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Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

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Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#51

Post by emodendroket »

olah_1 wrote: post #17
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 wi…

> It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Nobody in English-speaking countries is changing the way they speak "for the purposes of internationality." And the way a bunch of languages are importing scores of English words wholesale isn't much richer in my view.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#52

Post by brandmeyer »

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.

I agree that it is highly unlikely that language affects what you can or cannot think. But there are some strong differences between European languages and Chinese. Some of the Chinese particles function very different from anything in English. For example `ma` and `ba` can act like a verbal punctuation mark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#53

Post by dathinab »

marcodiego wrote: post #39
jefft255 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just love how this gets progressively harder to read!

Interesting.... as a Portuguese speaker, I'd say that it gets progressively easier to read. Note that portuguese has way more coherent writing than english.

While english was simplified quite a bit in the recent 100+ (probably more) years and is often seen as a "simple" language there are quite many languages which are much more coherent then english.

E.g. recently there had been an article on hacker news about bilingual people which are fine in one language but have a writing-disorder in english. Likely due to it being less coherent.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#54

Post by def_true_false »

variaga wrote: post #36
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Esperanto (and all the other intentionally designed languages) are simple and logical only because nobody actually speaks them as a native language. They're consistent because everyone learned them from the same miniscule corpus of available books and the occasional film. 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…

Updating the ortography once in a while would take care of most of the problems. There are real languages that have successfully made "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation, or the usage of additional sounds (compared to Latin), unlike English.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#55

Post by [deleted] »

bigbubba wrote: post #47
nabla9 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#56

Post by emodendroket »

olah_1 wrote: post #25
simion314 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The comparison is generous to Chinese characters. Even the world's worst speller, confronted with an uncommon English word, could make a guess at the spelling that's probably decipherable. If you forget a Chinese character you may not even be able to put the first stroke to paper.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#57

Post by canjobear »

Regardless of what you think about the idea of an artificial international auxiliary language, Esperanto is very poorly designed as a language. Sure, it's easy to learn, because it has a small vocabulary and is very regular. But it's like a programming language designed by an amateur: full of bells and whistles and useless stuff that the designer thought would be cool, without regard to the actual challenges faced by language users. Let me explain a few ways that Esperanto is messed up.

One issue is that it's hard to pronounce. Not from the perspective of an English speaker or a speaker of another European language, but from a global perspective. The problem is that it has a lot of complex consonant clusters (sequences of consonants jammed together without vowels in between) which are fine for someone coming from Polish (as Zamenhof, Esperanto's creator, was) but which are nightmarish for people coming from languages that don't have these clusters. Consider for example Chinese, which has no consonant clusters at all. Consider the closest Chinese approximation to the Russian city name "Vladivostok": 符拉迪沃斯托克 fuladiwosituoke (note also that there's no /v/ in Chinese nor many other languages, despite /v/ being very important in Esperanto). A Chinese speaker is not going to find Esperanto easy to produce, with all kinds of Slavic-esque words beginning with kv- such as basic words like kvam (how). Esperanto also has a number of distinctions between sounds which will be lost by speakers of most languages. For example the difference between horo (clock) and hxoro (chorus), involving a distinction between /h/ and /x/ that most languages do not make. Basically Zamenhof was coming from Polish and he did succeed in making Esperanto's phonology simpler than Polish, but it's still very complex from a global perspective. An international auxiliary language should be easy to pronounce.

Relatedly, Zamenhof made up some new diacritics to spell these crazy sounds that he shouldn't have included in the language to begin with. ĉ spells "ch" in Esperanto and in no other language. If you want your language to catch on, why would you give it diacritics that no other language has, which people will have trouble typesetting and typing? Since Esperantists can rarely type ĉ and related glyphs, they end up typing cx, sx, jx, gx, etc. instead. Why not just ch or sh? Why not just ditch these sounds altogether?

There are lots of other issues. The verb endings -as, -is, -us for present, past, and future tense end up sounding very similar to each other in fast speech (and the idea of making a tense distinction by changing the form of the verb is very European to begin with). The accusative endings -n are so confusing that (so I hear) the native Esperanto speakers have dropped this feature of the language. There is grammatical gender in the pronouns, and adjectives must agree in number and case with nouns.

So to conclude the rant, ironically, if Esperanto ever does take over as an auxiliary language, it will be solely because it has the largest community of all the auxiliary languages, not because it is a good language. In other words, the same way that a normal language takes over. I guess it bugs me that it could have been done much better. It gives a bad name to constructed languages. Interlingua and Ido are big improvements, and you can also check out Lojban for a much more radical non-Eurocentric approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#58

Post by School-Cotton »

olah_1 wrote: post #17
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 wi…

Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want.

I think having English as a native language actually gives us a huge advantage: we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#59

Post by bigbubba »

def_true_false wrote: post #45
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?

Same reason Americans use Phillips head screws instead of something sensible like square drive. Network effects. It may not be ideal but you can get by with it, and most other people are using it as well. Some might look north wistfully, but most around them continue using what they know.

And keep in mind, switching to square drive would be easy. Screwdriver sets already come with square drive bits, and hardware stores sell square drive fasteners. Robertson's patents expired generations ago. If America can't drop Phillips head screws, do you really think there is any chance for replacing the Latin alphabet? Let's get real.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#60

Post by olah_1 »

emodendroket wrote: post #56
olah_1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The comparison is generous to Chinese characters. Even the world's worst speller, confronted with an uncommon English word, could make a guess at the spelling that's probably decipherable. If you forget a Chinese character you may not even be able to put the first stroke to paper.

Yes, of course. But that was not the point I was making. Personally I find alphabets to be superior for that reason. But to be fair, I also don't know Chinese!
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