221–230 of 234 posts
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> The whole premise of 'a universal language for world peace' is oppressive Could you explain that? I see it more in terms of creating a voluntary standard than forcing people to comply.
I think the universal language would gradually extinguish other languages. The more universal a language becomes, the more powerful the network effects get.
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I think the universal language would gradually extinguish other languages. The more universal a language becomes, the more powerful the network effects get.
Is being extinguished by a universal language somehow worse than being extinguished by a non-universal language?
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…
I do. And I know a few others who do.
I mean, my preferred choice is to use my native language. Esperanto comes second. English third. But of course, the choice of language is usually determined by the intended audience.
The reason Esperanto comes second despite being used less than English is that it feels "more natural". This is probably hard to explain and hard to believe if you don't have a personal experience, but it is so. The high regularity has a psychological impact. I usually don't notice irregularities in my native language, because I am used to them so much. But in a foreign language, any irregularity is a mental reminder than I am not speaking my native language. Esperanto has more regularity, therefore fewer reminders of being foreign.
Most informative thing I have read about Esperanto is http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html
I wonder how many of those "Klingon speakers" can actually have a ten-minute dialog on a random topic.
The remainder of the article can be summarized as "Esperanto is not perfect" which I fully agree with. And it has a lot of irregularities, too! But still, ten or hundred times less than an average natural language. Which makes it so easy to learn.
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𐑢𐑦𐑔 ·𐑿𐑯𐑦𐑒𐑴𐑛, 𐑞 𐑦𐑯𐑑𐑤𐑴𐑛𐑳𐑒𐑖𐑩𐑯 𐑝 𐑯𐑵 𐑨𐑤𐑓𐑩𐑚𐑧𐑑𐑦𐑒 𐑕𐑦𐑕𐑑𐑩𐑥 𐑐𐑮𐑩𐑟𐑧𐑯𐑑𐑕 𐑯𐑴 𐑕𐑦𐑜𐑯𐑦𐑓𐑦𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑑 𐑑𐑧𐑒𐑯𐑩𐑤𐑪𐑡𐑦𐑒𐑩𐑤 𐑐𐑮𐑪𐑚𐑤𐑩𐑥𐑟, 𐑨𐑟 𐑿 𐑒𐑩𐑯 𐑕𐑰. (With Unicode, the introduction of new alphabetic writing systems presents no significant technological problems, as you can see.)
Now make that as easy to type on computers and phones as Latin script.
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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?.
Cynthia, cinder, cyrillic... I wonder why scythe is spelled with an S...
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…
It's about a 10x difference. You can actually learn it with negative time investment if you use it as precursor to learning English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
Esperanto isn't actually that universal. It's very European, using a Latin alphabet, grammar and syntax from romance languages, etc. Its going to be very easy for a Spanish or English or German speaker to pick up, for example. Probably a bit less easy for someone speaking a language on the idno side of indo European, like a hindi speaker, and then progressively harder as you get further and further away from the lang…
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...
It's also generally true that a speaker of an Asian language will have an easier time learning Esperanto than another Asian language.
The Chinese are one of the biggest state supporters of Esperanto. Radio Beijing has Esperanto programs and you can get a degree in it from some Chinese universities.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe%E2%80%93Democracy%E2%80...