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Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

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Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#21

Post by Kednicma »

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.

There's evidence against strong Sapir-Whorf in the logical-language subculture. They originally wanted people to learn logic by learning Loglan, but today the speakers of Lojban and Toaq are usually either fluent or logical but not both.

The weakest forms of Sapir-Whorf are obviously true, via Zipf's law; being able to shorten long phrases into short nonce words allows for faster communication, which allows for normalization of concepts, in a positive feedback loop. In English, for example, it's no accident that the shortest two words are "a" and "I" and that they are also the most two common ways to refer to things; "u" is on the way there, too!

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#22

Post by crispyambulance »

Esperanto is like the "Soylent" of languages. Some folks like the idea of it, some might even use it, but no one _actually_ likes esperanto (OK, except the 1000 "native" speakers the article refers to).

There's something profoundly unappealing in a hard-to-define subjective sense about engineering a language for humans to communicate with.

There's plenty of languages in existence that already "just work". What's wrong with English, Spanish and French? One could argue that English has already taken on the role that Esperanto was supposed to have. In the colonial past that might have been French or Spanish. In the distant future an Asian language could become a lingua franca? Or perhaps more radically, effective machine translation could render such efforts unnecessary?

Yes, there's annoying things about real languages. There's inconsistent grammar in English, "Passe Compose" tense in French, one could list hundreds of pain points for every language. But none of these things actually prevent someone from the practical usage of a language and being conversant in the language. Why do we need to make-up another language with iron-clad consistency? It's just not necessary.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#23

Post by olah_1 »

lukevp wrote: post #19
olah_1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> This happens in software, you are limited in what you can create and do by what concepts you can easily express

Even this is rare in software. For example, I recall reading a blog "Why Python is a Lisp" or something. And it basically destroyed this idea that Lisp was some magical insane language because the author did all the lisp things except they used python.

But yes, in some of the minor claims, I think there's some credence to the idea. But the idea that one language is incapable of understanding concepts in another is unfounded.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#24

Post by dvtrn »

jefft255 wrote: post #18
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!

It’s so hilariously and delightfully like Mark Twain to actually put readers through this and I chuckled once I realized what was going on

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#25

Post by olah_1 »

simion314 wrote: post #20
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.

When you consider that words are essentially the same thing as sinograms (chinese characters), the spelling is not a big deal.

English spelling needs to remain the same because they are primarily visual. Native level English users just scan the general shapes of words and know the meanings in the same way that Chinese users just scan the general gists of the characters.

The nice result is that you can have 10 wildly different English accents / dialects that all use the same spelling. It keeps everyone bound together.

After all, if you went with phonetic spelling, which accent would you choose?

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#27

Post by fanf2 »

axegon_ wrote: post #14

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…

The Esperanto word formation rules can collide, causing ambiguities http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/hh.html

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#29

Post by anewguy9000 »

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…

english is the language of the oppressor

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#30

Post by sushshshsh »

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 was unironically able to read that but it would probably be better if everyone learned IPA just for fun to use for all languages and see if people find it useful or not. If it's not useful it will die out.
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