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Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

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Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#41

Post by Taikonerd »

> His advice is to spend just a few weeks learning and having conversations in Esperanto, so that you can feel the experience of detaching from your mother tongue. Then you’ll be better-prepared to go learn the language you really want to learn.

Ah, the Paderborn method: [0]. If you only speak your native tongue, and you want to learn another language, first learn Esperanto, then learn your target language. You'll actually learn the target language faster than if you had studied it straight away!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#42

Post by yorwba »

msla wrote: post #8
myth2018 wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

I think it's technically true that someone in China at one point used Esperanto to introduce Western languages to a few other people, because around 1900 it was part of a package of futuristic Western ideas like overthrowing the Emperor and Communism.

But the claim omits how utterly unsuccessful Chinese Esperantists were at their goal compared to the revolutionary Communists. (Even though they were sometimes the same people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi )

For comparison, a few years after Zamenhof started Esperanto, Paul von Möllendorf (a German aristocrat working as a customs official in Shanghai) suggested in his Manchu grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar that Westerners should study Manchu as an easier introduction to the Chinese classics, the Chinese Emperor at the time being ethnically Manchu. Then the Emperor got deposed and by now the last native Manchu speakers have probably all died of old age. Learning Manchu in order to learn Chinese would be a collosal waste of time.

Chinese Esperantists that I know don't really seem to make fewer or different mistakes when using Esperanto than when using English. The marking of tenses with -is, -as, -os may be perfectly regular, but that doesn't help much when grammatical tense itself is a foreign concept to you. Someone who usually uses present tense in English when talking about the past will tend to also use present tense in Esperanto when talking about the past.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#43

Post by kragen »

zarzavat wrote: post #38
numeri wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

perhaps we should qualify the claim by pointing out that 20th-century swahili and indonesian are simpler than creoles, but have now been replaced by more complex creoles

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#44

Post by adastra22 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #14
adastra22 wrote: post #9

Earlier 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”.

Spanish and German pronunciation are extraordinarily regular, German in particular. Its spelling is regularly updated, most recently just a few years ago.

If you are getting fixed up on the one letter = one sound designation (which could be interpreted just as well to apply to German, and almost to Spanish, where one combination of letter always gives the same sound), then this is disingenuous pedantry.

English is pretty unique in not having rigid rules for pronunciation as spelling is typically retained from loan languages.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#45

Post by prmoustache »

kragen wrote: post #36
prmoustache wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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', 'p…

ok but as a native french speaker I find spanish much more intuitive than french. We french people have in common with german people in that we struggle with some sounds like the 'r' but that is the only real struggle when learning spanish. The rest is fairly easy. Everything is pronounced the way it is written.

However spanish people suffer much more than us when learning french because we don't pronounce words the way we write them in a reliable way and we have so many sounds that are so close to them spanish speaking people don't see the difference.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#46

Post by kragen »

anthk wrote: post #32
School-Cotton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not

french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple

english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#47

Post by Jun8 »

For some reason the topic of language brings up a lot of folk theories, half truths, and downright errors. This is not a bad thing, I think a lot of people are fascinated by language and want to understand it on a deeper level. There are many excellent books on the topic.if you’re on Audible, I strongly suggest Mc Whorter’s Language Families course: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of.... He’s an expert on African languages and his coverage of those are excellent from an introductory pov.

“My language-teaching polyglot friend Benny Lewis said that if you’ve never really spoken another language, then the best strategy is to start with the easiest possible language to learn, which is Esperanto”

The advice here is very context dependent. Esperanto was based on European languages, so would be easy for a person already speaking one; if not than not. Also, the concept of “easiest possible language” of course is ill-defined and learner dependent. If you’re interested in artificial languages one interesting book is Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language.

If I were pressed to pick an easy to learn language I’d say learn a creole language, which are relatively simplified. This is where Sivers was going with the Swahili idea, I think: although Swahili is not a creole language (https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4lq80i/why_isn...) contact by different populations tend to simplify complex language features. Same can be said about English, perhaps, it’s grammar and gender system is ssiplified but of course there’s the notorious spelling problem.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#48

Post by perlclutcher »

makeitdouble wrote: post #34
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…

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 idi…

[dead]

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#49

Post by thriftwy »

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…

Russian has a huge population of native Russian speakers who understand all lexical, grammatic and phonetic quirks of their language. Then they call the shots.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#50

Post by kragen »

prmoustache wrote: post #45
kragen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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', 'p…

ok but as a native french speaker I find spanish much more intuitive than french. We french people have in common with german people in that we struggle with some sounds like the 'r' but that is the only real struggle when learning spanish. The rest is fairly easy. Everything is pronounced the way it is written. However spanish people suffer much more than us when learning french because we don't pronounce words the…

it's still a lot to memorize to get started, and as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if your background is an isolating language like chinese, the entire concept of inflection is going to be an unnecessary obstacle

also, you're only talking about the most surface aspects of learning a language

in general pretty much every natural spoken language is equally difficult to learn, because if it's easier than what an average person can learn in their first five years of life, its speakers will invent new complexities that allow them to communicate more eloquently and efficiently. sometimes those complexities are very obvious like a larger inventory of phonemes (french has a lot of vowels, spanish doesn't), sometimes they're slightly more subtle (larger vocabularies, less regular inflection, phrasal verbs, higher segmental rate), and sometimes they're very subtle indeed (a larger inventory of idiomatic expressions, a greater cultural expectation that you will recognize literary allusions)

but about the same amount of complexity is are always there. conlangs and pidgins can avoid them (until they become native languages, as swahili and indonesian are, and i know someone who was raised speaking esperanto) and written languages aren't constrained by them because they don't rely on native language acquisition mechanisms

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