31–40 of 234 posts
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…
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…
As personal communication, Newspeak is to be spoken in staccato rhythm, using words that are short and easy to pronounce. The Party intends to make speech physically automatic and intellectually unconscious in order to diminish the possibility of critical thought occurring to the speaker. English words of comparative and superlative meanings and irregular spellings were simplified into regular spellings; thus, better becomes gooder and best becomes goodest. The prefixes plus- and doubleplus- are used for emphasis (for example, pluscold meaning "very cold" and doublepluscold meaning "extremely cold"). Adjectives are formed by adding the suffix –ful to a root-word, e.g. goodthinkful means "Orthodox in thought."; while adverbs are formed by adding the suffix –wise, e.g. goodthinkwise means "In an orthodox manner".
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…
There are loads of Esperanto nouns and verbs based on Germanic (mainly based on German, the main Germanic language L.L. Zamenhof knew and a prestigious language for intellectual communication in Eastern Europe at the time, but also a few English roots). With regard to Slavic, the question particle was taken from Polish and I have always assumed that the inflexion of participles was copied from Russian.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
If any of the intentionally designed languages were to actually come into common use, it would immediately be subject to the same kind of regional pronunciation differences, usage drift over time, coining of neologisms and idiomatic phrases, etc. that make real languages so complicated.
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 wron…
In Esperanto, it's about 3 months to get to not terrible for native speakers (yes there are native speakers) and a year or two to be quite good, maybe as annoying as your typical undergraduate to the top level of translators, authors, etc.
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…
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!
Esperanto isn't actually that universal. It's very European, using a Latin alphabet, grammar and syntax from romance languages, etc. Its going to be very easy for a Spanish or English or German speaker to pick up, for example. Probably a bit less easy for someone speaking a language on the idno side of indo European, like a hindi speaker, and then progressively harder as you get further and further away from the lang…
Such a language would in fact be profoundly unfair to speakers of minority languages today because it would deny them access to the largest markets of the world. The English speakers would keep their knowledge and access to global markets while the Finnish speakers would gain 10 words of English. Woopty doo.
So a language that takes words only from the top 5 languages would be better, yes? Because it teaches minority speakers more words from more important languages. But even still, what does that give you if you learn 500 words from each major language and the grammar is a bizarre mash up of totally different languages?
The most "fair" language would be the one that gives the minority language speakers useful and meaningful access to the most influential language family "at a discount". Picking from one family would allow one to distill the grammar and vocabulary, giving the student truly useful and applicable information if they decide to later branch out into natural languages / dialects.
In today's world, the most influential language family is by far Indo-European (for better or worse). And it just so happens that this language family is the easiest to synthesize and join back together, although there's nothing stopping others from trying to make a Semitic auxiliary language or a Sino-Tibetan auxiliary language, etc.