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Esperanto has certainly caught on. It just hasn't been more successful than English has been, which was always kind of a ridiculous goal anyway. Many of the re

Esperanto has certainly caught on. It just hasn't been more successful than English has been, which was always kind of a ridiculous goal anyway. Many of the reasons people give for learning a language are highly ideological and often propaganda. "no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. There is more to a language than network effects; languages tie together families and communities. If you are the kind of person who likes Esperanto and the company of Esperantists (open-minded, internationalist, cosmopolitan) appeals to you, then that is reason enough to speak it. Languages have carrots and sticks driving people to learn them. But then, languages that have sticks are usually using them to beat the snot out of minority groups in order to assimilate them to the national state. Esperanto has only carrots, such as a rich literature (some translated into English) and plenty of maps. The primary function of the United Nations is to prevent large-scale interstate wars. Translation is a small price to pay for that, and certainly less costly than trying to force everyone in the world to use and understand a single language. It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language?

jodrellblank 11y ago
Esperanto has certainly caught on - well it hasn't died out, I'll give it that. And you can probably do more things and more varied things in Esperanto than many niche regional languages, particularly online ( https://www.reddit.com/r/esperante https://www.reddit.com/r/esperante ktp.) . But it hasn't caught on in any official sense, it's learned and used by people who want to learn and use it, not by any big formal groups who think it is the fairest, the cheapest, the most reasonable, the xyz-est option for them, or because they think providing their non-Esperanto related services in Esperanto would be useful to their customers or profitable for their business. "no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. - That's a view I haven't considered before, but I might go with it for regional languages; if you ignore a regional language with few speakers then you are ignoring those people - but even native Esperantists speak another native language as well, and most people speak a native language better than they speak EO. So ignoring it because "nobody speaks it" doesn't close off communication completely from any one person, it just changes the lines of which languages could connect you to different people. Esperanto has only carrots - an apt analogy, when English has Hollywood films, the hyperstimulus of carrot cake spiced latte, to literature's austere plain carrot. EO might have only carrots, but it doesn't have a killer-app carrot. Say it was the ... language of extreme sports - how many people would want to pick it up then? It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language? - I could quote a lot more of Claude Piron's essay which I linked, but the whole thing is quite interesting. He certainly wasn't arguing for forcing everyone to learn English, he was for forcing English native speakers to learn Esperanto (or potentially something similar), as well as everyone else learning it, out of a kind of idealism for fairness and equality and putting everyone on a more level playing field as far as communication goes, as much as for just money saving. (Something I think wouldn't really work).

jodrellblank 11y ago

Esperanto has certainly caught on - well it hasn't died out, I'll give it that. And you can probably do more things and more varied things in Esperanto than many niche regional languages, particularly online ( https://www.reddit.com/r/esperante https://www.reddit.com/r/esperante ktp.) . But it hasn't caught on in any official sense, it's learned and used by people who want to learn and use it, not by any big formal groups who think it is the fairest, the cheapest, the most reasonable, the xyz-est option for them, or because they think providing their non-Esperanto related services in Esperanto would be useful to their customers or profitable for their business. "no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. - That's a view I haven't considered before, but I might go with it for regional languages; if you ignore a regional language with few speakers then you are ignoring those people - but even native Esperantists speak another native language as well, and most people speak a native language better than they speak EO. So ignoring it because "nobody speaks it" doesn't close off communication completely from any one person, it just changes the lines of which languages could connect you to different people. Esperanto has only carrots - an apt analogy, when English has Hollywood films, the hyperstimulus of carrot cake spiced latte, to literature's austere plain carrot. EO might have only carrots, but it doesn't have a killer-app carrot. Say it was the ... language of extreme sports - how many people would want to pick it up then? It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language? - I could quote a lot more of Claude Piron's essay which I linked, but the whole thing is quite interesting. He certainly wasn't arguing for forcing everyone to learn English, he was for forcing English native speakers to learn Esperanto (or potentially something similar), as well as everyone else learning it, out of a kind of idealism for fairness and equality and putting everyone on a more level playing field as far as communication goes, as much as for just money saving. (Something I think wouldn't really work).