In Monsters and the Critics by Tolkien, there's an essay titled "A Secret Vice" in which he intimates his love of inventing languages. To my delight he mentions his enjoyment attending an Esperanto conference in Oxford the previous year.
To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
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Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#12If you are interested in conlangs and world building https://www.youtube.com/c/Artifexian/videos?view=0&sort=p&fl... is an awesome channel for that.
I also like this channel which has a series called "conlang critic" where the creator describes various conlangs and ranks them.
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#13The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not Bengali is a mockery to Bangladeshi people.
Duolingo has a platform where volunteers can contribute to develop new courses. If you are fluent both in Bengali and in English, you should definitely consider signing up.
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#14The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not Bengali is a mockery to Bangladeshi people.
More Duolingo users are interested in learning Esperanto than Bengali.
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#15The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not Bengali is a mockery to Bangladeshi people.
Duolingo has a platform where volunteers can contribute to develop new courses. If you are fluent both in Bengali and in English, you should definitely consider signing up. https://incubator.duolingo.com
Yeah, that Duolingo is a for-profit company that relies on volunteers to develop their courses is probably a mockery of someone, but it also explains why nobody has gifted them a Bengali course yet. On the other hand, people who learn a conlang are self-selected for willingness to spend a lot of time on something that's unlikely to gain them any material reward, so it's unsurprising some of them worked on a Duolingo course.
There are also almost three times as many Wikipedia articles in Esperanto as in Bengali, despite the Esperanto Wikipedia having less than a third the number of active users: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table2
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#16The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not Bengali is a mockery to Bangladeshi people.
It comes down to demand and whether someone takes the time to create the lessons.
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Duolingo has a platform where volunteers can contribute to develop new courses. If you are fluent both in Bengali and in English, you should definitely consider signing up. https://incubator.duolingo.com
Yeah, that Duolingo is a for-profit company that relies on volunteers to develop their courses is probably a mockery of someone , but it also explains why nobody has gifted them a Bengali course yet. On the other hand, people who learn a conlang are self-selected for willingness to spend a lot of time on something that's unlikely to gain them any material reward, so it's unsurprising some of them worked on a Duolingo…
Somebody has to pay the costs of running the system.
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#18The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not Bengali is a mockery to Bangladeshi people.
considering that there are about 300 million native Bengali speaking people in the world (mostly in Bangladesh, and West Bengal which is a state in India).
It's not how many people speak it. It's how many people want to learn it as a second language. How many people would be in a position to want to learn Bengali if they don't already live there?
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#19The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not Bengali is a mockery to Bangladeshi people.
The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not [INSERT MISSING LANGUAGE] is a mockery to [INSERT NATIONALITY] people.
Re: To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
#20Esperanto is widely miunderstood by the general public. It's often lumped together with fictional languages (languages from fictional books or movies) like Klingon or Elvish. But there's a very important distinction. Fictional languages like Klingon are created to appear as if they're natural languages—reflecting their fictional cultures' customs, idioms, and ways of thinking. They often have a level of complexity comparable with that of a natural language, but lack the vocabulary and expressivity of a non-fictional language. Esperanto, on the other hand, is better described as an international auxiliary language.
As an international auxiliary language—and by far the most successful, with upwards of 5 million speakers worldwide—Esperanto has a number of notable features:
1. It's arguably the easiest language to learn, for speakers of European and non-European languages alike. It requires an order of magnitude less effort to learn. That makes the best candidate for a bridge language. Imagine that speakers of two difficult, mutually incomprehensible languages need a common means of communication. They could either attempt to learn one another's languages, or they could learn a bridge language, that would save them a lot of time. English is a terrible candidate for such a language, since it takes 10-20 times more time to learn to fluency, and is full of idioms, irregularities, nonsensical spelling, and other difficulties.
2. As a language with a history of almost 150 years, there is a rich body of literature in Esperanto, which you won't find in any other constructed language. Sure, you can find translations of Tolkien books in Elvish (unsurprisingly), and other token translations, but the largest Esperanto-language libraries have over 30,000 volumes. Many of these are available for free online. Learning Esperanto is thus not just an intellectual exercise, but a means of unlocking a whole wing of the library.
3. As a largely unidiomatic language, Esperanto just makes sense. If you can think of a way to express something, that's usually the correct way of expressing it. That isn't true of most natural languages. (Have you ever been a language learner, surrounded by native speakers, asking them if you're saying something right? Why do we ride on busses but in cars? It's because English is impossibly idiomatic.) Thus, Esperanto is a fantastic candidate for an international scientific or academic language, since it's just easier to say what you mean, and to be understood.
There are so, so many reasons to learn Esperanto, in particular, and those get glossed over when you're lumping it together with other smaller languages. Check out https://lernu.net/ and start learning it.