Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #51

olah_1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by emodendroket » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

olah_1 wrote: post #60

emodendroket wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Post by emodendroket » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

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.

Post by def_true_false » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

Post by bigbubba » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

def_true_false wrote: post #67

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…

Forget dialects, why is it possible in English that words sound different while being spelled the same way? Pronunciation is completely unpredictable, you have to know (guess) the etymology of every loanword and remember which of them have the original pronunciation and which of them the butchered one. Why is scythe spelled with a C?.