, and it would on the other hand bring a lot of difficulties in the reconstruction. Furthermore, the pretended simplicity of the system could also become a great disadvantage, as many expressions now possible with modern languages would need to be remade by way of lots of figures of speech.
V. Finally, some (generally old) Classical Languages scholars (of Latin and Greek mainly) argue the very existence of the Indo-European language, assuming that strictly a Language is only that which is written and renowned. Thus, for example, for some Spanish Latin scholars, two thousand years ago only Greek and Latin existed in Europe; to talk about other languages is then to speculate. Some also try to find a broader agreement by softening these theories, including other criteria for their individual lists of real languages; for example, some include late Germanic and Celtic dialects, because of some stone inscriptions. Similar lists are sustained by scholars of different languages, indeed always including the languages more renowned than their own, so that the one they study appears in the real group of their real/speculated languages scheme.
These are opinions based on a fruitless discussion about what should be considered language, and what not. We think that, if the Europaio becomes the written, national, renowned language of Europe, this criticism will logically disappear altogether, just as the strong initial opposition of some to the revived modern Hebrew is nowadays muted by its success.