Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#151

Post by jcranmer » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

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.

The vowels in the English language: bat, bait, bet, beet, bit, bite, bot, boat, but, butte, bout, boil, book, the 'a' in about (/ə/), baht. That's only in my dialect, and not counting r-colored vowels (which are not r-colored in British dialects!).

This list was constructed by building short/long vowel pairs, and then tacking on the weirder vowels afterwards. As you'll notice from the inclusion of the last entry, there is a major dialect issue here. There are four sounds (/æ/, /ɒ/, /ɑ/, /ɔ/) that are usually distributed into three sounds in major dialects, and these arise from short a and short o in written orthography... but which words send their vowels to the different targets varies greatly depending on the dialect. If you pick it according to any one dialect, you're going to get some poor correlation in another dialect.

The other obvious issue is that adding new characters is actually difficult in the modern age. Of the sounds I've dropped in above, I can only type in ə and æ without resorting to copy-paste, and that's only because those are accessible with the Compose key. Telling people that you have to use 10 keys not present on their keyboards to write their language is going to be a hard sell. Again, note that English dropped þ as a letter primarily because it wasn't possible to print with printing presses imported from Germany.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#152

Post by garmaine » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

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.

“Couch surfing”

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#153

Post by JdeBP » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

anticensor wrote: post #78

I have a mother, not a fatheress. (Esperanto speakers got the joke)

There have been efforts to fix this over the years, but this is indeed a problem with the way that the language was designed.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#154

Post by leke » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #132

Recently someone said to me that the EU really needs a common language - just like how English is spoken across most USA states. But none of the current European languages would be acceptable across the EU. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but now I wonder if Esperanto could fill that role?

I think English already does fill that role.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#155

Post by martinrue » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

I learned Esperanto because it was geeky and super easy to learn, and now I use it almost every day. I've made friends all over the world via the language, and can find people wherever I am to hang out and chat with. It's awesome. In fact, 6 weeks ago I moved from the UK to Spain and so far I've spent about 80% of my time using only Esperanto, with a combination of broken English and Spanish the rest of the time. I wrote a post a while back (that did pretty well here on HN) summing up why I love the language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619

Mi lernis Esperanton pro la nerdeco kaj pro tio, ke ĝi estas tre facile lernebla kaj amuza. 3 jarojn poste kaj mi uzas la lingvon ĉiutage kun amikoj de la tuta mondo. Kie ajn mi troviĝas, preskaŭ ĉiam mi povas trovi amikon (saluton!) kaj vagadi, babili, kaj nur Esperantumi kune. Fakte, antaŭ 6 semajnoj mi transloĝiĝis al hispanio kaj ĝis nun Esperanton mi uzis 80% de la tempo, kaj miksaĵon de la angla kaj mia rompita hispana krom Esperanto la ceteran. Jen artikolo, kiun mi skribis (anglalingve) por klarigi tial, kial mi tre ĝuas la lingvon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#156

Post by thotsBgone » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #131

kwhitefoot wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation, Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone from the south would use a long a. And which language do you have in mind when you imply that there are languages that are pronounced in the same way by all of its speakers? Anyway, there is no Academy in…

> Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone from the south would use a long a. It occurs to me that in an alternate universe, the answer could be "both spellings are correct", because logically speaking, if both pronunciations are correct, shouldn't the same apply to the written version? Come to t…

I don't want to read your words in your accent, I want to read them with my internal monologue.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#157

Post by k__ » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

I heard it was very eurocentric. Are there more global alternatives?

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#158

Post by crispyambulance » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

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?

We use the "character set" our parents and our culture gave us. It does the job as well as any other character set, because language is not merely a tool, like a set of bits for your screwdriver. It's a part of your identity and your place in the world.

You can, of course, pick up other languages and with effort use them either skillfully, or just pragmatically. But no one will ever feel that Esperanto is "their" language. It will always be either a curiosity or, at best, a utilitarian tool (and even then only if it ever becomes wildly successful).

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#159

Post by anewguy9000 » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

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 posted this as a joke but im not sure if its more or less funny how easy it was for everyone to take it seriously..

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#160

Post by leke » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

axegon_ wrote: post #14

I gave it a go several years ago out of curiosity. Knowing 1 Germanic language(English), 1 Romance language(Spanish) and 1 Slavic(Bulgarian), I found it brutally easy. For the most part, I could understand the average conversation out of the box with ease. One thing that came to my mind is that it could be a huge win for nlp purposes: With such simple, yet incredibly strict rules, you'd be able to make an incredibly…

I tried it too, but eventually walked away from the endeavor. I found you really have to learn to think the "Esperanto way" of saying things. That's the tricky part. At least, if I tried to communicate a more complex thought other than a general conversation, it wouldn't really be understood by the community, or at least be understandable, but just incorrect.

To overcome this, I think I would have next had to emerge myself into more complex texts. For example, I had 1984 to read, but just never got round to it.

The other thing was this personal relationship building thing the community embraces. I really am a loner so am not really into their general ideology. It really freaked me out when they wanted to meet me when visiting my town, or worse still, stay with me! That's the thing that actually really turned me off and made me ditch the whole idea.

I've played with various languages over the years, including conlangs, and actually found Swedish to be my favorite. There are some hard parts, like the declensions of definite, indefinite, plural with its genders, but practicing general conversation with my wife (who is a native Finnish speaker with Swedish as a second language), found we could communicate simply, quite well. It just felt more natural and fluent. The way you literally say things translate quite well to English, so I can still think in English --if that makes any sense.