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What Will the World Speak in 2115?

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Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#61

Post by tokenadult »

jodrellblank wrote: post #58
tokenadult wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why "surely"? 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?

You seemed to be quite confident in your use of the phrase "any native language," so I immediately suggested a counterexample. As the Justin Rye website, already linked above, points out, Esperanto is NASTILY hard to learn for the native speakers of many languages. I by no means accept the statement that Esperanto is easy to learn to a given degree of proficiency unless someone shows me a well conducted study to that effect published outside of Esperantist advocacy publications. (I know for certain that the United States Army investigated using Esperanto as a language for the "aggressor" force in war games, but that practice appears to have been abandoned. Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage that I have to conclude, on the basis of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," that Esperanto is not especially easy to learn for actual real-world use with persons who have other native language backgrounds.)

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#62

Post by jodrellblank »

tokenadult wrote: post #61
jodrellblank wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why "surely"? 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?

You seemed to be quite confident in your use of the phrase "any native language," so I immediately suggested a counterexample. As the Justin Rye website, already linked above, points out, Esperanto is NASTILY hard to learn for the native speakers of many languages. I by no means accept the statement that Esperanto is easy to learn to a given degree of proficiency unless someone shows me a well conducted study to that…

But why surely? What makes you suggest Dutch would be easier than Esperanto to learn to fluency? Dutch looks as daunting as any other natural language to me, whereas the simplified patterns in Esperanto make it much more attractive. No more (goose->geese, but bed->beds). No more (swim->swam, but jump->jumped). No more (row/row) spelling and pronounciation weirdness. (X/malX instead of X/Y) dramatically reducing vocabulary to say the same thing. Looks much easier than Dutch.

(Albeit not Easy because how easy can it ever be to learn to say everything in another way?)

Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage

If they really had "sufficient" interest, they would have funded some linguists and had an interlanguage designed from scratch, then mandated that it be taught in their schools and solved the problem[1]. Language work requires minimal technology, minimal physical resources, and minimal space, so funding from a government scale budget would be a non-issue ... so why haven't they?

All of the central European governments with multiple neighbour countries speaking different languages, international organizations like the EU, the UN, WTO, ISO, any of these people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intergovernmental_organ... - which of them had sufficient interest to actually try and solve the problem - in whatever way, picking any of the myriads of constructed languages or having their own designed and agreed upon?

Your suggestion is that they investigated Esperanto and found it too difficult, right? But why haven't they done anything, except be happy that English or French is good enough for them and ha ha sod the entire rest of the world who find English and French difficult to learn to fluency.

[1] I conclude, either the problem of agreeing on a more-simple shared language is unsolvable, or they didn't have "sufficient interest" in solving it.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#63

Post by jodrellblank »

rspeer wrote: post #49
hrktb wrote: post #46

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…

Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015!

And here it is in 2014:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/skype-...

And the comments include "Google has been doing this for ages".

Siri, Cortana, Google Now, all have speech recognition. Google and Microsoft have translation engines. Microsoft and WordLens (and Google?) have live image OCR and translation.

It's no Star Trek Universal Translator, but it's a thing and it exists.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#64

Post by jodrellblank »

BillChapman wrote: post #60
jodrellblank wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see things differently. I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries.

I think it's odd for people to argue that "it failed" when it's the only language to have started from scratch and taken off at all; there's no precedent to compare it with - how long "should" a language take to go from non-existent to popular?

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#65

Post by rokhayakebe »

jodrellblank wrote: post #48
rokhayakebe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but back then they did not have the Internet, apps and such.

What difference will that make? You don't speak Esperanto now, and we have those things now.

It was ahead of its time, perhaps. I never heard of it until this thread. It would good to learn from its failure and not repeat the same mistake. But certainly just because something did not succeed does not mean another solution won't.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#66

Post by jodrellblank »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #65
jodrellblank wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference will that make? You don't speak Esperanto now, and we have those things now.

It was ahead of its time, perhaps. I never heard of it until this thread. It would good to learn from its failure and not repeat the same mistake. But certainly just because something did not succeed does not mean another solution won't.

True, it does not mean another solution won't - but what is there to suggest another solution will do any differently?

None of these alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages have spread even as far as Esperanto. Whatever Esperanto did, it did something right.

(And the way you say "learn from its failure" - it's still around and widespread on the internet and available in Apps; you can learn it from http://www.kurso.com.br/ and http://www.lernu.net and talk about it at http://www.reddit.com/r/esperanto and write in it at http://www.reddit.com/r/esperante and chat in it on IRC on Freenode, or verbally with Mumble http://retbabilejo.net/ , there are decks on Memrise for it, it's in development on Duolingo http://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/eo/en/status and there are Facebook and Skype groups, Anki flashcard decks https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/esperanto and heaps of Youtube videos in / about it https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=esperanto ) and yet it still isn't very popular (despite the Internet), and you still had not heard of it. That's a failure of it.

I think it's more likely that most people don't want to invest thousands of hours of effort into learning another language, and those who do, do so because they like a particular country/language/culture, than any big mistake it made.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#67

Post by rspeer »

jodrellblank wrote: post #63
rspeer wrote: post #49

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…

Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015! And here it is in 2014: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/skype-... And the comments include "Google has been doing this for ages". Siri, Cortana, Google Now, all have speech recognition. Google and Microsoft have translation engines. Microsoft and WordLens (and Google?) have live image OCR and translation. It's no Star Trek…

That's not the same thing as "high-quality machine translation".

Those are some lofty claims about Skype Translate, but it's not putting human translators out of business.

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