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Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

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Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#11

Post by mchaver »

7thaccount wrote: post #6
msla wrote: post #2

Sadly, 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…

Vocabulary difference is a huge issue though. Korean and Japanese grammar is very different from Chinese, but the shared vocabulary (of Chinese origin) makes it easier to learn one of them if you already speak another one. Also incentives and resources in a target language are very important.

Assuming you don't know a Slavic language (I don't), take a look Interslavic. I recognize zero words in the example texts. That might make sense to someone who knows one, but it's going to be an uphill battle for me. Honestly I'd rather invest time in something like Russian or Polish because it gives me access to a lot more native speakers, media and literature.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#13

Post by claytonwramsey »

This tracks roughly with my experience learning Esperanto. It's a very cool language with many interesting quirks, but there just aren't a lot of people who speak it, and nearly all of them speak English anyway. I don't regret learning it, but I would probably have been better served by learning another language.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#14

Post by School-Cotton »

adastra22 wrote: post #9
7thaccount wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's true of almost every language though

This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#15

Post by underlipton »

herculity275 wrote: post #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…

It's curious that the quote mentions both Swahili and colloquial Indonesian, but your reply only questions Swahili's fitness (without mentioning Indonesian at all).

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#17

Post by numeri »

herculity275 wrote: post #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…

Swahili and Indonesian are primarily second languages, used as lingua francas amongst large and diverse populations, so linguistic changes are mainly driven by non-native speakers, as opposed to the languages you listed

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#18

Post by zozbot234 »

anthk wrote: post #7
herculity275 wrote: post #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…

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 beyo…

Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#20

Post by materielle »

anthk wrote: post #7
herculity275 wrote: post #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…

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 beyo…

Spanish is easy except for those pesky conjugations.

But, do you know how hard it is to fluidly conjugate into 50 verb forms in spoken speech?

Plus, people gloss over this fact, but Spanish is highly inflected. After you choose 1 out of 50 conjugation for your form, you have to choose a gender for your noun, and inflect your adjectives by number and gender. Conceptually, it’s not difficult. But if you open your mouth and starting try to talk this way you’ll mess up for about the first 5 years.

I can do it. But of course a language which I know seems easy to me!

But point taken that most languages have conjugations + all that other stuff, too.

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