Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Esperanto is finding new life online

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#71

Post by riffraff »

riquito wrote: post #69
sanoli wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably is a common Liceo Classico in Italy, where Latin and Greek are teached each for 5 and 4 hours a week during the first two years and 4 and 3 hours during the following three years.

which highlights the point that choice of subjects should very much be culture-specific.

Picking up latin as an italian seems far simpler (and probably more useful) than as an english, as you can guess large part of the lexicon and you will be exposed to "volgare" (transitional latin-italian) when studying early italian literature.

But would studying Old English be of any use for italians? I am not sure.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#72

Post by yiyus »

Red_Tarsius wrote: post #24

I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau

It is not the same case. Esperanto was one of the first attempts. Now that we have Esperanto, Intelingua, Ido, Novial, and many others I have not even hear about, trying again with a new international language would be a good reason to post this comic. But when Esperanto was developed, a simple artificial language was a very innovative idea. Although it was not very successful, I think it was worth a try.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#73

Post by iakdnf »

freehunter wrote: post #41
panglott wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German. The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Lat…

The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know w…

You are using English because you are using English. When I lived in Germany I used German nearly 100% of the time, and now I speak fluent German with hardly a hitch. 10 years later I regularly run into German speakers, and while it feels a little rusty now, I continue using German because I know if I fall back on English Im going to be using English and not learning German. I recommend you adopt the same learning strategy.

I have been learning Chinese in China for about 7 months, and have a functional command of most conversations because I never ever use English during those conversations. English will always win if you keep biking with the training wheels on.

When I lived in Cambodia for an even longer time I didnt learn nearly as much Khmer because I was constantly speaking in English, even though I diligently listened to Khmer conversations and researched the language. Like programming, language learning is much slower as a spectator sport.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#74

Post by jinushaun »

tokenadult wrote: post #40

From 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…

As a polyglot, I tried to get into Esperanto several times, but can't get over its ugliness, complex phoneme inventory, unnecessary grammar complexity, strong European roots, abundance of consonant clusters, and overall language bugs. Sure natural languages are worse, but you expect a lot more from a language that was designed from scratch to be consistent and easy to learn. If you don't already speak a European language, good luck.

I really wish Reformed Esperanto had usurped Esperanto, which fixed a lot of the bugs.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#75

Post by intopieces »

panglott wrote: post #2

It'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…

Languages are not just languages. They're also a component of a wider culture. Foreign language education exposes students to cultures and ways of thinking not present in their day to day culture and allows them to understand and possibly communicate with people around them who speak that language (living in central Texas, you ought to know a bit of Spanish).

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#77

Post by 7erb »

I'm working on a conlang called 7erb (pronounced Verb).

It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. Here's what I got so far:

- All seven words in the vocabulary are a negative. A word means "everything but that word. Words are then "stacked" to be more "anti-specific"

- 7erb is completely present-tense. Past and future are not acknowledged

- Anything in this world that can be evaluated in various ways depending upon arbitrary conditions are generally avoided in 7erb. 7erb is a language of reality, not subjectivity and opinion. There are no words in 7erb that function as adjectives

- However, vocal pitch and tonality can indicate degrees of closeness, height, intensity etc. In written form, this can be expressed with bold text, underscoring etc

If anyone is interested in developing this new language, please contact me (see my profile).

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#78

Post by tmalsburg2 »

baddox wrote: post #6

Speaking of constructed languages, you might find Lojban interesting. It is "a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic." I have read most of the official language description. It's a compelling book not just about Lojban, but about logic and English grammar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language

There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information: context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language on the syntaxtic level you're basically just adding excessive redundancy. There are special niches where disambiguating information is scarce or where any misinterpretation could have catastophic consequences (e.g., aviation handbooks) but outside these domains the absence of syntactic ambiguity is hardly a desirable property.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#79

Post by freehunter »

gkya wrote: post #65
freehunter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Esperanto has some incredibly good aspects to it, though. The biggest, of course, is that learning Esperanto (which is very easy to do) helps tremendously with learning other languages. So it doesn't really matter if you think Esperanto is an incredibly bad idea, Esperanto is an incredibly good idea if you're looking to learn other languages afterwards. It's not just another standard. It's a great learning aid. "A gr…

Well, this is for esperanto being a conlang that is borrowing mostly from romance, slavic and germanic languages and indo-european languages in general. I have been studying italian for about 6 months, and I can comprehend written french and portuguese, and written/spoken spanish to an extent, all of which are romance languages i.e. latin descendants. And I have not really studied these languages. So esperanto is no…

You're right, it's easier to learn a third language than it is a second. But Esperanto is super easy to learn in the first place, it gets you to learning your third language that much quicker.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#80

Post by digi_owl »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #78
baddox wrote: post #6

Speaking of constructed languages, you might find Lojban interesting. It is "a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic." I have read most of the official language description. It's a compelling book not just about Lojban, but about logic and English grammar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language

There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information: context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language on the syntaxtic level you're basically just…

International diplomacy?
Post reply on HN