Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#11

Post by olah_1 » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

innocenat wrote: post #6

> Esperanto creates a kind of "level playing field," because it's a second language for almost everyone who speaks it, says Humphrey Tonkin. It doesn't. It is entirely based on European and Western culture. Language have huge influent on thought process, and it seems that thought process needed for Esperanto is a Western-centric.

> Language have huge influent on thought process, and it seems that thought process needed for Esperanto is a Western-centric

I believe that Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has been considered unfounded and a meme for a long time now. It sort of makes sense, but strangely I don't think there is any evidence for such a thing.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#12

Post by lukevp » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

bigbubba wrote: post #7

The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to achieve world peace, then the efforts of pragmatists would go towards teaching more people English, since that language is the closest to the finish line. Of course that would be contentious in some political philosophies, it doesn't surprise me that some people drawn to the 'universal lan…

I agree it doesn’t make sense in the context of today, but in 1887 when it was invented, there was no internet, and you couldn’t translate between languages with a computer. The globalization hadn’t happened yet where everyone had to learn English, and learning some easier to use intermediate language made sense as an easy adoption for translating at a time that machine translation was inconceivable.

Think about newspapers as a concept of information dissemination. It would be a lot lower effort to create a single newsletter and distribute it globally than to have a network of translators who can recreate it, redo the layout, and reprint it. Or think about travelers, where your queries are simple and someone could learn a language in a couple of weeks and be a tour guide for travelers from all places.

At this point, English makes far more sense, but I get why they invented Esperanto, and at some point I could carry light conversations in it, though that has faded since it’s fairly useless.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#13

Post by nabla9 » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

bigbubba wrote: post #8

CydeWeys wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, but if you're designing a universal language I think Latin script is the only feasible option. You're not helping anyone if you invent an entirely new script that everyone has to learn from scratch, and that doesn't even have extant keyboards. Latin script is the only choice that makes sense -- most people worldwide already have at least some familiarity with it, and it has excellent universal hardw…

I agree, but for the same reasons shouldn't Esperanto just be English or Spanish? Way more people are familiar with these systems than Esperanto.

Esperanto is much easier to learn.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#14

Post by axegon_ » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

I gave it a go several years ago out of curiosity. Knowing 1 Germanic language(English), 1 Romance language(Spanish) and 1 Slavic(Bulgarian), I found it brutally easy. For the most part, I could understand the average conversation out of the box with ease. One thing that came to my mind is that it could be a huge win for nlp purposes: With such simple, yet incredibly strict rules, you'd be able to make an incredibly fast and efficient tokenizers, parsers and extracting all sorts of information with nearly 100% accuracy(if not 100 - as far as I know the language has no exceptions in any shape or form). Real shame it didn't gain any considerable popularity.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#15

Post by tormeh » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

Esperanto deserves to die, honestly. Romance language speakers don't need another language in their family (and Esperanto is a romance language - I don't see any Germanic or Slavic in there). It's just not very useful. I actually at one point started to see if I could fuse Germanic, Romance and Slavic into a mutt language, but I didn't get very far: http://tormodhellen.com/muttlang.html

But honestly, even if you add more language families into the mix getting a language established without any government backing is going to be extremely hard, if not impossible.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#16

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

bigbubba wrote: post #7

The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to achieve world peace, then the efforts of pragmatists would go towards teaching more people English, since that language is the closest to the finish line. Of course that would be contentious in some political philosophies, it doesn't surprise me that some people drawn to the 'universal lan…

I'm not particularly familiar with Esperanto, but I imagine the idea is that it's much easier to learn than English. English is stupidly complicated—not necessarily more-so than other languages, but well above what an intentionally-designed language could achieve.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#17

Post by olah_1 » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

bigbubba wrote: post #7

The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to achieve world peace, then the efforts of pragmatists would go towards teaching more people English, since that language is the closest to the finish line. Of course that would be contentious in some political philosophies, it doesn't surprise me that some people drawn to the 'universal lan…

As a native English speaker, I don't like English being the world language because I'm at a significant disadvantage because

1. I have zero incentive to learn another language

2. I do not have a secret/family language that I can switch into for strategic purposes

3. It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes. We can't even create meaningful names within English anymore. It loses its richness.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#18

Post by jefft255 » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #9

When I tried it just for a few days, I was surprised how easy it was to learn. It was much easier to learn than English. On the other hand so many people already know English vocabulary that just having regular spelling and simple grammar could work. Mark Twain already suggested it: "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling: For example, in Year 1 that useless letter 'c' would be dropped to be replased either b…

I just love how this gets progressively harder to read!

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#19

Post by lukevp » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

olah_1 wrote: post #11

innocenat wrote: post #6

> Esperanto creates a kind of "level playing field," because it's a second language for almost everyone who speaks it, says Humphrey Tonkin. It doesn't. It is entirely based on European and Western culture. Language have huge influent on thought process, and it seems that thought process needed for Esperanto is a Western-centric.

> Language have huge influent on thought process, and it seems that thought process needed for Esperanto is a Western-centric I believe that Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has been considered unfounded and a meme for a long time now. It sort of makes sense, but strangely I don't think there is any evidence for such a thing.

Hmm, I think it makes a lot of sense that a language would govern your thought patterns. This happens in software, you are limited in what you can create and do by what concepts you can easily express, why wouldn’t this be true for language? I truly want to know because I have heard this many times and believed it, but if there’s no evidence I’d need to reevaluate.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#20

Post by simion314 » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

bigbubba wrote: post #7

The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to achieve world peace, then the efforts of pragmatists would go towards teaching more people English, since that language is the closest to the finish line. Of course that would be contentious in some political philosophies, it doesn't surprise me that some people drawn to the 'universal lan…

But English is so broken, from what I see there are consts for spelling where you could create a language with clear rules and no freaking exceptions based on the history of the word. Maybe if you could reform/refactor English to drop the historical stuff and write words exactly how they sound - we would rename this language to not cause confusion or outrage, like a clean refactor.