I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau
Not really. Surely the real problem is that learning Esperanto means you can now talk to people who, well, are the kind of people who learnt Esperanto...
Esperanto is finding new life online
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto. They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of t…
Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material. A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a su…
These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community.
Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it…
> ...something that had any cultural relevance at all. My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in liceo (the last 3 years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches, plays... Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to u…
I upvoted you for your last sentence alone. What high school did you go to, and is it still heavily focused on Latin and Greek?
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a very distinctive culture to Esperanto: people who continue to hope for positive social transformation and international and intercultural harmony. Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said something to the effect that, if you go to a Esperanto congress, you should start with the default assumption that everyone you meet is a gay vegetarian. [1] I cannot speak to the truth of…
That sounds more like a philosophy than a culture.
There is even an Esperantist movement that explicitly argues that it's a culture.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#35I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau
Not really. Surely the real problem is that learning Esperanto means you can now talk to people who, well, are the kind of people who learnt Esperanto...
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#36I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau
This is the perfect post for a more in depth argumentation. Otherwise there is not much discussion value here, only disturbance.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them. More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages. I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I c…
Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better.
1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school.
2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man".
3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#38It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
Guess what determines school curricula in most cases? The opinions of the parents who care enough to go to school board meetings, serve on the board or complain to officials.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it…
> ...something that had any cultural relevance at all. My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in liceo (the last 3 years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches, plays... Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to u…
And current languages too. A while back I found this diagram http://imgur.com/ZNlwDUZ, to me it shows how logical greeks were. Terms are symmetrical, well organized, forming a tiny core of combinators.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#40From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs." Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has severe growth problems if that is how interesting it is to prospective learners.
I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses.
As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades.
The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will.