Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
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Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#2Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke.
> Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised) consonants, and /dz/.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#3> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. He said both of these languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language, so all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river stone. No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions.
I have no knowledge of Swahili and perhaps it really is all that but this statement makes no sense - English, French, Russian, Arabic and plenty of other languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language yet they still have plenty of weird grammar, exceptions, and edge-cases.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#4Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised…
I like to think that Esperanto is easier, not necessarily easy. It definitely helps if you know e.g. a romance language, but it still is way more accessible than any other "regular" language (and, even for a romance language speaker, it requires effort to learn properly).
In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#5Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised…
I have learned Esperanto using Duolingo and I made more mistakes in English (which was the language in which that Esperanto course was tought) than in Esperanto. Mainly because Esperanto is very regular without all those edge cases which English has.
BTW English is my second language, Czech is my first and I have some limited knowledge of German.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#6Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised…
I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there are a bunch of other tricks to keep vocabulary reasonable and grammar logical without a bazillion edge cases. It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English.
Teaching my kid to speak and then how to read and write has been a recent reminder of just how illogical English is. I would have massively struggled as a non-native speaker.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#7> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. He said both of these languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language, so all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river stone. No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions. I have no…
This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian.
At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyond. It had five vowels compared to the seven ones from the Catalan/Valencian or the 7-8 (if not more) of the Galician-Portuguese. And it got loanwords from all the Iberian romances overtime (and a bit later French and Italian).
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#8Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised…
I like to think that Esperanto is easier , not necessarily easy. It definitely helps if you know e.g. a romance language, but it still is way more accessible than any other "regular" language (and, even for a romance language speaker, it requires effort to learn properly). In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
You can look at the whole rest of the page I linked to for ways in which Esperanto is irregular and parochial.
For example:
There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right?
> In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned:
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#9Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised…
I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there are a bunch of other tricks to keep vocabulary reasonable and grammar logical without a bazillion edge cases. It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Es…
> One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4
That's true of almost every language though, just not English.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#10Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised…
I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there are a bunch of other tricks to keep vocabulary reasonable and grammar logical without a bazillion edge cases. It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Es…
I'm not complaining about orthography, but phonology: How easy it is to spell a word matters little if you get your mouth in a tangle trying to pronounce it. Esperanto has sounds most languages don't, and it has them purely because Zamenhof was accustomed to them. A good constructed auxiliary language would have a phonological inventory taken from the most common sounds in all of the world's languages. This page makes that case a lot better:
This is partly a consequence of Zamenhof being first, sure: Relatively little was known about global phoneme popularity in the 1800s. But he could have done a bit better than copying his specific dialect of Polish.