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Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

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Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#111

Post by 7thaccount »

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…

Back in the day, French was the dominant language for international communications. As such, France was the only major League of Nations (might have been a different group) power to vote against Esperanto being pushed for international communications at that time. The USA was supportive at the time. Now the tables are turned and native English speakers have a significant advantage on the world stage, so the US and UK would not benefit as much.

In recent years, Esperanto has pushed itself as more of an international auxiliary language. If it's much easier to learn than English, than everyone can continue speaking their national language and use Esperanto as an intermediary language. It's an interesting idea, but I figure we'll just move towards fewer and fewer major languages until only 5-10 are widely spoken (Ex: english, spanish, mandarin, Hindi...etc).

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#112

Post by rihegher »

garmaine wrote: post #101
swatson741 wrote: post #89

"Esperanto Is Not Dead: Can The Universal Language Make A Comeback?" I'm not trying to be that guy but, looking at the title for this piece I'm thinking: Esperanto is dead and, it is not a universal language. "... Humphrey Tonkin, an English professor at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. He taught himself Esperanto at age 14, and then used it to travel across Eastern Europe and beyond." I feel like this need…

There is an active Esperanto couch serving community. Free room and board to those who speak the language.

This service is called "Pasporta Servo" for those interested

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#113

Post by ColanR »

Tainnor wrote: post #98
kwhitefoot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Twain was satirising the whole ridiculous idea that trying to regularise the spelling of English is a good idea. English has homonyms and homophones in part because it is always open to taking words from other languages. In fact "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." Any attempt to force Eng…

That argument makes no sense. English is far from alone in borrowing heavily from other languages. Loanwords are one of the most obvious cases of linguistic contact and can be found everywhere throughout the world. There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules, or they can adapt the spellin…

> There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules...

Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old Norse, "word" is old English). The combination happened when Britain spent a while under Norman rule. The commoners were largely Saxon & Norse, the rulers were French. Eventually the languages simply merged, with grammar rules and vocabulary taken from both sides.

I believe the first edition of the Webster dictionary in the 1800s was when the spelling was standardized. At that point, Webster looked at the original language of the words to both define them and figure out a correct spelling.

Edit: additional recollections, formatting.

Edit2: I'm being downvoted?

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#114

Post by innocenat »

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 didn't know about Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or any argument on it, but what I know is that the flow of information during sentence construction is totally different. You cannot use the same flow in English to construct natural-sounding Japanese sentence, and vice versa. The amount of supplement information alone is different.

A quick example is that my mother tongue doesn't have tense, and I still misuse tense all the time in English when I am careless simply because I am not used to incorporating time information during sentence creation when the time information is not an important information.

It does not necessarily change your cognition or world view, but it does change what information you are actively looking for/collecting.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#116

Post by pessimizer »

ColanR wrote: post #113
Tainnor wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument makes no sense. English is far from alone in borrowing heavily from other languages. Loanwords are one of the most obvious cases of linguistic contact and can be found everywhere throughout the world. There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules, or they can adapt the spellin…

> There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules... Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old Norse, "word" is old…

There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to an analysis based on most probable language origin.) Figuring out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before in English is only slightly easier than trying to figure out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before in Mandarin.

> Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old Norse).

Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because before the Normans it was just "-scr".

Also, British English tends to Anglicize French pronunciations, like "herb," "valet," etc. French borrows aren't the major thing making English difficult to read and write. French orthography is also pretty bad (and Portuguese.)

obligatory: http://zompist.com/spell.html

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#117

Post by ogogmad »

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?.

In the Early Modern period, "scythe" was actually spelled "sithe". The spelling changed to resemble a (false) classical etymology.[1] A similar thing happened to the words "island", "ache" and "tongue", which were originally spelled "iland", "ake" and "tung".

See also "some" (originally "sum"), "friend" (originally "frend"), "delight" (originally "delite") and "could" (originally "coude").

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#118

Post by siltpotato »

dathinab wrote: post #64
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…

At the same time you have a major advantage by most of the internet being (language wise) accessible to you from the get to go. I can just say that if I would have been able to speak english in my teenage years it would have majorly influenced my life in a likely positive but at least more interesting direction. Sadly back then I neither had any reasonable english skills nor was I aware of how much it would help me.…

That actually brings up a point that upsets me somewhat: The Spanish Internet feels inaccessible to me because I don't know where the interesting parts of it are.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#119

Post by ColanR »

pessimizer wrote: post #116
ColanR wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules... Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old Norse, "word" is old…

There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to an analysis based on most probable language origin.) Figuring out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before in English is only slightly easier than trying to figure out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before in Mandarin. > Isn't that the point?…

> There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to an analysis based on most probable language origin.)

I mean, yeah. The rules governing English are a combination of the rules governing a couple other languages. Divide up the vocabulary according to the applicable rules, and I'm pretty sure you end up with a fragment each of the French, Saxon, Norse, etc. languages, and within those fragments the rules make as much sense as they do in the full versions of the respective languages. E.g.: put "rendezvous" & "accomplice" in one pile, "loan" in another, and the rules of each pile would be internally consistent, and consistent with the rules of French and Norse respectively...accounting for language drift, of course.

A large fraction of English follows French rules - might as well ask the French language to fix their spellings to make phonetic sense. The work put into that would translate directly to fix a lot of English.

> Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because before the Normans it was just "-scr".

Personally, given the entymology of English, it makes a lot of sense to preserve the original, applicable, rules of the languages English is comprised of. Otherwise, it would be like rewriting either Norse or French to fit the other - as you mention, that's even worse than the combination of languages in the first place.

Edit for clarity.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#120

Post by emodendroket »

Tainnor wrote: post #106
emodendroket wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There have been studies, and I know this also anecdotally from native speakers, that e.g. "business English", at least in non-English countries, becomes its own, more restrictive variant of English because of the high percentage of non-native speakers. I know that some such native speakers have said that they feel their English got worse after living abroad for a while. Of course, overall, this is a very slow process…

Sure, and materials produced by the government or for wide consumption are written in very simple language. But this is somewhat outside what "typical" native speakers are using.
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