8 ms·

This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace

This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace. Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it are there.

danieltillett 11y ago
We are going to have the technological equivalent of a Babel fish [1] soon, so we should expect that basically everyone will just learn their native language unless they like learning languages as a hobby. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...
- jes5199 11y ago
  But we don't actually know what having access to a babelfish does to language learning. It's easy to assume it would make learning a second language obsolete, but a counterproposal is that it makes the other language(s) more accessible to learn - for example, I've picked up enough Chinese characters to navigate a Chinese ecommerce site by using Google Translate until I started to recognize patterns myself
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    This is true, but given human nature it unlikely that people will both to go to the effort of learning a second or third language once there is an easier approach.
    - curun1r 11y ago
      Which is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to translate something from an acquired language into your native language not because you don't understand what you're attempting to translate, but because none of the words in your native tongue feel right. But it eventually starts to happen a lot and you realize that there's so much that you weren't able to easily conceptualize because you were constrained by the limits of your native tongue.
      - Swizec 11y ago
        There is an established theory that language shapes your thoughts. If you only know one language, then you are confined to a single way of thinking. Another interesting phenomena is that you are more logical in a 2nd or 3rd language than you are in your mother tongue, where you are more emotional. This can be a useful superpower.
        danieltillett 11y ago
        I have a personal hobby of trying to find one of these thoughts that only can be thought of in one language and not another and I have yet to find one. All modern languages seem to be able to be used to express all human thoughts that can be expressed with any language.
        Swizec 11y ago
        In english it is very common to say that you are a "mommy" or "daddy" of your pet. It sounds normal and acceptable. In Slovenian it sounds like you're a mental patient who thinks they gave birth to a dog. So most people switch to English to express said sentiment since we imported it from US television. Even though we have a direct translation for the word "mommy", all the submeanings do not directly translate. So we sometimes use them as separate different words.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    In Firefox, the Perapera plugin is far easier.
- carlob 11y ago
  I think that with global media we're much closer to having a generation where everybody at least understands English, than getting to the point where automatic translation is pleasant enough that you could read Anna Karenina translated by a machine and find it enjoyable. But then again robots can make cars, yet some people still buy hand-made supercars. So probably translators will have to stick around to translate art.
  - vorg 11y ago
    When a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean talk to each other in English, they often can't understand an American who joins in the conversation. Perhaps Basic English, without nativisms like "stick around".
    - mwcampbell 11y ago
      Maybe we native speakers should consider it an obligation to learn to speak and write in basic English without idioms, phrasal verbs, and other gratuitous features that make the language more difficult for non-native speakers.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Like "consider it"
      - panglott 11y ago
        Sorry, native speakers with language privilege will never give up on the idea that they speak "real" English, and the the "bad" English non-native speakers speak among themselves is anything other than a bastard pidgin. What international business English would need is dictionaries, grammars, lesson courses, and people willing to have their kids speak it INSTEAD OF British- or American-standard English.
- DrScump 11y ago
  [1] should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T... (general note: please use desktop rather than mobile-specific URLs wherever possible. In this case, the mobile fragment identifier gets mishandled on desktop browsers, going to the "Shaltanacs" section instead. The desktop URL with fragment identifier works on mobile and desktop alike.)
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Interesting bug there for wiki. I just checked and the link is broken on mobile for the desktop version too.
- panglott 11y ago
  We will not have a technological Babel fish until we have portable (power-efficient) computers that are both 1. roughly as or more intelligent as a human and 2. understands the world in the same way as a human, including both semantics and pragmatics of such things as humor. This is not anything realistic in anything like the near term. Most of the automated translation software I've used can't even handle something like deixis through a text between two such well-studied and similar languages as English and Spanish. You're talking about a device that could translate between Scots, Tamil, and Huasteca Nahuatl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU
vinay427 11y ago
From what I understand, spoken Chinese is not terribly difficult compared to something like English with its immense number of ambiguous and arcane grammatical structures. The most unique aspect is the use of tones, which at least often results in shorter words. Orthography is a different story, and could be aided by a phonetic script (see Finnish, Korean, or Cyrillic for instance).
- jes5199 11y ago
  yeah, Chinese is heavy on sounds and glyphs unfamiliar to Westerners, but is really light on syntax and grammer. So: high barrier to entry, but not that steep of a learning curve?
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    Chinese speaking: easy. The accent is not particularly harder than any other language. The grammar is mostly simple. Chinese writing: doubles the difficulty of the language. If you think of it, the hardest part of any language is the vocabulary. That is going to take the most time, because there are so many things you need to know. I am still learning vocabulary in my native language. Chinese essentially takes the most difficult (time-consuming) part of the language and doubles it. It's also a very fun part of the language
  - jonathankoren 11y ago
    So many homophones and minimal distance tonal pairs! (Needless to say, puns and word play figure a lot into their humor.) On the other hand, there's no conjugation, no gender, and no pluralizations. So there's that.
- allemagne 11y ago
  Chinese characters aren't totally devoid of phonetic meaning. They are often structured so that their pronunciation is hinted towards. Nevertheless, Chinese people already know pinyin but choose to use characters anyway. You could compare the urgency of completely switching Chinese to a phonetic system to standardizing English spelling or French verb conjugations, but that's ignoring the cultural factor. Overall I'd be very skeptical and suspicious of the view that the Chinese writing system needs to change. Mao Zedong forced a switch to simplified characters on the mainland ostensibly to improve literacy, but the comparably more prosperous and educated Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau seem to be doing just fine with traditional characters. In my view, this switch was a needless violence against Chinese heritage by the CCP and I'd hate to see anything like that repeated without a very very good reason.
jodrellblank 11y ago
Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise. As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are written in it, no road signs are written in it, no maps, nothing to push anyone to learn it. And where not-using-any-agreed-interlanguage does cost, the costs are hidden or swallowed unquestioningly and the consequences brushed aside: "An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year," says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, "but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money." (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided - against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat - to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, "to begin with" (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7)which translates many millions of words a year. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm Translation is expensive. In the oligolingual system, every thousand words in an original text cost US$2030 for translation in seven languages (average for UN and WHO), or more than two dollars per word (Allen, Sibahi and Sohm, 1980, table 7). Such a sum seems more realistic than the figure of 36 cents a word given for the European Union (Rollnick, 1991). Apparently, the European Union translates daily 3,150,000 words, so that translation costs there, in the most conservative estimate, US$ 1,134,000 per day (Rollnick, 1991). The situation is quite different with the two multilingual systems, which rely heavily on translation and interpretation. With simultaneous interpretation, a loss of 10% and a distortion of 2 to 3 % are considered normal. The conditions are such that it is impossible to transmit a speech in another language without gaps and errors while it is being delivered. The interpreter must not only have a good delivery, a perfect mastery of both languages, a quick mind and sharp hearing, he must also be fairly familiar with the subject in order to repeat in the target language everything said in the original using the appropriate technical terminology and without dropping important elements. Such a combination of deep linguistic competence and vast technical knowledge can rarely be found. Hence the large number of inaccurate interpreters noted in UN documents (King, Bryntsev and Sohm, 1977, par. 89 and 94). - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/sociolinguistics.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/sociolinguistic...
wolfgke 11y ago
> Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. One reason is that many 20th-century totalitarian regimes had a problem with Esperanto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-century_totalitarian_regimes_to_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-ce... lists Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, Soviet Union and Imperial Japan.
- josinalvo 11y ago
  Ok. Why the downvotes? Is this untrue? If true, though not a good enough reason by itself, it is very interesting
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    I also don't understand why at the beginning I was downvoted...
- panglott 11y ago
  Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. (IIRC it is widely spoken in China as an alternative to English.) Esperanto is only considered a "failure" in terms of its original goal of becoming the second language of every educated person in the world. Not even any natural language, even such a powerful one as English, has ever achieved anything so ambitious.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    > Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. What evidence do you have the the number of Esperanto speakers are increasing? The best source I could find > http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480 http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480 thinks that this question is very difficult to answer: Depending on the data that one considers the number of Esperanto speaker can be increasing or decreasing (first diagram hints at a strongly decreasing number since about 1990, second at an slowly, but steadily increasing number).
curun1r 11y ago
> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too). Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a lot more successful than Esperanto has been.
- teek 11y ago
  Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.
  - vorg 11y ago
    > conjugation and gender are just as complicated Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?
    - notahacker 11y ago
      Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality. Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's population will be able to pick up muy rapidamente (I have a feeling this is going to end up like the joke about eliminating all the problems with British spelling, which is achieved by progressively turning it into something sounding like comedy German...)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
panglott 11y ago
Support for English is wide but shallow. Compare to indigneous mother tongues where support is narrow but deep, with a small community of committed speakers passing on their language to their children in the face of massive social and institutional pressure from the majority society to abandon it. If English ever came under serious pressure, many would abandon it in an instant.

danieltillett 11y ago

We are going to have the technological equivalent of a Babel fish [1] soon, so we should expect that basically everyone will just learn their native language unless they like learning languages as a hobby. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...

jes5199 11y ago
But we don't actually know what having access to a babelfish does to language learning. It's easy to assume it would make learning a second language obsolete, but a counterproposal is that it makes the other language(s) more accessible to learn - for example, I've picked up enough Chinese characters to navigate a Chinese ecommerce site by using Google Translate until I started to recognize patterns myself
- danieltillett 11y ago
  This is true, but given human nature it unlikely that people will both to go to the effort of learning a second or third language once there is an easier approach.
  - curun1r 11y ago
    Which is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to translate something from an acquired language into your native language not because you don't understand what you're attempting to translate, but because none of the words in your native tongue feel right. But it eventually starts to happen a lot and you realize that there's so much that you weren't able to easily conceptualize because you were constrained by the limits of your native tongue.
    - Swizec 11y ago
      There is an established theory that language shapes your thoughts. If you only know one language, then you are confined to a single way of thinking. Another interesting phenomena is that you are more logical in a 2nd or 3rd language than you are in your mother tongue, where you are more emotional. This can be a useful superpower.
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        I have a personal hobby of trying to find one of these thoughts that only can be thought of in one language and not another and I have yet to find one. All modern languages seem to be able to be used to express all human thoughts that can be expressed with any language.
        Swizec 11y ago
        In english it is very common to say that you are a "mommy" or "daddy" of your pet. It sounds normal and acceptable. In Slovenian it sounds like you're a mental patient who thinks they gave birth to a dog. So most people switch to English to express said sentiment since we imported it from US television. Even though we have a direct translation for the word "mommy", all the submeanings do not directly translate. So we sometimes use them as separate different words.
- mirimir 11y ago
  In Firefox, the Perapera plugin is far easier.
carlob 11y ago
I think that with global media we're much closer to having a generation where everybody at least understands English, than getting to the point where automatic translation is pleasant enough that you could read Anna Karenina translated by a machine and find it enjoyable. But then again robots can make cars, yet some people still buy hand-made supercars. So probably translators will have to stick around to translate art.
- vorg 11y ago
  When a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean talk to each other in English, they often can't understand an American who joins in the conversation. Perhaps Basic English, without nativisms like "stick around".
  - mwcampbell 11y ago
    Maybe we native speakers should consider it an obligation to learn to speak and write in basic English without idioms, phrasal verbs, and other gratuitous features that make the language more difficult for non-native speakers.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Like "consider it"
    - panglott 11y ago
      Sorry, native speakers with language privilege will never give up on the idea that they speak "real" English, and the the "bad" English non-native speakers speak among themselves is anything other than a bastard pidgin. What international business English would need is dictionaries, grammars, lesson courses, and people willing to have their kids speak it INSTEAD OF British- or American-standard English.
DrScump 11y ago
[1] should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T... (general note: please use desktop rather than mobile-specific URLs wherever possible. In this case, the mobile fragment identifier gets mishandled on desktop browsers, going to the "Shaltanacs" section instead. The desktop URL with fragment identifier works on mobile and desktop alike.)
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Interesting bug there for wiki. I just checked and the link is broken on mobile for the desktop version too.
panglott 11y ago
We will not have a technological Babel fish until we have portable (power-efficient) computers that are both 1. roughly as or more intelligent as a human and 2. understands the world in the same way as a human, including both semantics and pragmatics of such things as humor. This is not anything realistic in anything like the near term. Most of the automated translation software I've used can't even handle something like deixis through a text between two such well-studied and similar languages as English and Spanish. You're talking about a device that could translate between Scots, Tamil, and Huasteca Nahuatl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

vinay427 11y ago

From what I understand, spoken Chinese is not terribly difficult compared to something like English with its immense number of ambiguous and arcane grammatical structures. The most unique aspect is the use of tones, which at least often results in shorter words. Orthography is a different story, and could be aided by a phonetic script (see Finnish, Korean, or Cyrillic for instance).

jes5199 11y ago
yeah, Chinese is heavy on sounds and glyphs unfamiliar to Westerners, but is really light on syntax and grammer. So: high barrier to entry, but not that steep of a learning curve?
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Chinese speaking: easy. The accent is not particularly harder than any other language. The grammar is mostly simple. Chinese writing: doubles the difficulty of the language. If you think of it, the hardest part of any language is the vocabulary. That is going to take the most time, because there are so many things you need to know. I am still learning vocabulary in my native language. Chinese essentially takes the most difficult (time-consuming) part of the language and doubles it. It's also a very fun part of the language
- jonathankoren 11y ago
  So many homophones and minimal distance tonal pairs! (Needless to say, puns and word play figure a lot into their humor.) On the other hand, there's no conjugation, no gender, and no pluralizations. So there's that.
allemagne 11y ago
Chinese characters aren't totally devoid of phonetic meaning. They are often structured so that their pronunciation is hinted towards. Nevertheless, Chinese people already know pinyin but choose to use characters anyway. You could compare the urgency of completely switching Chinese to a phonetic system to standardizing English spelling or French verb conjugations, but that's ignoring the cultural factor. Overall I'd be very skeptical and suspicious of the view that the Chinese writing system needs to change. Mao Zedong forced a switch to simplified characters on the mainland ostensibly to improve literacy, but the comparably more prosperous and educated Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau seem to be doing just fine with traditional characters. In my view, this switch was a needless violence against Chinese heritage by the CCP and I'd hate to see anything like that repeated without a very very good reason.

jodrellblank 11y ago

Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise. As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are written in it, no road signs are written in it, no maps, nothing to push anyone to learn it. And where not-using-any-agreed-interlanguage does cost, the costs are hidden or swallowed unquestioningly and the consequences brushed aside: "An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year," says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, "but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money." (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided - against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat - to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, "to begin with" (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7)which translates many millions of words a year. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm Translation is expensive. In the oligolingual system, every thousand words in an original text cost US$2030 for translation in seven languages (average for UN and WHO), or more than two dollars per word (Allen, Sibahi and Sohm, 1980, table 7). Such a sum seems more realistic than the figure of 36 cents a word given for the European Union (Rollnick, 1991). Apparently, the European Union translates daily 3,150,000 words, so that translation costs there, in the most conservative estimate, US$ 1,134,000 per day (Rollnick, 1991). The situation is quite different with the two multilingual systems, which rely heavily on translation and interpretation. With simultaneous interpretation, a loss of 10% and a distortion of 2 to 3 % are considered normal. The conditions are such that it is impossible to transmit a speech in another language without gaps and errors while it is being delivered. The interpreter must not only have a good delivery, a perfect mastery of both languages, a quick mind and sharp hearing, he must also be fairly familiar with the subject in order to repeat in the target language everything said in the original using the appropriate technical terminology and without dropping important elements. Such a combination of deep linguistic competence and vast technical knowledge can rarely be found. Hence the large number of inaccurate interpreters noted in UN documents (King, Bryntsev and Sohm, 1977, par. 89 and 94). - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/sociolinguistics.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/sociolinguistic...

wolfgke 11y ago

> Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. One reason is that many 20th-century totalitarian regimes had a problem with Esperanto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-century_totalitarian_regimes_to_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-ce... lists Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, Soviet Union and Imperial Japan.

josinalvo 11y ago
Ok. Why the downvotes? Is this untrue? If true, though not a good enough reason by itself, it is very interesting
- wolfgke 11y ago
  I also don't understand why at the beginning I was downvoted...
panglott 11y ago
Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. (IIRC it is widely spoken in China as an alternative to English.) Esperanto is only considered a "failure" in terms of its original goal of becoming the second language of every educated person in the world. Not even any natural language, even such a powerful one as English, has ever achieved anything so ambitious.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. What evidence do you have the the number of Esperanto speakers are increasing? The best source I could find > http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480 http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480 thinks that this question is very difficult to answer: Depending on the data that one considers the number of Esperanto speaker can be increasing or decreasing (first diagram hints at a strongly decreasing number since about 1990, second at an slowly, but steadily increasing number).

curun1r 11y ago

> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too). Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a lot more successful than Esperanto has been.

teek 11y ago
Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.
- vorg 11y ago
  > conjugation and gender are just as complicated Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality. Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's population will be able to pick up muy rapidamente (I have a feeling this is going to end up like the joke about eliminating all the problems with British spelling, which is achieved by progressively turning it into something sounding like comedy German...)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

panglott 11y ago

Support for English is wide but shallow. Compare to indigneous mother tongues where support is narrow but deep, with a small community of committed speakers passing on their language to their children in the face of massive social and institutional pressure from the majority society to abandon it. If English ever came under serious pressure, many would abandon it in an instant.