There's an old xkcd comic related to this https://xkcd.com/191/
Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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”.
Don't even think putting Spanish in the same basket of French of German...
French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html 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…
> Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular
I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them.
> Really? Do you have any evidence for this?
Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us).
Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#34> 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…
I think it's true to a point in english as well.
For instance people on reddit (or here?) aren't actually writing as they'd write texts in Alabama or lecture notes in Manchester. English used online tends IMHO to have less classical idioms and less respect (or more avoidance) of the weird rules.
And I assume at some point countries with english as first language sill backport massively crushingly popular memes as idioms and many irregularities will become pedantic instead of the norm. After all it's not that long that English became the linga france, we've yet to see more pronounced changes IMO.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#35There's an old xkcd comic related to this https://xkcd.com/191/
> If you learned to speak lojan, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who learn lojban.
Funny!
So far I've found the Toki Pona community to be extremely friendly
Feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town if you're looking for a TP pen pal :)
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What does it means? EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.
no, 'inflectional language' means that different independent axes of meaning are encoded in a single word. french verbs are inflected for time (present, imperfect, simple past, simple future), mood (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative), number (single, plural), and person (first, second, and third). so 'parler' can be realized as 'parle', 'parles', 'parlons', 'parlez', 'parlent', 'parlais', 'parlait', 'parliez', and so on
https://www.wordreference.com/conj/frverbs.aspx?v=parler lists all of the forms unless there are other inflected forms that are only preserved in literary french
the crucial thing that distinguishes inflections from simple agglutination (where instead of the isolating 'will talk' that english uses, you write the future as 'willtalk') is that they interact. so, for example, second-person plural indicative present 'parler' is 'parlons'. second-person singular indicative present 'parler' is 'parles', pronounced [paRl]. second-person singular indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlais'. so you might guess that second-person plural indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlonais' or 'parlaisons', depending on which order the suffixes go in, but it's not, it's 'parlions'
that's a lot to memorize for a new language learner. there are 36 distinct forms of 'parler' in that page, and the reason 'parler' is used is that it's a regular verb; some verbs have even more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language describes the concept in english and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_flexionnelle in french
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#37Esperanto as "hippie Klingon" is a very neat turn of phrase, even rolls off the tongue perfectly...
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#38> 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
Swahili and Indonesian were primarily second languages, in the 20th century. But now they are very much first languages as people are learning them from childhood simultaneously with their ethnic language.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#39> 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 not dumb simple. A friend transferred a PhD there and could never get to the level of comfortable conversations with her lab mates and had a hell of a time. Same with French or any European language not English to be frank (have German stories as well). So it’s perhaps not a great analogy, and folks who learned a language as kids or are polyglots should recuse themselves from commenting on how easy those languages are to others.
Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What does it means? EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.
By how you accentuate the word while speaking and by context. papá has the accent in the last syllable, while papa in the first.