51–60 of 67 posts
From the article: "By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English." Yep. Esperanto is toast as a world interlanguage compared to English. The number of new speakers added to English each year just by natural increase of households in which English is spoken as a home language is, matched for levels of proficiency, comfortably greater than the total…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes automatic translation seems to be the flying cars of computer engineering. In 2115 we might be able to technically do a very good approximation of it, but it might not have much use except for very casual contexts. I think it really comes down to controlling one's communication. For instance, right now businessmen learning Mandarin are not cheaping on translator services, they want a better understanding of…
As an example of how overly optimistic people have been about translation, here's a page on Foresight Exchange (a long-running play-money prediction market) where people have been betting on the probability of high-quality machine translation by 2015, since 1995: http://www.foresightexchange.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Tran Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015! Of course the people who…
That isn't to say I agree with the sentiment that efficient and accurate translation will make English obsolete. Pretty much every major programming language, along with things like URLs and markup, requires using ISO Latin characters found on a QWERTY keyboard, which greatly limits the power of a major class of contenders. English just happened to be the lingua franca at the time that cultural globalization allowed for a language to keep that status long past the nation that made it such stopped being a super power (which, of course, may or may not happen to the US in the next 100 years).
From the article: "By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English." Yep. Esperanto is toast as a world interlanguage compared to English. The number of new speakers added to English each year just by natural increase of households in which English is spoken as a home language is, matched for levels of proficiency, comfortably greater than the total…
On the other hand, Esperanto is the only constructed language to have got anywhere at all, and is outlasting those smaller languages that are going extinct every few weeks and those natural languages on life support kept around by hobbyists with too much power, like Welsh. It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed, and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically l…
That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.[1]
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, Esperanto is the only constructed language to have got anywhere at all, and is outlasting those smaller languages that are going extinct every few weeks and those natural languages on life support kept around by hobbyists with too much power, like Welsh. It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed, and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically l…
Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgro…
I would struggle, because I'm not a fluent Esperantist; it would come out be omething like:
Alian ideon. la Esperanton estas la sola konstruitan lingvon kio havas multaj da parolistoj en multaj loĝoj. Ĝi ekzistas, dum ĉiu semajno aliajn malgrandajn lingvojn mortas, kaj ĝi havas pli vivo ol tiojn denaskajn lingvojn kio vivas de amatoristoj kun tro influo - ekzemple kimra lingvo.
La Esperanton neestas la plej uzata mondlingvon (nuntempe), sed ĝi ne mortas. Nenio ŝanĝis la fakto ke vi povas lerni ĝin, ĝis vi bonparolas, en malpli tempo ol iu denaska lingvo.
--
[I dropped English idioms "on the other hand" - which hand?, "have got anywhere" - languages don't go anywhere, some of the metaphoric stuff about a language being alive and "on life support". If I've written it reasonably well it should carry the same general meaning. Transliterating this comment back to English:
Another idea. Esperanto is the only constructed language which has many speakers in many places. It exists while every week other small languages die, and it has more life than those native languages which live by amateurs with too much influence - for example Welsh.
Esperanto is not the most used world-language (currently), but it is not dead. Nothing changed the fact that you can learn it, until you speak well, in less time than any native language. ]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, Esperanto is the only constructed language to have got anywhere at all, and is outlasting those smaller languages that are going extinct every few weeks and those natural languages on life support kept around by hobbyists with too much power, like Welsh. It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed, and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically l…
Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgro…
I have read large parts of this rant, and I started off thinking "wow, he's really ripping into Esperanto, there will be nothing useful left afterwards!". Then I started thinking about it; on the high level his arguments are weak. E.g. the overall theme of his rant seems to boil down to "If Esperanto has flaws, it can't be good", and on the low level, his arguments are weak, he gets right down to "A flaw in Esperanto is that the 1905 published book on it contained a typo". That's someone with a real axe to grind.
I'm not linguist enough to follow very closely, but pages and pages of this are essentially. "Here's what Esperanto did. It's bad because it's not what I'd have done". Look:
The actual forms of these inflections (‐os? ‐inta?) are unconvincing. Worst of all is ‐u, the imperative. Most languages, for obvious reasons, arrange it so that commands can be given via the most basic verbal “stem” available, not a special, uniquely inflected form!
Well I disagree, I like that basic stems and imperatives are clearly different. Now what?
B3: I wouldn't have chosen those sounds.
F1: It uses words people knew!!!!!
F2: I wouldn't have chosen those words!
F3: It's plausible that a hypothetical language could do better.
G2: He wasn't even a real linguist!
G5: I don't like how this looks, therefore it's bad.
M1: Unsurprisingly, Esperanto's phrase structure rules and so on turn out to be hardly distinguishable from the ones Zamenhof grew up with – they're pretty good simple ones, but it's sheer blind luck… - Really? You can't even give him the benefit of the doubt? He spent ten years working on this and the only way he did something you like was blind luck?
On and on, sour grapes and "hypothetically it could be done differently and more to my taste" by the author.
Yes there are some valid criticisms in there, the way "Three twelfths, 32nds and Thirty halves" are written the same, numerically.
But then we come back to... what's the point of the article? "If there are problems it must be completely useless?" or "If I can find no problems then everyone would speak it?" or "it's possible to design a language that nobody would find any flaws with?".
Anyway, let me not whinge forever, since I'm not a fluent Esperantist or a linguist. See instead Claude Piron's response to that deconstruction: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm (He being a UN translator working on translating English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish into French, and was fluent in Esperanto).
There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.
and his http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/comments.htm which contains
Languages such as Esperanto are no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or English.
When I observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia, especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans, I made it a point to ask people how much time they had devoted to acquiring the language. [..] Most of these Asians with a rather crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity, nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is based on erroneous data. (See my research report "Esperanto: l'image et la realite'", Cours et Études de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8, 1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this book can be found in Language in Society, 26 (1), 143-147, 1997).
Also, ref. Bjarne Stroustrup's quote 'There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgro…
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto? I would struggle, because I'm not a fluent Esperantist; it would come out be omething like: Alian ideon. la Esperanton estas la sola konstruitan lingvon kio havas multaj da parolistoj en multaj loĝoj. Ĝi ekzistas, dum ĉiu semajno aliajn malgrandajn lingvojn mortas, kaj ĝi havas pli vivo ol tiojn denaskajn lingvojn kio vivas de amatoristoj kun tro influo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto? I would struggle, because I'm not a fluent Esperantist; it would come out be omething like: Alian ideon. la Esperanton estas la sola konstruitan lingvon kio havas multaj da parolistoj en multaj loĝoj. Ĝi ekzistas, dum ĉiu semajno aliajn malgrandajn lingvojn mortas, kaj ĝi havas pli vivo ol tiojn denaskajn lingvojn kio vivas de amatoristoj kun tro influo…
I could surely learn Dutch to given level of proficiency faster than I could learn Esperanto to the same level of proficiency. And what's really sad about that for Esperanto is that learning Dutch would give me access to more speakers in more places than learning Esperanto does.
That's not a great comparison since Dutch is about as close as a foreign language gets to English. And when you learn it you can only use it in the Netherlands and some former colonies. More speakers yes, but ... More places?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an example of how overly optimistic people have been about translation, here's a page on Foresight Exchange (a long-running play-money prediction market) where people have been betting on the probability of high-quality machine translation by 2015, since 1995: http://www.foresightexchange.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Tran Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015! Of course the people who…
Overly optimistic over the course of 20 years is one thing, but I find it pretty difficult to believe that translation between major languages won't be mostly solved in 100 years. The difference between what is available today and 20 years ago is already pretty impressive, but 100 years ago we didn't even have the theoretical underpinnings of a computer, let alone a machine capable of any kind of automated, generaliz…
For any mildly complex concept, heuristics, context analysis, pattern matching and word databases won't be enough to match two exact sentences in different languages. Even a sentence like 'I felt sick watching him treating his partner this way' will need an extreme lot of intelligence to correctly parse and convey in a different language.
If in 100 years AI really reaches the holy grail and we have actual artifical intelligence, translation will be a solved problem. Now, will we be able to reach that goal in 100 years ? I hope, but that's not a given I think.
I have a different opinion. I think people will stick to their languages, and some will die naturally. However, one new language will emerge. It will be a set of 500 to 1000 words that anyone can learn and use to communicate world wide. Similarly to a programming language, this one will be limited in words and easy to pick up. This language will act as a framework, giving the essential people would need to have basic…
Your hundred year prediction is already more than a hundred years out of date. Welcome to 1880's Bialystok in not-yet-Poland, and the birth of Esperanto. Here we are in 2015 and the one hundredth annual Esperanto Congress is coming. The reasons approximately nobody speaks Esperanto now, are the same reasons nobody will speak your universal language in 2115.