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Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

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Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#181

Post by pwdisswordfish4 »

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…

Every now and then comments like this one pop up (or even a bit more frequently than the way that sounds). But it's hard to understand how they get written up and posted. It only makes sense if you assume the author has dozed off halfway through the comment they meant to reply to, woke up, and banged out a response anyway.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#182

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#183

Post by tptacek »

jcranmer wrote: post #151
elboru wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

Again, note that English dropped þ as a letter primarily because it wasn't possible to print with printing presses imported from Germany.

Really? That's a super interesting TIL.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#184

Post by [deleted] »

Fnoord wrote: post #102
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…

That reminds me of this old joke [1]: > The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. > As part of the negotiations, the British and American government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement. Consequently, they have adopted a five-year ph…

[deleted]

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#185

Post by H8crilA »

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…

One second, Mr. Twain.

You're talking about a nation that has been rolling out a sensible system of measurement units for decades. By 2020 it has made its way into engineering schools, but is still nowhere near the daily usage level. Surely the entire language will take a multiple of that. I think we should extend your plan to a few centuries.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#186

Post by [deleted] »

inglor_cz wrote: post #109
Fnoord wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of this old joke [1]: > The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. > As part of the negotiations, the British and American government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement. Consequently, they have adopted a five-year ph…

"fotograf" is precisely how it is spelt in Czech and I am not sure why the English language insists on keeping the ancient-looking "ph" in those words; what the phreaking phuck?

[deleted]

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#187

Post by silasdb »

Tade0 wrote: post #166
bserge wrote: post #10

Comeback? Has it ever been more than a niche curiosity? It's more like translation tools will make a comeback. Already have. They've gotten so good, you don't even need to learn a new language to learn something that's only available in English (or other languages). Incidentally, this was a major reason I learned English. There was so much more information available back in the early 00's that I just had to do it. Ro…

They've gotten so good, you don't even need to learn a new language to learn something that's only available in English It's a mixed bag really. Japanese is still too foreign for Google Translate to interpret properly outside of common phrases.

I find automatic translation from English to Portuguese very good, but those are not that different from each other. What is the state of automatic translation between two languages that are very far and different from each other like Chinese (a sino-tibetan language) and English (an indo-european language)? I thought that ML and all the recent research on that could close the gap in this regard even for such very distant languages.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#189

Post by jhbadger »

emodendroket wrote: post #49
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…

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…

That's part of it, but another way vocabulary can be easy is if it is self-documenting meaning you can figure out the meaning without memorizing it specifically. The Chinese 地理 is literally "Earth Science" (a term also used in English but with a broader meaning of all sciences dealing with the earth including geology and geophysics as well as geography) . Spanish "geografía" means "earth description" but isn't as self-documenting because to recognize this you have to go outside the language to Ancient Greek.

Re: Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)

#190

Post by myth2018 »

Diplomacy, Science and maybe Aviation. I believe that the entire world would benefit if Esperanto were adopted as lingua franca in these three fields, especially in Science.

It's hard for the members of the "linguistic status quo" to realize the huge amount of contributions which are not made, how huge is the amount of super intelligent and talented people who don't take part in the game simply because they don't have the resources and the access needed to become proficient at English.

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