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Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

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Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#121

Post by emodendroket »

ben_w wrote: post #80
emodendroket wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

The ability to guess plausible meanings if great for comprehending the words, but for speaking them? I’ve guessed „Spoonen” instead of „Löffel”; “live”, “liver”, “love” translated as the equally homophonic „Leben“, „Leber“, „Liebe“; and Siri regularly fails to know if I am trying to say „höher“ or „Hure“ (only one of the latter words is even in Duolingo).

Well, it's better than nothing, and if you're doing the producing you can simply stick to words you already know and avoid more difficult ones. In many cases you can come up with a plausible guess by applying regular patterns (e.g., -phy to -fia or -gy to -gia going from English to Spanish).

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#122

Post by tsimionescu »

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?…

> French orthography is also pretty bad (and Portuguese.)

Actually, french orthography is a bit complex, but pretty regular (if you exclude some old names). Also, French grammar would be more complex if the spelling was more inline with pronunciation, as the grammar rules have changed slower than pronunciation has.

If you went by current pronunciation, the feminine or sometimes plural forms of many words, and the tenses of many verbs, would add random consonants, while the current spelling shows that they simply "revive" a consonant that is now elided, but has stayed part of the root of the word (e.g. 'present/presente' pronounced something like 'prezan/prezant'; 'mis/mise' pronounced something like 'mi/miz').

French spelling is also an interesting showcase of what happens when a phonetic spelling is frozen while pronunciation changes (Old French was almost 1:1 with today's spelling, but pronunciation has changed dramatically).

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#123

Post by emodendroket »

adrianN wrote: post #86
emodendroket wrote: post #48

If Esperanto were ever adapted in significant numbers it would develop irregular forms and all the other quirks that make natural languages difficult to learn.

Maybe after a couple of centuries. Languages don't change that fast, especially after the introduction of the printing press and formal language education in schools. You can read 200 year old texts without problems. Shakespeare is close to five hundred years old and you can still understand it with a little effort.

It seems like it would be exactly analogous to the formation of pidgins, which takes one generation, not centuries. Also, if I think back to high school I would challenge the idea that every speaker of modern English has "no problems" reading 200-year-old texts.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#124

Post by peatmoss »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #90
peatmoss wrote: post #50

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 hy…

Zamenhof’s optimism isn’t as universally admired as you suggest. First of all, the Yugoslav wars stand as bloody proof that even if neighbors can understand each other and speak more or less the same language, they can just find something else to fight over. Secondly, Zamenhof was still writing from an Enlightenment-era framework that saw language diversity as a problem, something to systematize away. In our modern e…

> Zamenhof’s optimism isn’t as universally admired as you suggest.

Where did I say say his optimism was universally admired? I think I made it clear that I admire his optimism, and think it worthy of admiration :-)

> some of Zamenhof’s views can be shocking today.

That's fine, having admiration for his work and those views of his that I feel have merit don't mean I need to accept absolutely everything the man believed.

> Those super-idealistic Esperantists who praised Zamenhof and banged on about world peace, were seen as weirdos and a target of mockery.

That may well be true, but this feels like an ad-hominem argument: "the cool kids are so over Esperanto and world peace. You want to be cool, don't you?"

You have critiques of Esperanto and maybe even the idealism that I find endearing. That's fine. Those critiques are valid. I still maintain Zamenhof added more to the world than the critics.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#125

Post by pessimizer »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #16
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'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.

English is stupidly complicated to speak perfectly, but it's stupidly easy to speak badly and still be understood because it's analytic rather than inflectional and relies so much on word order.

It's an easy language to do business in, but a very hard language to sound perfect in. It's also a hard language to read and write.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#126

Post by tsimionescu »

ColanR wrote: post #119
pessimizer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many more phonetic writing systems re-write loanwords to match local pronunciation, at least once the words are established enough.

For example, in Romanian, recent borrows do typically preserve the original spelling (e.g. English 'computer','mall' -> Romanian 'computer', 'mall'; plausible Romanian phonetic spelling 'compiutăr','mol'). But older loan-words that have become established take on a phonetic spelling (e.g. French 'bureau' -> Romanian 'birou'; English 'interview', 'tramway', 'jam' -> Romanian 'interviu', 'tramvai', 'gem').

So it is possible to absorb large amounts of loan-words into a language and completely disregard the orthography of the original language. I don't think you lose much by doing that, in fact.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#128

Post by ColanR »

tsimionescu wrote: post #126
ColanR wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Many more phonetic writing systems re-write loanwords to match local pronunciation, at least once the words are established enough. For example, in Romanian, recent borrows do typically preserve the original spelling (e.g. English 'computer','mall' -> Romanian 'computer', 'mall'; plausible Romanian phonetic spelling 'compiutăr','mol'). But older loan-words that have become established take on a phonetic spelling (e.g…

That's true. I guess what I didn't really say explicitly is that I don't think there is a 'local pronunciation' in the case of English. French and Saxon seem to have merged on equal terms, where neither was sufficiently dominant to determine how words were re-written, and neither vocabulary would be counted as loan words.

I think English would claim both as the original languages.

I, think, english, would, both = old english

claim, original, language = old french

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#129

Post by dropofwill »

elboru wrote: post #38
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…

Agree, I would add, make vocals consistent, ‘a’,‘e’,‘i’,’o’,’u’ should only have one sound per each letter for every case, if we need more vocal sounds then use different characters.

Problem with English is that there are a lot of vowels (up to about 20) and the number varies greatly based on dialect. I believe this is an outlier for Indo-European languages.
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