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Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

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Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#41

Post by wenc »

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.

I used to think so too but I once did a little thought experiment, and while it seems to be true that language influences our thought patterns, I'm not sure if it necessarily limits them.

Empirically, we are able to think thoughts and feel things that we cannot describe in words. I know I'm able to feel ennui, limerence, or hygge without knowing these words.

I can also perceive things and states without necessarily being able to describe them precisely with single words (but I could probably describe them approximately with many words)

The classic example is that the Inuit have many words for different types of snow -- implicit in this example is that they are able to recognize different types of snow and have codified them into shared symbols (words). But to me, that doesn't mean the rest of us who don't have those words cannot perceive the same if we'd lived in the same environment. Children can tell packing snow from sleet from a dusting even without knowing the words.

There's an industry of people romanticizing certain words in a foreign culture, claiming them to be untranslatable, and then writing books/articles about them. Not all of this is without merit, but I believe that the words themselves aren't so much untranslatable, but that they have no compact representation outside of a certain cultural context.

Words are compressions of meaning, but meaning can be perceived outside of verbal representation, or even language. It seems to me one can look at a picture or taste a meal or listen to instrumental music and perceive and manipulate meaning through no use of language at all.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#42

Post by nabla9 »

bigbubba wrote: post #35
nabla9 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Esperanto is much easier to learn.

Not really; maybe for a particularly motivated individual but not on the large scale. You'll have more succeeds teaching English to large numbers of people because more people will be motivated to learn it, because learning English presently had WAY more immediate short-term utility than learning Esperanto.

Have you tried. I wonder if I'm more qualified to judge or are you.

I know three languages, Finnish is my native and I know both Sweden and English. I'm not good at languages and but Esperanto was incredibly easy to learn. The grammar is so simple and logic.

Words are created from 900 roots by just adding affixes or making compounds. This makes learning the vocabulary incredibly easy.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#43

Post by bigbubba »

anewguy9000 wrote: post #29
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

I understand that point of view, but desiring the creation of a universal language makes one an aspirational conqueror. The whole premise of 'a universal language for world peace' is oppressive (and for that reason I don't support it no matter the language chosen.)

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#44

Post by fanf2 »

lukevp wrote: post #12
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 news…

My grandfather had a story from when he was travelling around Europe between the wars: he tried to have a conversation with someone in a youth hostel but they had trouble finding a language they had in common ... until they tried Latin!

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#45

Post by def_true_false »

crispyambulance wrote: post #22

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…

Sure, but why do we have to use a character set that can only cleanly represent sounds made by the Romans of 2500 years ago?

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#47

Post by bigbubba »

nabla9 wrote: post #42
bigbubba wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really; maybe for a particularly motivated individual but not on the large scale. You'll have more succeeds teaching English to large numbers of people because more people will be motivated to learn it, because learning English presently had WAY more immediate short-term utility than learning Esperanto.

Have you tried. I wonder if I'm more qualified to judge or are you. I know three languages, Finnish is my native and I know both Sweden and English. I'm not good at languages and but Esperanto was incredibly easy to learn. The grammar is so simple and logic. Words are created from 900 roots by just adding affixes or making compounds. This makes learning the vocabulary incredibly easy.

The number of people who succeed is all that matters because that's all that moves you closer to the finish line of 'universal.' It doesn't matter if Esperanto is the most pleasurable language to learn if approximately nobody bothers to learn it because it has no pragmatic use, because nobody uses it. Network effects work in favor of English and against Esperanto. Esperanto simply doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#49

Post by emodendroket »

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…

People make a fuss about irregular verbs or grammar or whatever but what really makes learning languages hard is the very long tail of words you need to know. The grammar is a comparatively very small amount of content.

When we think about how "easy" a language is a lot of it is how likely it is for us to guess from our native language what any given difficult word means -- "geografía" is more obvious to an English speaker than 地理).

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#50

Post by peatmoss »

For me, what I love most about Esperanto is its unabashed affirmative optimism. The name itself means “one who hopes.” For me it’s a microcosm of competing epistemologies in society.

I’ll be a little casual with definitions here, but if we adopt a rationalist / positivist view of the world, Esperanto is a straightforward solution to a problem. Zamenhof despaired at his multi-ethnic neighbors killing each other. He hypothesized that could be remedied if people were able to speak to each other on equal language footing. It’s not a bad hypothesis. It’s easy to hate “those people” but hard to hate the person whose face you’ve looked into and tried to understand.

We can snipe at Esperanto and apply critical theories of how Esperanto falls short in crucial ways. Those critiques are largely valid! Esperanto is to euro-centric. Esperanto draws too much from romance languages. The need for Esperanto has been supplanted by the global dominance of English. The language was designed by an amateur. Synthetic languages are indulgent in the face the extinction of natural languages.

But I think a lot of the criticisms miss the fact that, around this simpleton, inadequate language designed by an amateur, has coalesced a community infused with something of the “let’s build” optimism that gave rise to the language in the first place.

If I look at society spanning from academia to pop culture right now, we have a hegemony of rhetorically sophisticated criticism. I wouldn’t want to lose the moderating effect of that critique and blunder into starry-eyed utopianism, but I do worry that the volume of critique to “we can do it” optimism is out of balance.

The world needs more Zamenhofs.

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