12 ms·

Esperanto: the language that never was

81 points by samclemens 10y ago

Apocryphon 10y ago
I've been trying out different Romance languages, and have heard that learning Esperanto makes learning such languages easier. Does anyone know if that's true or not?
- benbreen 10y ago
  Honestly, for your purposes it sounds like learning basic Latin would be a much better choice. Having Latin syntax and vocab in the back of my mind definitely helped when I was learning French and Portuguese (even though my Latin is terrible, just knowing things like verb conjugations helped a lot with seeing the patterns in what initially looked like arbitrary differences between the two languages).
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    Being native in German I found having to learn Latin in school didn't help me in any sense for French, Spanish or Portuguese. If you like Latin, feel free to learn it. But I consider it as a waste of time, in particular if you just want it to learn as a foundation for modern foreign languages.
    - barking 10y ago
      Makes sense to me what you say. People often say that knowing latin is good if you want to study medicine. It's ridiculous. Learning a list of 100 relevant latin root-words would likely achieve as much.
- clw8 10y ago
  Just keep doing what you're doing. Sounds like you're pretty motivated, so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your time. Highly recommend reading Wikipedia articles to give perspective about how the languages developed from Latin.
  - vintermann 10y ago
    so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your time. This is bad advice. People grossly underestimate the effort to learn ONE language, never mind two related ones at the same time. You will probably not succeed at learning a new language unless you have a pressing, extrinsic reason to. Self-study language courses have dropout rates north of 98%. Even in an educational setting with young people (better at learning languages than older ones), it's only about 20% who progress beyond the bare beginner stage. Esperanto is MAYBE easy enough to learn from only curiosity and dedication... but I am aware that "eternaj komencantoj" is an expression in Esperanto-land.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      Depends what your goal is. If you want to be able to speak/write one or more romance languages correctly, then it's probably bad advice. If the goal is to be able to have a rough understanding and be able to make yourself understood, then I'm not so sure. My French is passable, and it made picking up enough Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words that I can slowly work my way through many types of text in those languages a lot easier. Not least because my French teacher made a point of explaining how French vocabulary related to Spanish and English - just the habit of recognising which sounds are related in different languages helps tremendously in recognising words without having to explicitly learn them in each language. I don't use any of that much and certainly not enough to justify spending a lot of time learning to speak more languages flawlessly, but it's been helpful in many occasions.
TwoBit 10y ago
Esperanto's design may have been a good idea 100 years ago. But its design is too shortsighted for this modern world. All it solves is spelling and pronunciation problems, when it could do so much more.
- honua 10y ago
  Well, like what?
- vintermann 10y ago
  The coordination problem - agreeing on what what language to agree on - is by far the largest problem with the good idea of an easy auxiliary language (assuming it's a good idea). Any advantages you could get from an esperanto that isn't Esperanto, are trumped by the fact that Esperanto exists - such as it is.
- pathsjs 10y ago
  Not quite. It also has a very regular grammar, handles regular composition of words (skribmaŝino, bovido, ...), regular formation of words like [nowhere, someone, whatever], simplifies the formation of verb tenses (also handling things like the future of the past which do not exist in other languages), has a choice of roots that makes it familiar for people knowing any indoeuropean language, and more
cloudjacker 10y ago
Its a pretty cool phenomenom
LeoPanthera 10y ago
Interlingua is designed to be understandable by anyone who speaks one of a few common European languages. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
- geowwy 10y ago
  There is also Folkspraak which does the same thing but with Germanic languages instead of Latin languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkspraak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkspraak If you speak English it's pretty easy to get the gist of both. Interlingua Patre nostre, qui es in le celos, que tu nomine sia sanctificate; que tu regno veni; que tu voluntate sia facite como in le celo, etiam super le terra. Folkspraak Ons Fater, whem leven in der Himmel, Mai din Name werden helig, Mai din Konigdom kommen, Mai din will werden, in der Erd und in der Himmel.
  - vintermann 10y ago
    I recommend Arika Orkent's "In the land of invented languages" for people who are interested in the history of invented languages. Esperanto is still the only which is in any sort of regular use, though.
    - lmm 10y ago
      Klingon now has more speakers than Esperanto, no?
      - memsom 10y ago
        Good question. I'd hope "no", but the best I have is "possibly".
      - arundelo 10y ago
        Esperanto has way way more speakers than Klingon. "Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1] "In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2] "As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers
jalami 10y ago
I like the idea around Lojban[0]. Esperanto feels like another standard to replace the 99 others where lojban seems to be more than that. I don't like inconsistency in structured language and there's always glaring inconsistency in natural spoken language. If I learn a linguistic rule that is only applicable in ~70% of cases, its becomes a mental stressor. However, I'm not certain any secondary language can ever really become a universal language. Until there's direct economic force behind adoption, I see it as a hobby language. I am also not sure any constructed language can remain pure when it becomes popular. Languages, dialects, idioms etc. like to drift between isolated or semi-isolated groups. As communication and transportation become cheaper though, who knows how prevalent that will be in the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
- pathsjs 10y ago
  Where do you find Esperanto inconsistent?
  - iso-8859-1 10y ago
    Esperanto is a compromise since it tries to be familiar AND logical. The word ovaro "collection of eggs" pointlessly duplicates the meaning of nesto "nest". From: http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm
    - thomasfoster96 10y ago
      What makes you think 'nest' and 'collection of eggs' are synonyms? True, it's common for a collection of eggs to be found in a nest, but they don't mean the same thing.
  - jalami 10y ago
    I haven't looked into how Esperanto is inconsistent and I'm sure it's very consistent compared to modern languages. I think the two are built on two different paradigms though. Esperanto seems to be a language built for easy adoption. The grammar and vocabulary seem to be a somewhat fair mixture of popular natural languages with the hope for easier adoption. A claim I've heard is that someone that knows Chinese or English would be able to communicate effectively in Esperanto in four months. I see the goal of Lojban being different. Lojban's grammar is based on predicate logic with the intent being a syntactically unambiguous language. This makes it more like a programming language than a natural language. The two bleed into each other often since Lojban's root-words are similar to those in popular natural languages and Esperanto is a constructed language with a simple grammar so it's naturally (artificially?) much more consistent than current spoken languages. I just think Lojban's goal is more interesting than Esperanto's despite honestly feeling like Esperanto is better suited to be a natural language replacement. Esperanto certainly has more resources and support. I'm no linguist and I've only superficially researched either so spare me if I'm being unintentionally disingenuous to either camp or misinterpreted their claims.
barking 10y ago
Too lazy to check if it's still a thing but iirc way back there used to be shortwave radio programmes in esperanto
- urubu 10y ago
  China Radio International still has daily transmissions on shortwave. I listened to one yesterday night, as it happens.
  - barking 10y ago
    I am impressed by both you and china radio. Are you part of a community of esperanto speakers or is it a solitary pursuit?
    - urubu 10y ago
      Listening to languages I'm vaguely familiar with - I also like the BBC in Persian and Hausa - seems to have become part of my evening routine (I work as a technical translator). I learned Esperanto on a whim in uni in the 80s but haven't used it actively ever since.
INTPenis 10y ago
It's a wonderful and practical idea to try and standardize language, albeit a naive one. IMO it's pointless to try and debate the design of esperanto, or any other forced language. Because it's just that, it's forced. I just don't believe you can force a language on people. Languages are as naturally ocurring as anything else in nature. They evolve organically. If we were hypothetically able to force esperanto on a part of the populace then that very same populace would evolve the language and the wordlists would be rewritten by the people introducing new words.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > I just don't believe you can force a language on people. Forcing English on large parts of the world seems to have worked very well. ;)
  - olakease 10y ago
    Only for the native english speakers. Others we must do a tremendous effort. Even worse, in a discussion —because you are not native— you feel always weaker. So my point will be for a non natural language. Easy to learn for everybody so we all play with the same rules. [EDIT] The idea is not to replace natural languages, but to pick an extra non-natural language as an international one
    - avar 10y ago
      As a non-native English speaker I think this is a horrible idea. So rather than for us to all communicate in English which is spoken natively by around half a billion, you'd rather international communication take place in a language nobody speaks natively? That seems like a horrible idea. When the lingua franca is some common natively spoken language at least people who can confidently correct you exist. Having everyone speak a non-native language would just lead to a regression towards the mean, and such a language would be much harder to learn than any existing language because it wouldn't come with a culture. There would be very few books, movies etc. in that language.
isidor3 10y ago
Ithkuil is my favorite conlang, it has an amazing amount of depth that can be presented in surprisingly few syllables. It was designed to be a sort of uber-language. Have the most amount of information in the least number of syllables while allowing absolutely no ambiguity. It also attempts to be somewhat tailored to map to how we naturally think about concepts, and a lot of information you have to get from context in languages like English are made explicit in the grammatical forms of the language. I think the grammar of it is really something special, however, it was never designed to be either learnable or really even speakable, which is a shame. I think given the right overcoat the grammar could form the base of a surprisingly usable language.
zeemonkee3 10y ago
To what extent are many languages today "artificial"? Modern Hebrew was resurrected from a language unspoken for millennia outside of religious services and given an up-to-date vocabulary. Shakespeare and Elias Lonnrot invented thousands of everyday words used today in English and Finnish respectively. Standard German and Italian are products of their unification/nationalist movements, supplanting old regional dialects, as is the Greek Katharevousa (official language until 1976). Esperanto and other conlangs are more an extreme case, but there's surprisingly little that's "natural" about the "natural" languages either.
- eivarv 10y ago
  I'd argue that this is because "natural" and "unnatural" or "artificial" are poorly defined (and usually useless) terms.
- gkya 10y ago
  Most standardised languages are sorts of conlangs. I can be a testimone for Turkish, where the language was cleared from persian and arabic loanwords by very oppressing revolutionary govt action. So much so that one generation had difficult time talking to grandparents, they say.
  - zeemonkee3 10y ago
    Moving to the Latin alphabet must have been quite a shift as well.
    - gkya 10y ago
      Certainly, though widespread literacy was a thing of the republican era. And the old script and the language was abolished and not taught in the schools, so it only lives among historians (unlike latin and ancient greek which is studied a bit in European tertiary schools).
  - brian_cloutier 10y ago
    To add to this, I met someone who claims she cannot read Neitzsche because she doesn't know most of the terms recent Turkish translations use and can't find any older translations.
yoz-y 10y ago
One big problem I see with many of these artificial languages is that they do not put the ease of pronunciation at the topmost priority. I think it would be interesting to make a study on what sounds can anybody produce. It is also important to study the different subtleties that people perceive as different sounds. For example in my experience the Chinese have a hard time understanding you if you mangle the different tones they use for vowels, however they completely ignore the 'length' of a tone which is very often used to distinguish words in the slavic languages.
- yoplait_ 10y ago
  Esperanto is very easy to pronounce even for Chinese
  - yoz-y 10y ago
    But is it for Japanese? In general I think that an artificial language should never put two consonants together.
    - yoplait_ 10y ago
      I only have second-hand accounts from proselytes, and they say esperanto is nowhere as bad as English for Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Just google around if you want to read from them. English is so difficult to pronounce correctly than my prior is to believe them.
      - talideon 10y ago
        One infamous example being the consonant car crash that is 'strengths'.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - tokenadult 10y ago
    廢話。How many native speakers of various Chinese languages do you know how converse with you regularly in Esperanto? The phonological system of Esperanto is noticeably worse than that of English for native speakers of Chinese to acquire.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Studies have shown Esperanto is a useful aide for teaching languages. For example, teach students Esperanto for 1 year and French for 3 years, and they end up speaking French better than the group who just learned French for 4 years. Learning one language makes learning other languages easier, and as a constructed language, Esperanto is very regular and thus easy to learn. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Espera...
- jmfayard 10y ago
  That's important because IMHO the most important point in the language debate is that we must become much more efficient language learners. A part of my experience is that people start with grossly inefficient methods to speak foreign languages. Spend way too much time. Discard it as too difficult or not worth it. Another part of my experience is that speaking a foreign languages is actually totally doable. We human beings are naturally skilled at it. So what about esperanto? (One my languages). There is still this misconception (also in this comments section) that it had the goal to do to existing languages what the euro did to existing currencies. That would have been silly, fortunately it has been a non-goal from the start. What makes much more sense is that since it has a much nicer learning curve, young people and monoglots can use it as a testbed to get how to learn a language. Then reach much quicker a level where they can have a casual conversation in that or those other languages they are interested in. That strategy work actually quite well, but require a non-conformist mind. People have a malthusian approach to language learning and _will_ tell you that you are just being silly.
jhbadger 10y ago
Esperanto was the first (beyond my native, obviously) language I learned about twenty years ago. What I enjoyed about it then (and still do today, although I've learned a couple of natural languages since) was that I could learn it to a useful level (as in reading novels without a dictionary) in probably a couple of hundred hours. I still haven't managed that in other languages with much more study even in ones where I have reasonable conversational ability. To use a hacker's analogy, learning a natural language is like learning C++, and learning Esperanto is like learning a scripting language like Ruby or Python.
- gkya 10y ago
  That's mostly about how you study. My approach is sort of Lisp-like, and I become comfortable very early on with a mostly exploratory and immersive process.
tokenadult 10y ago
There are two different ways to treat Esperanto, both of which come up in the comments. One way is to take Esperanto seriously as a proposal for a world auxiliary language that people from all over the world can use for intercommunication if they didn't grow up speaking a common native language. This first way of treating Esperanto for discussion immediately runs into practical issues and real-world trade-offs. As the article kindly submitted here for our discussion notes, "Because, of course, the massive, trumpeting, stamping, ear-flapping, blanka elefanto in the room is… English; English; English; the English language; the widespread global adoption thereof." It is already well known that the plurality of daily use of English around the world is use of English as an "interlanguage," communicating among persons who are not all native speakers of English, including millions of conversations a day in English that don't include any native speakers of English.[1] I have personally overheard hundreds of conversations in English in multiple countries among people who didn't grow up speaking English, and English is of course the interlanguage of online discussion sites such as Hacker News. (I have also overheard, and participated in, many hundreds of conversations in Modern Standard Chinese that include no native speakers of that language, as Chinese is my most proficient second language.) For practical value for a language learner, incentives matter. People respond to incentives in deciding which languages to learn, and how attentive to be to opportunities to learn languages. And more opportunity to learn, with more sound recordings to listen to and more texts to read, makes it easier to learn a language. The pervasiveness of English all over the world makes English an easy language to learn--I'm not kidding. Precisely because hundreds of millions of people use English every day as an "interlanguage," English is quite "fault tolerant," full of social conventions about how to get around people with a beginning command of the language communicating with one another, including officially adopted controlled vocabularies for occupations like seafaring.[2] (Again, Modern Standard Chinese is similar in that poorly pronounced Mandarin Chinese is an actual lingua franca in many parts of southern China.) English-language daily newspapers abound all over the world, English-language videos number in the millions on YouTube, many recorded by second-language speakers of English, and English-language books and advertisements make up the plurality of the world's books and advertisements. Languages spread around the world mostly by people using them or not for practical purposes. The majority of the settlement of the interior of North America by Europeans was done by Europeans who were not native speakers of English. (For example, both of my maternal grandparents, both of whom were born in Great Plains states, grew up in German-speaking families and had all of their schooling in the German language.) The freedom of the United States included a freedom to speak whatever language people pleased. (Abraham Lincoln funded German-language newspapers to help his presidential campaign, and Theodore Roosevelt campaigned in English, German, and French, the three languages he knew from childhood, in various places in the United States.) English was the customary language of governance in the United States, and still is not official at the federal level, but mostly English won out in the world's third most populous country because it was a common language that immigrants from a variety of places could use to communicate with one another (as happened in my paternal ancestral line). The huge population base of native speakers of English (in the following generations) in the United States who still had family ties to other countries provides English with a great advantage in spreading around the world. Another way to treat Esperanto is to take it as a hobby, an exploration of the characteristics of a constructed language. Many language hobbyists have explored Esperanto from that point of view,[3] as I have. For a hobby language, the main criterion is fun, and I do not judge anyone else's opinion about what is fun. I don't waste my time in online discussion debating whether coin collection or knitting is a better hobby, for example. To each their own in hobbies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_global_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak [3] http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/
dctoedt 10y ago
Esperanto's underlying desire for language simplification is still worth keeping in mind. Perhaps a standardized, simplified, "minimum viable English" could be identified and declared to be socially acceptable "because we say so." Non-native speakers might find such an MVE to be easier to learn and more comfortable to use. The easy part would be to develop a set of tweaks to the more-arcane grammatical- and spelling rules of English, using crowd-sourced suggestions. For example --- and as a language purist it pains me deeply to say this: + Allow they and their (and even there) to be used as singular generic pronouns; so, for example, Any student can learn to speak English if they put there mind to it. + Allow there to be used as a possessive (vice their). + Allow consistent apostrophes for possessives; so, for example, The spread of English is hindered by some of it's fussy rules (which in currently-standard usage is incorrect). This might be a useful project for someone working in linguistics: Collect and organize real-world examples of how people actually use English in non-standard ways, then propose a subset of those examples as MVE. The hard part would be convincing the world that it's just as socially acceptable to speak and write MVE as it is to speak and write "standard" English.
- dempseye 10y ago
  Similar work has been done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
  - vintermann 10y ago
    A common accusation against Esperanto is that a lot of the complexity it takes away from grammar, it sneaks back in the form of idioms - but that's nothing to Basic English.
Nadya 10y ago
The only flaw with Esperanto is that it is a language. Languages hate staying still unless they're dead. I say this as someone who spent several months studying Esperanto and holding a few conversations. :) I treated it more as a "springboard" to language learning. Learning a second language is tough - learning a third language less so! So picking an easy second language, I found, helped speed up language acquisition (which was my goal). Languages naturally change over time as the population invents slangs and irregulars, typically out of laziness. Certain vowels will be mixed or slurred, parts of words might change entirely, etc. Even if Esperanto was taught to every individual as a second language - various regions would invent their own slangs based on the "native language of the region". Borrowing loanwords from their parent language and creating various dialects of Esperanto that may or may not be understandable with other dialects to varying degrees. I highly recommend learning Esperanto to anyone interested in learning a second language - to use it as a springboard to your third.

81 points by samclemens 10y ago

I've been trying out different Romance languages, and have heard that learning Esperanto makes learning such languages easier. Does anyone know if that's true or not?

benbreen 10y ago
Honestly, for your purposes it sounds like learning basic Latin would be a much better choice. Having Latin syntax and vocab in the back of my mind definitely helped when I was learning French and Portuguese (even though my Latin is terrible, just knowing things like verb conjugations helped a lot with seeing the patterns in what initially looked like arbitrary differences between the two languages).
- wolfgke 10y ago
  Being native in German I found having to learn Latin in school didn't help me in any sense for French, Spanish or Portuguese. If you like Latin, feel free to learn it. But I consider it as a waste of time, in particular if you just want it to learn as a foundation for modern foreign languages.
  - barking 10y ago
    Makes sense to me what you say. People often say that knowing latin is good if you want to study medicine. It's ridiculous. Learning a list of 100 relevant latin root-words would likely achieve as much.
clw8 10y ago
Just keep doing what you're doing. Sounds like you're pretty motivated, so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your time. Highly recommend reading Wikipedia articles to give perspective about how the languages developed from Latin.
- vintermann 10y ago
  so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your time. This is bad advice. People grossly underestimate the effort to learn ONE language, never mind two related ones at the same time. You will probably not succeed at learning a new language unless you have a pressing, extrinsic reason to. Self-study language courses have dropout rates north of 98%. Even in an educational setting with young people (better at learning languages than older ones), it's only about 20% who progress beyond the bare beginner stage. Esperanto is MAYBE easy enough to learn from only curiosity and dedication... but I am aware that "eternaj komencantoj" is an expression in Esperanto-land.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Depends what your goal is. If you want to be able to speak/write one or more romance languages correctly, then it's probably bad advice. If the goal is to be able to have a rough understanding and be able to make yourself understood, then I'm not so sure. My French is passable, and it made picking up enough Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words that I can slowly work my way through many types of text in those languages a lot easier. Not least because my French teacher made a point of explaining how French vocabulary related to Spanish and English - just the habit of recognising which sounds are related in different languages helps tremendously in recognising words without having to explicitly learn them in each language. I don't use any of that much and certainly not enough to justify spending a lot of time learning to speak more languages flawlessly, but it's been helpful in many occasions.

TwoBit 10y ago

Esperanto's design may have been a good idea 100 years ago. But its design is too shortsighted for this modern world. All it solves is spelling and pronunciation problems, when it could do so much more.

honua 10y ago
Well, like what?
vintermann 10y ago
The coordination problem - agreeing on what what language to agree on - is by far the largest problem with the good idea of an easy auxiliary language (assuming it's a good idea). Any advantages you could get from an esperanto that isn't Esperanto, are trumped by the fact that Esperanto exists - such as it is.
pathsjs 10y ago
Not quite. It also has a very regular grammar, handles regular composition of words (skribmaŝino, bovido, ...), regular formation of words like [nowhere, someone, whatever], simplifies the formation of verb tenses (also handling things like the future of the past which do not exist in other languages), has a choice of roots that makes it familiar for people knowing any indoeuropean language, and more

cloudjacker 10y ago

Its a pretty cool phenomenom

LeoPanthera 10y ago

Interlingua is designed to be understandable by anyone who speaks one of a few common European languages. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

geowwy 10y ago
There is also Folkspraak which does the same thing but with Germanic languages instead of Latin languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkspraak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkspraak If you speak English it's pretty easy to get the gist of both. Interlingua Patre nostre, qui es in le celos, que tu nomine sia sanctificate; que tu regno veni; que tu voluntate sia facite como in le celo, etiam super le terra. Folkspraak Ons Fater, whem leven in der Himmel, Mai din Name werden helig, Mai din Konigdom kommen, Mai din will werden, in der Erd und in der Himmel.
- vintermann 10y ago
  I recommend Arika Orkent's "In the land of invented languages" for people who are interested in the history of invented languages. Esperanto is still the only which is in any sort of regular use, though.
  - lmm 10y ago
    Klingon now has more speakers than Esperanto, no?
    - memsom 10y ago
      Good question. I'd hope "no", but the best I have is "possibly".
    - arundelo 10y ago
      Esperanto has way way more speakers than Klingon. "Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1] "In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2] "As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers

jalami 10y ago

I like the idea around Lojban[0]. Esperanto feels like another standard to replace the 99 others where lojban seems to be more than that. I don't like inconsistency in structured language and there's always glaring inconsistency in natural spoken language. If I learn a linguistic rule that is only applicable in ~70% of cases, its becomes a mental stressor. However, I'm not certain any secondary language can ever really become a universal language. Until there's direct economic force behind adoption, I see it as a hobby language. I am also not sure any constructed language can remain pure when it becomes popular. Languages, dialects, idioms etc. like to drift between isolated or semi-isolated groups. As communication and transportation become cheaper though, who knows how prevalent that will be in the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

pathsjs 10y ago
Where do you find Esperanto inconsistent?
- iso-8859-1 10y ago
  Esperanto is a compromise since it tries to be familiar AND logical. The word ovaro "collection of eggs" pointlessly duplicates the meaning of nesto "nest". From: http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm
  - thomasfoster96 10y ago
    What makes you think 'nest' and 'collection of eggs' are synonyms? True, it's common for a collection of eggs to be found in a nest, but they don't mean the same thing.
- jalami 10y ago
  I haven't looked into how Esperanto is inconsistent and I'm sure it's very consistent compared to modern languages. I think the two are built on two different paradigms though. Esperanto seems to be a language built for easy adoption. The grammar and vocabulary seem to be a somewhat fair mixture of popular natural languages with the hope for easier adoption. A claim I've heard is that someone that knows Chinese or English would be able to communicate effectively in Esperanto in four months. I see the goal of Lojban being different. Lojban's grammar is based on predicate logic with the intent being a syntactically unambiguous language. This makes it more like a programming language than a natural language. The two bleed into each other often since Lojban's root-words are similar to those in popular natural languages and Esperanto is a constructed language with a simple grammar so it's naturally (artificially?) much more consistent than current spoken languages. I just think Lojban's goal is more interesting than Esperanto's despite honestly feeling like Esperanto is better suited to be a natural language replacement. Esperanto certainly has more resources and support. I'm no linguist and I've only superficially researched either so spare me if I'm being unintentionally disingenuous to either camp or misinterpreted their claims.

barking 10y ago

Too lazy to check if it's still a thing but iirc way back there used to be shortwave radio programmes in esperanto

urubu 10y ago
China Radio International still has daily transmissions on shortwave. I listened to one yesterday night, as it happens.
- barking 10y ago
  I am impressed by both you and china radio. Are you part of a community of esperanto speakers or is it a solitary pursuit?
  - urubu 10y ago
    Listening to languages I'm vaguely familiar with - I also like the BBC in Persian and Hausa - seems to have become part of my evening routine (I work as a technical translator). I learned Esperanto on a whim in uni in the 80s but haven't used it actively ever since.

INTPenis 10y ago

It's a wonderful and practical idea to try and standardize language, albeit a naive one. IMO it's pointless to try and debate the design of esperanto, or any other forced language. Because it's just that, it's forced. I just don't believe you can force a language on people. Languages are as naturally ocurring as anything else in nature. They evolve organically. If we were hypothetically able to force esperanto on a part of the populace then that very same populace would evolve the language and the wordlists would be rewritten by the people introducing new words.

majewsky 10y ago
> I just don't believe you can force a language on people. Forcing English on large parts of the world seems to have worked very well. ;)
- olakease 10y ago
  Only for the native english speakers. Others we must do a tremendous effort. Even worse, in a discussion —because you are not native— you feel always weaker. So my point will be for a non natural language. Easy to learn for everybody so we all play with the same rules. [EDIT] The idea is not to replace natural languages, but to pick an extra non-natural language as an international one
  - avar 10y ago
    As a non-native English speaker I think this is a horrible idea. So rather than for us to all communicate in English which is spoken natively by around half a billion, you'd rather international communication take place in a language nobody speaks natively? That seems like a horrible idea. When the lingua franca is some common natively spoken language at least people who can confidently correct you exist. Having everyone speak a non-native language would just lead to a regression towards the mean, and such a language would be much harder to learn than any existing language because it wouldn't come with a culture. There would be very few books, movies etc. in that language.

isidor3 10y ago

Ithkuil is my favorite conlang, it has an amazing amount of depth that can be presented in surprisingly few syllables. It was designed to be a sort of uber-language. Have the most amount of information in the least number of syllables while allowing absolutely no ambiguity. It also attempts to be somewhat tailored to map to how we naturally think about concepts, and a lot of information you have to get from context in languages like English are made explicit in the grammatical forms of the language. I think the grammar of it is really something special, however, it was never designed to be either learnable or really even speakable, which is a shame. I think given the right overcoat the grammar could form the base of a surprisingly usable language.

zeemonkee3 10y ago

To what extent are many languages today "artificial"? Modern Hebrew was resurrected from a language unspoken for millennia outside of religious services and given an up-to-date vocabulary. Shakespeare and Elias Lonnrot invented thousands of everyday words used today in English and Finnish respectively. Standard German and Italian are products of their unification/nationalist movements, supplanting old regional dialects, as is the Greek Katharevousa (official language until 1976). Esperanto and other conlangs are more an extreme case, but there's surprisingly little that's "natural" about the "natural" languages either.

eivarv 10y ago
I'd argue that this is because "natural" and "unnatural" or "artificial" are poorly defined (and usually useless) terms.
gkya 10y ago
Most standardised languages are sorts of conlangs. I can be a testimone for Turkish, where the language was cleared from persian and arabic loanwords by very oppressing revolutionary govt action. So much so that one generation had difficult time talking to grandparents, they say.
- zeemonkee3 10y ago
  Moving to the Latin alphabet must have been quite a shift as well.
  - gkya 10y ago
    Certainly, though widespread literacy was a thing of the republican era. And the old script and the language was abolished and not taught in the schools, so it only lives among historians (unlike latin and ancient greek which is studied a bit in European tertiary schools).
- brian_cloutier 10y ago
  To add to this, I met someone who claims she cannot read Neitzsche because she doesn't know most of the terms recent Turkish translations use and can't find any older translations.

yoz-y 10y ago

One big problem I see with many of these artificial languages is that they do not put the ease of pronunciation at the topmost priority. I think it would be interesting to make a study on what sounds can anybody produce. It is also important to study the different subtleties that people perceive as different sounds. For example in my experience the Chinese have a hard time understanding you if you mangle the different tones they use for vowels, however they completely ignore the 'length' of a tone which is very often used to distinguish words in the slavic languages.

yoplait_ 10y ago
Esperanto is very easy to pronounce even for Chinese
- yoz-y 10y ago
  But is it for Japanese? In general I think that an artificial language should never put two consonants together.
  - yoplait_ 10y ago
    I only have second-hand accounts from proselytes, and they say esperanto is nowhere as bad as English for Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Just google around if you want to read from them. English is so difficult to pronounce correctly than my prior is to believe them.
    - talideon 10y ago
      One infamous example being the consonant car crash that is 'strengths'.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- tokenadult 10y ago
  廢話。How many native speakers of various Chinese languages do you know how converse with you regularly in Esperanto? The phonological system of Esperanto is noticeably worse than that of English for native speakers of Chinese to acquire.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Studies have shown Esperanto is a useful aide for teaching languages. For example, teach students Esperanto for 1 year and French for 3 years, and they end up speaking French better than the group who just learned French for 4 years. Learning one language makes learning other languages easier, and as a constructed language, Esperanto is very regular and thus easy to learn. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Espera...

jmfayard 10y ago
That's important because IMHO the most important point in the language debate is that we must become much more efficient language learners. A part of my experience is that people start with grossly inefficient methods to speak foreign languages. Spend way too much time. Discard it as too difficult or not worth it. Another part of my experience is that speaking a foreign languages is actually totally doable. We human beings are naturally skilled at it. So what about esperanto? (One my languages). There is still this misconception (also in this comments section) that it had the goal to do to existing languages what the euro did to existing currencies. That would have been silly, fortunately it has been a non-goal from the start. What makes much more sense is that since it has a much nicer learning curve, young people and monoglots can use it as a testbed to get how to learn a language. Then reach much quicker a level where they can have a casual conversation in that or those other languages they are interested in. That strategy work actually quite well, but require a non-conformist mind. People have a malthusian approach to language learning and _will_ tell you that you are just being silly.

jhbadger 10y ago

Esperanto was the first (beyond my native, obviously) language I learned about twenty years ago. What I enjoyed about it then (and still do today, although I've learned a couple of natural languages since) was that I could learn it to a useful level (as in reading novels without a dictionary) in probably a couple of hundred hours. I still haven't managed that in other languages with much more study even in ones where I have reasonable conversational ability. To use a hacker's analogy, learning a natural language is like learning C++, and learning Esperanto is like learning a scripting language like Ruby or Python.

gkya 10y ago
That's mostly about how you study. My approach is sort of Lisp-like, and I become comfortable very early on with a mostly exploratory and immersive process.

tokenadult 10y ago

There are two different ways to treat Esperanto, both of which come up in the comments. One way is to take Esperanto seriously as a proposal for a world auxiliary language that people from all over the world can use for intercommunication if they didn't grow up speaking a common native language. This first way of treating Esperanto for discussion immediately runs into practical issues and real-world trade-offs. As the article kindly submitted here for our discussion notes, "Because, of course, the massive, trumpeting, stamping, ear-flapping, blanka elefanto in the room is… English; English; English; the English language; the widespread global adoption thereof." It is already well known that the plurality of daily use of English around the world is use of English as an "interlanguage," communicating among persons who are not all native speakers of English, including millions of conversations a day in English that don't include any native speakers of English.[1] I have personally overheard hundreds of conversations in English in multiple countries among people who didn't grow up speaking English, and English is of course the interlanguage of online discussion sites such as Hacker News. (I have also overheard, and participated in, many hundreds of conversations in Modern Standard Chinese that include no native speakers of that language, as Chinese is my most proficient second language.) For practical value for a language learner, incentives matter. People respond to incentives in deciding which languages to learn, and how attentive to be to opportunities to learn languages. And more opportunity to learn, with more sound recordings to listen to and more texts to read, makes it easier to learn a language. The pervasiveness of English all over the world makes English an easy language to learn--I'm not kidding. Precisely because hundreds of millions of people use English every day as an "interlanguage," English is quite "fault tolerant," full of social conventions about how to get around people with a beginning command of the language communicating with one another, including officially adopted controlled vocabularies for occupations like seafaring.[2] (Again, Modern Standard Chinese is similar in that poorly pronounced Mandarin Chinese is an actual lingua franca in many parts of southern China.) English-language daily newspapers abound all over the world, English-language videos number in the millions on YouTube, many recorded by second-language speakers of English, and English-language books and advertisements make up the plurality of the world's books and advertisements. Languages spread around the world mostly by people using them or not for practical purposes. The majority of the settlement of the interior of North America by Europeans was done by Europeans who were not native speakers of English. (For example, both of my maternal grandparents, both of whom were born in Great Plains states, grew up in German-speaking families and had all of their schooling in the German language.) The freedom of the United States included a freedom to speak whatever language people pleased. (Abraham Lincoln funded German-language newspapers to help his presidential campaign, and Theodore Roosevelt campaigned in English, German, and French, the three languages he knew from childhood, in various places in the United States.) English was the customary language of governance in the United States, and still is not official at the federal level, but mostly English won out in the world's third most populous country because it was a common language that immigrants from a variety of places could use to communicate with one another (as happened in my paternal ancestral line). The huge population base of native speakers of English (in the following generations) in the United States who still had family ties to other countries provides English with a great advantage in spreading around the world. Another way to treat Esperanto is to take it as a hobby, an exploration of the characteristics of a constructed language. Many language hobbyists have explored Esperanto from that point of view,[3] as I have. For a hobby language, the main criterion is fun, and I do not judge anyone else's opinion about what is fun. I don't waste my time in online discussion debating whether coin collection or knitting is a better hobby, for example. To each their own in hobbies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_global_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak [3] http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

dctoedt 10y ago

Esperanto's underlying desire for language simplification is still worth keeping in mind. Perhaps a standardized, simplified, "minimum viable English" could be identified and declared to be socially acceptable "because we say so." Non-native speakers might find such an MVE to be easier to learn and more comfortable to use. The easy part would be to develop a set of tweaks to the more-arcane grammatical- and spelling rules of English, using crowd-sourced suggestions. For example --- and as a language purist it pains me deeply to say this: + Allow they and their (and even there) to be used as singular generic pronouns; so, for example, Any student can learn to speak English if they put there mind to it. + Allow there to be used as a possessive (vice their). + Allow consistent apostrophes for possessives; so, for example, The spread of English is hindered by some of it's fussy rules (which in currently-standard usage is incorrect). This might be a useful project for someone working in linguistics: Collect and organize real-world examples of how people actually use English in non-standard ways, then propose a subset of those examples as MVE. The hard part would be convincing the world that it's just as socially acceptable to speak and write MVE as it is to speak and write "standard" English.

dempseye 10y ago
Similar work has been done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
- vintermann 10y ago
  A common accusation against Esperanto is that a lot of the complexity it takes away from grammar, it sneaks back in the form of idioms - but that's nothing to Basic English.

Nadya 10y ago

The only flaw with Esperanto is that it is a language. Languages hate staying still unless they're dead. I say this as someone who spent several months studying Esperanto and holding a few conversations. :) I treated it more as a "springboard" to language learning. Learning a second language is tough - learning a third language less so! So picking an easy second language, I found, helped speed up language acquisition (which was my goal). Languages naturally change over time as the population invents slangs and irregulars, typically out of laziness. Certain vowels will be mixed or slurred, parts of words might change entirely, etc. Even if Esperanto was taught to every individual as a second language - various regions would invent their own slangs based on the "native language of the region". Borrowing loanwords from their parent language and creating various dialects of Esperanto that may or may not be understandable with other dialects to varying degrees. I highly recommend learning Esperanto to anyone interested in learning a second language - to use it as a springboard to your third.