22 ms·

Esperanto as an Asian language

134 points by diodorus 9y ago

OriginalPenguin 9y ago
Thanks for posting this. I'm hoping now that Esperanto is on Duolingo, we will see an uptick in Esperanto speakers.
- ben_w 9y ago
  Duolingo is certainly how I got into it, both because it has a course and because {Esperanto makes learning languages easier and Duolingo has a lot of interesting languages to learn}. That said, I feel the Duolingo courses in general don't have enough content, and the Esperanto course seems to be on the short side even then.
  - cmmike 9y ago
    Clozemaster might be a useful complement to the Duolingo course - lots of content for Esperanto as well as a bunch of other languages. https://www.clozemaster.com https://www.clozemaster.com
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Thanks! I've installed it on my tablet, and it seems good. :)
- balsamicus 9y ago
  The recommended metric is DAU.
- biotech 9y ago
  Genuinely curious - why are you hoping to see an uptick in Esperanto speakers? I'm not sure I see the advantage of Esperanto, although I do find constructed languages fascinating.
  - caryhartline 9y ago
    It is a much easier and possibly the easiest language to learn especially for those who already speak a latin-based language. In some cases, people can be thought of as fluent with a couple months of learning the language. It's also not tied to any particular nation which makes it easier for people to adopt without feeling like they are just being taken over by another culture. This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world.
    - learc83 9y ago
      The fact that it's much easier for those who already speak a Romance language means that it's still is tied to particular nations. >This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world. English is as close to a global lingua franca as we've ever had. There's just so much momentum behind it, that it would take something world shaking to change that. I think we'd be better off trying for an artificial language that is mostly mutually intelligible with English if the goal is really widespread adoption.
      - schoen 9y ago
        Zamenhof had a famous ethical argument about this (it begins "Ofte kunvenas personoj de malsamaj nacioj kaj komprenas unu la alian", 'People of different nations frequently encounter and understand one another', and you can find a lot of copies of it online, although I didn't immediately find an English translation). He felt that it was unfair that native speakers of a language that's used in international communication will have an advantage in fluency (and learning effort) compared to non-native speakers, and argued that these were reasons that the eventual international language should not be any community's native language. However, he was also fighting (and is still fighting) very significant economic or incentive issues. Even before the era of English as an international language, there was always an obvious incentive to learn the most widely spoken or prestigious language or languages in one's region -- such as the language of a nearby large, rich country. People still feel that incentive today and the benefits of learning specific languages of wider communication or languages of prestige can be very tangible. And there are definitely people who feel that it's unfair that they have to learn English rather than English-speakers having to learn their language (and it is!), but many of them learn English anyway because they can clearly see the benefits. Having a really apparent worldwide Schelling point of "everyone in the world in going to learn this" or "enough people already know this that it's clearly useful for international communication" would help Esperanto tremendously, and Esperanto did have momentum of that kind at one point, but according to the Esperanto Museum in Vienna it seemed to lose it in the course of the World Wars.
GuiA 9y ago
It's fascinating to read about how Esperanto got adopted so much by people in the "counter-culture", for lack of a better term. What enabled that? It is hard to imagine an artificial language being met with so much enthusiasm today.
- bpodgursky 9y ago
  IMO, it's hard to imagine an artificial currency being met with so much enthusiasm 30 years from now, yet see where we are today :)
- caryhartline 9y ago
  In my own experience, people who speak Esperanto are more likely to be against the status quo of nationalism and tend to be against the imperialist nature of their own or other large governments. They tend to be for the free travel of people and against strict immigration laws. Those ideologies square well with political movements of communism, anarchism, libertarianism, etcetera which are usually on the fringes of society.
  - ue_ 9y ago
    This is true, in the left circles I'm in, Esperanto is a popular suggestion for language learning.
- wahern 9y ago
  AFAIU this happened because of where Esperanto was created--among the rapidly shifting cultural and political mores of Central Europe. The emigration of both ideas, particularly communism and anarchism, and people (e.g. educated Jews) helped carry it across Europe. The global spread of communism then carried it around the world. It's unsurprising that the promise of a single, unifying, constructed, internationalist language would appeal to leftists. Which isn't to say leftists are naive, just that it would be much more odd to see initial interest from nationalists or other conservatives.
Typhon 9y ago
"Linguists are undecided about Esperanto" Indifferent would be a better word. In any case, Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages, whether in lexicon (obviously) or in grammar, it is thoroughly european (as demonstrated in great detail here : http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ )
- fizixer 9y ago
  > Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages. Do you know why it was created? To have one language for communication for the whole world unencumbered by historical baggage of politico-cultural domineering (e.g., prevalence of english due to British imperialism). (among other reasons). That right there is a feature that sets it apart from all natural languages (other than the created ones like Klingon, Lojban, etc) not just European.
  - macintux 9y ago
    I'm not confident that the reason for something's existence can be objectively described as a feature.
  - mallaidh 9y ago
    That has nothing to do with aspects considered in the context of linguistics, however.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Yeah, but it fails at its objective when considered outside a European context.
    - chch 9y ago
      That's one of the things I like about the auxiliary language Interlingua[1] over Esperanto[2]. To quote from Wikipedia: "Interlingua has detached itself from the movement for the development and introduction of a universal language for all humanity. Whether or not one believes that a language for all humanity is possible, whether or not one believes that Interlingua will become such a language is totally irrelevant from the point of view of Interlingua itself. The only fact that matters (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its ambition of reflecting the cultural and thus linguistic homogeneity of the West, is capable of rendering tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is by its present contributions and not by the promises of its adherents that Interlingua wishes to be judged." It was created with a goal of taking its structure and vocabulary from other common European (mostly Romance) languages, which means if one is familiar with those languages, they can already decently read Interlingua. The same passage from above, for those who might know some Romance language: "Interlingua se ha distachate ab le movimento pro le disveloppamento e le introduction de un lingua universal pro tote le humanitate. Si o non on crede que un lingua pro tote le humanitate es possibile, si o non on crede que interlingua va devenir un tal lingua es totalmente indifferente ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme. Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua [2] Not that I've actually studied either, for full disclosure.
ivanbakel 9y ago
>Although the proposal for the League to accept Esperanto as their working language was accepted by ten delegates, mainly from Asian countries, the French delegate used his power of veto to block the issue. What an odd thing to veto. Was there a good reason for it, or was it just to preserve the "lingua franca" over a new contender?
- wahern 9y ago
  At this stage, therefore, the strongest opposition to Esperanto came from France, whose strongly nationalistic government opposed the internationalist aims of Esperanto. French nationalism was expressed, inter alia, in support for the use of French as the international language. Since Versailles, English had threatened the status of French. The League of Nations was officially bilingual, though (with French encouragement) French soon became its dominant language. France was thus hardly likely to favour any kind of threat to the prestige of its language. Source: Forster, Peter (1982). The Esperanto Movement. Page 175. I found the quote using Wikipedia's League of Nations article for a citation and Google Books for the source material. Searching for "strongest opposition" in Google Books should take you straight to the page. I can't figure out how to create a permanent link in Google Books straight to the page that will reliably work for people.
  - MattHeard 9y ago
    https://books.google.com/books?id=3LqqGU3p_noC&pg=PA175 https://books.google.com/books?id=3LqqGU3p_noC&pg=PA175 To link to a specific page in a book in Google Books, add the URL parameter "pg=PA<#>" where "<#>" is the page number.
- Iv 9y ago
  French here. French politicians, and a big part of the population also, are weirdly defensive about using any international language other than French. French is actually used in some international organization: international post (and aviation I think?) as well as diplomacy. That latter one may make some politicians blind to the fact that the game is set: English won as the de facto international language. France could dispute the status of superpower to UK in the time of colonial empires but this time is definitely over, but some are deluded into thinking that we could still dispute the status of English as the predominant language. It is a combination of pride and laziness that makes so many people consider that we should not accept English as an international language. I find it stupid, but it is not a thing that is specific to the far-right nationalists.
microcolonel 9y ago
I think there are two counterproductive forces around Esperanto: a) Attachment to bizarre communist political ideology (I've seen this a lot in online and offline Esperanto groups) and b) slightly deficient phonotactics for an IAL (some sounds used are incredibly difficult to teach to e.g. Japanese speakers). Third to those is maybe the accusative, the grammar of which is the subject of an entire pamphlet. It's otherwise super easy to learn if you can manage to pronounce the sounds. I encourage you to give it a shot either through Duolingo or through Kurso de Esperanto
- jhbadger 9y ago
  I think you are confusing anti-nationalism/world republic idealism with communism. Certainly the former is part of the traditional Esperanto culture -- Zamenhof's "interna ideo" and all that. The relationship of Esperanto to communism is more antagonistic given that the Soviet Union jailed and executed many Esperantists (see Ulrich Lins' "La Danĝera Lingvo").
- Chris_Jay 9y ago
  The accusative is mostly difficult for native English speakers because we only use the accusative for certain pronouns (he/him, she/her, who/whom). It does take some getting used to if one has never learned the concept in one's native language. But denoting the accusative allows Esperanto to have an arbitrary word order, which cuts out a lot of headache elsewhere.
contingencies 9y ago
It is not Asian in the slightest. If it were Asian, it would be Chinese or Malay-Indonesian.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Have you read the article? It's rather interesting.
  - contingencies 9y ago
    Lu Xun also advocated for romanized Chinese instead of characters, citing time wasted for students in achieving literacy, however this part of his character (as well as no doubt his support for Esperanto and the apparent anarchist affiliations alleged here) have been airbrushed from history by the Chinese government, who praise him and have a government audited version of his life taught in schools while removing these politically unfortunate aspects of his character. In short, a collection of superfluous historic tidbits does not make a regional affiliation for a language fundamentally grounded in the etymology of another.
narrator 9y ago
One thing that makes Esperanto popular in Asia is that the Asian languages are much more dissimilar than European languages. For example, the effort for a Japanese person to learn Korean is much more than to learn Esperanto.
- wodenokoto 9y ago
  The Japanese -> Korean example is quite unfortunate as it is one of the big exceptions to the rule you put forth.
  - nandemo 9y ago
    How is it unfortunate? Korean might have some features that sound familiar to a Japanese speaker -- e.g. word order and morphology of Sinitic vocabulary -- but phonology is quite challenging and non-Sinitic vocabulary is completely different. Overall it's far, far harder than Esperanto for Japanese speakers.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- jpatokal 9y ago
  Japanese and Korean are actually fairly similar as far as Asian languages go and may even be related, although that's controversial. Try eg. Japanese<->Chinese or Thai<->Malay for neighboring but completely unrelated languages.
  - Figs 9y ago
    Eh. I'm not sure if Japanese<->Chinese is that good of an example either; Chinese is sort of the Latin of Japanese. Even though it's grammar is different, China had a huge cultural influence on Japan, and both its writing system and its vocabulary (as spoken over a thousand years ago though!) were imported and incorporated into Japanese. Something like 60% of the Japanese dictionary is Chinese-derived either as old imported words, or more modern "wasei kango" (lit. Japanese-made Chinese words) -- think "television" for an English word equivalent (modern idea but coined with Greek and Latin word roots). There's a lot of really interesting details about this on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary
jcranmer 9y ago
The problem with invented languages is that it is almost always possible to find some easy criticism of it (e.g., inherent sexism in vocabulary), and since it's invented, you can't shrug it off with "historical baggage" like you can with natural languages. When trying to design it for an international audience, and trying to avoid tying it to a specific language or language family, it's basically impossible to find sufficiently universal constructs. Phonetics is the easiest thing to find a universal subset for--there's basically only so many ways you can physically structure your mouth to make sounds (although it does operate rather on a continuum basis). We can also objectively say that some sounds are easier to produce than others. Even then, the intersection of all languages' phonemic inventories is probably empty. The basic structure of a dozen or so consonants (m, n, b, p, j, s, z, k, g, d, t, w, h, say) with 5 basic vowels structured in a strict CV syllable format, with no diphthongs and vowel length, aspiration, and tone all being non-phonemic is the basic outline for how to design the phonotactics of a universal language. Moving beyond phonemes is virtually impossible, however. Trying to design a basic lexeme for the language obviously runs into problem of where you source the lexemes (particularly since borrowing from several different languages tends to make it completely incomprehensible to everybody, although you may find that more tasteful than prejudicing one language's speakers as having an easier time mastering the lexeme). But even choosing which words to make root lexemes and which ones to make compounds is difficult. Should blue and green be separate lexemes? What about blue and azure? Should right be "not-left" but south not be "not-north"? Languages often attach multiple meanings to the same word, and these meanings don't always match up across languages. Grammar is even worse. It's hard to find any grammatical structure that's truly universal across languages; maybe the separation of function between nouns and verbs, but the proclivity to verb nouns is so common in languages that it's questionable how fundamental the distinction actually is. Even the basic meaning of things like mood, aspect, and tense can be hard to settle, since the forms that exist in languages can partially overlap certain combinations (past/present+future versus past+present/future forms being the most well-known). Having to mark cases that don't exist in your native language can be difficult; English users' trouble with the subjunctive is well-known.
- yorwba 9y ago
  I think if you wanted to construct a language for maximum learnability, you'd have to tackle it both from the perspective of a speaker/writer and a listener/reader. The language should allow a speaker to make any distinction they can in their native language, but not require them to make a distinction that is foreign to them. On the other hand, it should allow a listener to understand any distinction they could understand in their native language, but allow them to ignore everything else. In practice, these requirements are obviously at odds with each other. You have to balance the freedom available to a speaker with the mental capacity of a listener. If you want to accomodate speakers of languages that allow free word order due to case marking, as well as languages that have a fixed word order, you might end up with case marking and marks to indicate a specific fixed word order. But then all of these markings would have to be understood by the listener, who'd have trouble keeping the various forms straight. However, you might be able to quantify the learning effort required and optimize for that. This is obviously hard for grammar and semantics, but could be done for phonetics. Instead of trying to intersect the phoneme sets in use, or giving up and choosing arbitrarily, you could collect statistics on the ability to produce and distinguish various phones, and then optimize for communicability. A speaker can pronounce a phoneme as well as the allophone that is easiest to pronounce for them, a listener can distinguish a pair of phonemes as well as the most similar combination of allophones from them. Then calculate the expectation over all pairings of speaker and listener, maximize the bandwidth accounting for the required error correction, and you get your perfect phoneme set. I'm actually interested what the result might look like, whether there will be a few, clearly separate phonemes, or a huge number with potential overlap, that needs to be compensated by unambiguous vocabulary. It also occurred to me that this might somehow apply to constructing programming languages, but I'm hazy about the details. Maybe something like Python's "one way to do it" vs other languages supporting a variety of styles?
chillacy 9y ago
Interesting to see this on HN. I'm actually at the congress right now in Seoul, I can answer any questions people might have (though this is only my second congress). In general I find that the speakers from Asia have to try harder to be understood because of the reduced shared vocabulary and different phonetics. It seems much easier for a speaker of Spanish or Italian.
- kikimaru 9y ago
  What is the general feel on "Esperanto vs English as a world language" there?
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    it's english and will be for quite some time. maybe not a perfect language, but good enough, simple enough to learn to OK level (compared to french for example).
  - etatoby 9y ago
    This. In particular: what's the purpose of Esperanto now that anybody either speaks English or wishes they did and will make sure their children do?
    - robotoloco 9y ago
      English does not fulfill the neutrality ideal of Esperanto, which many people that speak Esperanto think it's very important. Currently, if you are born in an English speak country, you have such a great advantage over everybody else (starting with you don't have to spend lots of money to learn English, and few people attain native speaking levels later in life). But it is true that the current purpose of Esperanto is more ideal than practical. I study Esperanto because I really like its internal ideals. I study English because I want to eat.
      - msla 9y ago
        Esperanto fails at being neutral because it's inherently oriented towards the subset of European languages Zamenhof based it off of. Someone who speaks German or Czech would have an easier time learning it than someone who speaks Mongolian or Korean or Mandarin Chinese.
erezsh 9y ago
Can anyone recommend any books or essays written in Esperanto by Asian authors? I'm very interested in experiencing these cultures with a non-English skew. Please, only recommend things you have read and liked!
drdaffey 9y ago
I just want to say I wish there were more interest in Idiom Neutral.
akvadrako 9y ago
Here is a good article about the language family of Esperanto: Esperanto: european or asiatic language? (1981) http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...
amelius 9y ago
Here is a youtube video of a man teaching his child to speak Esperanto: [1] I'm not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, it is a nice experiment that probably wouldn't hurt. On the other hand, what is the real benefit? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aN94LWe9ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aN94LWe9ro
- dbrgn 9y ago
  There are already around ~2000 native Esperanto speakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers Actually, there even exist third generation native Esperantistas already: http://blogs.transparent.com/esperanto/3rd-gen-native-esperanto-speaker-nicole/ http://blogs.transparent.com/esperanto/3rd-gen-native-espera...
xiaq 9y ago
One interesting influence of Chinese on Esperanto is that you now have two ways to use adjectives as predicates. To say "Anna is beautiful" you can use the copular verb est: Anna est bela. Which is like English and most European languages. But you can also say Anna belas. That is, you turn the adjective to a verb and use it as a predicate directly. This mirrors the syntax of Chinese.
- etatoby 9y ago
  Desu!!! (sorry, I had to)
- thriftwy 9y ago
  I think it's mostly an influence of Russian/Belorussian: verb form: Анна красива. adjective form: Анна красивая.
  - xiaq 9y ago
    Hmm that's also possible. Only those who have studied the history of Esperanto can give us a definite answer, I suppose.
  - jwilk 9y ago
    Wait, where's the verb in the first form?
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      красива is predicate (or сказуемое)
  - kemerover 9y ago
    It is not a verb form. It is just a short form. Both forms can be used as predicates but have different meanings. For example, "ты болен" and "ты больной" both mean "you are sick", but in the first case it means a temporary state. Another example, "эта юбка коротка" and "эта юбка короткая" both mean "this dress is short", but in the first case it has an implication of being short relative to something. For example, you would use first form to mean that this dress is short for you.
etatoby 9y ago
Television standardized the language of nation-states. Now even the most backward of countrymen speaks or at least understands the common language used on TV, and the local inflections get less and less prominent with each passing generation. (Granted, this was more of a problem in older countries.) The Internet will do the same on a global scale, in the long run, with English being that language, obviously. So what's the purpose of Esperanto, again?
- briandear 9y ago
  There isn’t a purpose. It’s a contrived language with the historical and cultural relevance of pig latin. The purpose is likely to provide its enthusiasts with a quirky hobby. It’s not any more serious a language as Klingon. Why Duolingo/etc wastes resources supporting such a useless language when they could perhaps support any of the number of dying languages that actually have cultural and historical significance (such as Yiddish, Navajo or any number of African or Asian languages) seems to be a waste.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    You could almost say the same thing about those cultural languages though. If me, as a white American, wanted to learn Navajo... what's the point? I'm not Native American, I'm very unlikely to adopt their culture, and my knowing the language isn't really going to further the spread of their culture. So I'd just be learning it as an enthusiast with a quirky hobby and have no one to talk to. The problem with trying to save dying languages is that you need to save their dying culture, too. Otherwise the language is useless, just as useless as Esperanto. If there's no point in Esperanto because it's a language without a culture, there's no point in learning a language without learning their culture. And culture is often a very tricky, very closely guarded thing. What we have with Esperanto is a brand new culture that's been created, one that's a lot more relatable to a wider audience than Kasanga or Iñapari.
amelius 9y ago
I don't get the philosophy behind the Esperanto language. Why didn't the inventors pick a popular language like English or Spanish, and fixed their inconsistencies, rather than invent a whole new language? Were there political reasons?
- litehacker 9y ago
  1. It is meant to be an international language. They tried to blend in as many languages as possible. Otherwise someone speaking German, for example would have a harder time picking it up than someone who already speaks Spanish or English. 2. The Esperanto culture is post-nationalistic. They purposely did not want to align with a specific country, and be global.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  This is kind of a let-me-google-that-for-you situation, but the nickel explanation is that Zamenhof saw a culturally-neutral international language as being important for building peace, furthering humanism and combating nationalism. If you look at the historical context, it makes more sense. Most of the criticism aimed at Esperanto today is about how badly executed the language itself is, but it unquestionably got further towards the larger goals than any other constructed language.
- robotoloco 9y ago
  The main reason was neutrality, and respect for the popular language. 'Fixing' the inconsistencies of a language means getting rid of its identity, and culture. You may be able to do that with a dead language, but not with a living one. As for neutrality, an English or Spanish speaker would always have the advantage, thus the idea that everybody can meet on a ground as even as possible. Esperanto tried to solve that by not belonging to any people, or any nation. It ended up being Eurocentric, but to some extent it does fulfill its neutrality motivation
- bbctol 9y ago
  Yes, Esperanto was a deeply political project. The ultimate goal was to spread international unity and peace, rather than just to create an interesting language. At the time, it was taken very seriously by not insignificant numbers of people, and the movement intersected with other late 19th/early 20th century idealist movements, sometimes in unfortunate ways (eventually, both the Nazis and Soviets viewed Esperantists as spies, which pretty definitively shut down its momentum.)
luxpir 9y ago
A symbolic language, such as Bliss[0][1][2], avoids cringe-worthy issues with accents and comprehension, at the cost of being written only. Sign languages do the same. International Sign Language[3] + Bliss are in theory the perfect combination for intergalactic communication. Blind people, unfortunately, would have to continue to suffer English until such time that direct brain stimulation becomes feasible. EDIT: Key point in all seriousness: the Bliss language has enabled thousands of cerebral palsy sufferers to communicate with a full range of expression. Sadly curbed in recent years by the much more limited pre-phrased, Hawking-like computer voices. Alternatives exist. Listen to the radio shows in [1] to find out more. The BBC one I found particularly moving. The Radiolab one starts at 5min, goes on for some 30mins. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols [1] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08y26qf http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08y26qf, http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/ [2] - https://archive.org/details/mrsymbolman https://archive.org/details/mrsymbolman [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign
- mcguire 9y ago
  Another fascinating chapter in the history of perfect languages. "... McNaughton’s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a “misinterpretation”. For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable —according to the English definition of tomato— even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss’s system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English. (2009, p. 189) Bliss complaints about his symbols “being abused” by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. In spite of this, in 1975 Bliss granted an exclusive world license, for use with disabled children, to the new Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton (later called Blissymbolics Communication International, BCI). Nevertheless, in 1977 Bliss claimed that this agreement was violated so that he was deprived of effective control of his symbol system."
awkwarddaturtle 9y ago
Esperanto isn't an asian language. It has nothing to do with asia or asian languages ( however you define "asia" ). Just because a meeting about esperanto is being held in asia or that there were some fans of esperanto in asia doesn't make it "asian".

134 points by diodorus 9y ago

OriginalPenguin 9y ago

Thanks for posting this. I'm hoping now that Esperanto is on Duolingo, we will see an uptick in Esperanto speakers.

ben_w 9y ago
Duolingo is certainly how I got into it, both because it has a course and because {Esperanto makes learning languages easier and Duolingo has a lot of interesting languages to learn}. That said, I feel the Duolingo courses in general don't have enough content, and the Esperanto course seems to be on the short side even then.
- cmmike 9y ago
  Clozemaster might be a useful complement to the Duolingo course - lots of content for Esperanto as well as a bunch of other languages. https://www.clozemaster.com https://www.clozemaster.com
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Thanks! I've installed it on my tablet, and it seems good. :)
balsamicus 9y ago
The recommended metric is DAU.
biotech 9y ago
Genuinely curious - why are you hoping to see an uptick in Esperanto speakers? I'm not sure I see the advantage of Esperanto, although I do find constructed languages fascinating.
- caryhartline 9y ago
  It is a much easier and possibly the easiest language to learn especially for those who already speak a latin-based language. In some cases, people can be thought of as fluent with a couple months of learning the language. It's also not tied to any particular nation which makes it easier for people to adopt without feeling like they are just being taken over by another culture. This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world.
  - learc83 9y ago
    The fact that it's much easier for those who already speak a Romance language means that it's still is tied to particular nations. >This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world. English is as close to a global lingua franca as we've ever had. There's just so much momentum behind it, that it would take something world shaking to change that. I think we'd be better off trying for an artificial language that is mostly mutually intelligible with English if the goal is really widespread adoption.
    - schoen 9y ago
      Zamenhof had a famous ethical argument about this (it begins "Ofte kunvenas personoj de malsamaj nacioj kaj komprenas unu la alian", 'People of different nations frequently encounter and understand one another', and you can find a lot of copies of it online, although I didn't immediately find an English translation). He felt that it was unfair that native speakers of a language that's used in international communication will have an advantage in fluency (and learning effort) compared to non-native speakers, and argued that these were reasons that the eventual international language should not be any community's native language. However, he was also fighting (and is still fighting) very significant economic or incentive issues. Even before the era of English as an international language, there was always an obvious incentive to learn the most widely spoken or prestigious language or languages in one's region -- such as the language of a nearby large, rich country. People still feel that incentive today and the benefits of learning specific languages of wider communication or languages of prestige can be very tangible. And there are definitely people who feel that it's unfair that they have to learn English rather than English-speakers having to learn their language (and it is!), but many of them learn English anyway because they can clearly see the benefits. Having a really apparent worldwide Schelling point of "everyone in the world in going to learn this" or "enough people already know this that it's clearly useful for international communication" would help Esperanto tremendously, and Esperanto did have momentum of that kind at one point, but according to the Esperanto Museum in Vienna it seemed to lose it in the course of the World Wars.

GuiA 9y ago

It's fascinating to read about how Esperanto got adopted so much by people in the "counter-culture", for lack of a better term. What enabled that? It is hard to imagine an artificial language being met with so much enthusiasm today.

bpodgursky 9y ago
IMO, it's hard to imagine an artificial currency being met with so much enthusiasm 30 years from now, yet see where we are today :)
caryhartline 9y ago
In my own experience, people who speak Esperanto are more likely to be against the status quo of nationalism and tend to be against the imperialist nature of their own or other large governments. They tend to be for the free travel of people and against strict immigration laws. Those ideologies square well with political movements of communism, anarchism, libertarianism, etcetera which are usually on the fringes of society.
- ue_ 9y ago
  This is true, in the left circles I'm in, Esperanto is a popular suggestion for language learning.
wahern 9y ago
AFAIU this happened because of where Esperanto was created--among the rapidly shifting cultural and political mores of Central Europe. The emigration of both ideas, particularly communism and anarchism, and people (e.g. educated Jews) helped carry it across Europe. The global spread of communism then carried it around the world. It's unsurprising that the promise of a single, unifying, constructed, internationalist language would appeal to leftists. Which isn't to say leftists are naive, just that it would be much more odd to see initial interest from nationalists or other conservatives.

Typhon 9y ago

"Linguists are undecided about Esperanto" Indifferent would be a better word. In any case, Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages, whether in lexicon (obviously) or in grammar, it is thoroughly european (as demonstrated in great detail here : http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ )

fizixer 9y ago
> Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages. Do you know why it was created? To have one language for communication for the whole world unencumbered by historical baggage of politico-cultural domineering (e.g., prevalence of english due to British imperialism). (among other reasons). That right there is a feature that sets it apart from all natural languages (other than the created ones like Klingon, Lojban, etc) not just European.
- macintux 9y ago
  I'm not confident that the reason for something's existence can be objectively described as a feature.
- mallaidh 9y ago
  That has nothing to do with aspects considered in the context of linguistics, however.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Yeah, but it fails at its objective when considered outside a European context.
  - chch 9y ago
    That's one of the things I like about the auxiliary language Interlingua[1] over Esperanto[2]. To quote from Wikipedia: "Interlingua has detached itself from the movement for the development and introduction of a universal language for all humanity. Whether or not one believes that a language for all humanity is possible, whether or not one believes that Interlingua will become such a language is totally irrelevant from the point of view of Interlingua itself. The only fact that matters (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its ambition of reflecting the cultural and thus linguistic homogeneity of the West, is capable of rendering tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is by its present contributions and not by the promises of its adherents that Interlingua wishes to be judged." It was created with a goal of taking its structure and vocabulary from other common European (mostly Romance) languages, which means if one is familiar with those languages, they can already decently read Interlingua. The same passage from above, for those who might know some Romance language: "Interlingua se ha distachate ab le movimento pro le disveloppamento e le introduction de un lingua universal pro tote le humanitate. Si o non on crede que un lingua pro tote le humanitate es possibile, si o non on crede que interlingua va devenir un tal lingua es totalmente indifferente ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme. Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua [2] Not that I've actually studied either, for full disclosure.

ivanbakel 9y ago

>Although the proposal for the League to accept Esperanto as their working language was accepted by ten delegates, mainly from Asian countries, the French delegate used his power of veto to block the issue. What an odd thing to veto. Was there a good reason for it, or was it just to preserve the "lingua franca" over a new contender?

wahern 9y ago
At this stage, therefore, the strongest opposition to Esperanto came from France, whose strongly nationalistic government opposed the internationalist aims of Esperanto. French nationalism was expressed, inter alia, in support for the use of French as the international language. Since Versailles, English had threatened the status of French. The League of Nations was officially bilingual, though (with French encouragement) French soon became its dominant language. France was thus hardly likely to favour any kind of threat to the prestige of its language. Source: Forster, Peter (1982). The Esperanto Movement. Page 175. I found the quote using Wikipedia's League of Nations article for a citation and Google Books for the source material. Searching for "strongest opposition" in Google Books should take you straight to the page. I can't figure out how to create a permanent link in Google Books straight to the page that will reliably work for people.
- MattHeard 9y ago
  https://books.google.com/books?id=3LqqGU3p_noC&pg=PA175 https://books.google.com/books?id=3LqqGU3p_noC&pg=PA175 To link to a specific page in a book in Google Books, add the URL parameter "pg=PA<#>" where "<#>" is the page number.
Iv 9y ago
French here. French politicians, and a big part of the population also, are weirdly defensive about using any international language other than French. French is actually used in some international organization: international post (and aviation I think?) as well as diplomacy. That latter one may make some politicians blind to the fact that the game is set: English won as the de facto international language. France could dispute the status of superpower to UK in the time of colonial empires but this time is definitely over, but some are deluded into thinking that we could still dispute the status of English as the predominant language. It is a combination of pride and laziness that makes so many people consider that we should not accept English as an international language. I find it stupid, but it is not a thing that is specific to the far-right nationalists.

microcolonel 9y ago

I think there are two counterproductive forces around Esperanto: a) Attachment to bizarre communist political ideology (I've seen this a lot in online and offline Esperanto groups) and b) slightly deficient phonotactics for an IAL (some sounds used are incredibly difficult to teach to e.g. Japanese speakers). Third to those is maybe the accusative, the grammar of which is the subject of an entire pamphlet. It's otherwise super easy to learn if you can manage to pronounce the sounds. I encourage you to give it a shot either through Duolingo or through Kurso de Esperanto

jhbadger 9y ago
I think you are confusing anti-nationalism/world republic idealism with communism. Certainly the former is part of the traditional Esperanto culture -- Zamenhof's "interna ideo" and all that. The relationship of Esperanto to communism is more antagonistic given that the Soviet Union jailed and executed many Esperantists (see Ulrich Lins' "La Danĝera Lingvo").
Chris_Jay 9y ago
The accusative is mostly difficult for native English speakers because we only use the accusative for certain pronouns (he/him, she/her, who/whom). It does take some getting used to if one has never learned the concept in one's native language. But denoting the accusative allows Esperanto to have an arbitrary word order, which cuts out a lot of headache elsewhere.

contingencies 9y ago

It is not Asian in the slightest. If it were Asian, it would be Chinese or Malay-Indonesian.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
Have you read the article? It's rather interesting.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Lu Xun also advocated for romanized Chinese instead of characters, citing time wasted for students in achieving literacy, however this part of his character (as well as no doubt his support for Esperanto and the apparent anarchist affiliations alleged here) have been airbrushed from history by the Chinese government, who praise him and have a government audited version of his life taught in schools while removing these politically unfortunate aspects of his character. In short, a collection of superfluous historic tidbits does not make a regional affiliation for a language fundamentally grounded in the etymology of another.

narrator 9y ago

One thing that makes Esperanto popular in Asia is that the Asian languages are much more dissimilar than European languages. For example, the effort for a Japanese person to learn Korean is much more than to learn Esperanto.

wodenokoto 9y ago
The Japanese -> Korean example is quite unfortunate as it is one of the big exceptions to the rule you put forth.
- nandemo 9y ago
  How is it unfortunate? Korean might have some features that sound familiar to a Japanese speaker -- e.g. word order and morphology of Sinitic vocabulary -- but phonology is quite challenging and non-Sinitic vocabulary is completely different. Overall it's far, far harder than Esperanto for Japanese speakers.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
jpatokal 9y ago
Japanese and Korean are actually fairly similar as far as Asian languages go and may even be related, although that's controversial. Try eg. Japanese<->Chinese or Thai<->Malay for neighboring but completely unrelated languages.
- Figs 9y ago
  Eh. I'm not sure if Japanese<->Chinese is that good of an example either; Chinese is sort of the Latin of Japanese. Even though it's grammar is different, China had a huge cultural influence on Japan, and both its writing system and its vocabulary (as spoken over a thousand years ago though!) were imported and incorporated into Japanese. Something like 60% of the Japanese dictionary is Chinese-derived either as old imported words, or more modern "wasei kango" (lit. Japanese-made Chinese words) -- think "television" for an English word equivalent (modern idea but coined with Greek and Latin word roots). There's a lot of really interesting details about this on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary

jcranmer 9y ago

The problem with invented languages is that it is almost always possible to find some easy criticism of it (e.g., inherent sexism in vocabulary), and since it's invented, you can't shrug it off with "historical baggage" like you can with natural languages. When trying to design it for an international audience, and trying to avoid tying it to a specific language or language family, it's basically impossible to find sufficiently universal constructs. Phonetics is the easiest thing to find a universal subset for--there's basically only so many ways you can physically structure your mouth to make sounds (although it does operate rather on a continuum basis). We can also objectively say that some sounds are easier to produce than others. Even then, the intersection of all languages' phonemic inventories is probably empty. The basic structure of a dozen or so consonants (m, n, b, p, j, s, z, k, g, d, t, w, h, say) with 5 basic vowels structured in a strict CV syllable format, with no diphthongs and vowel length, aspiration, and tone all being non-phonemic is the basic outline for how to design the phonotactics of a universal language. Moving beyond phonemes is virtually impossible, however. Trying to design a basic lexeme for the language obviously runs into problem of where you source the lexemes (particularly since borrowing from several different languages tends to make it completely incomprehensible to everybody, although you may find that more tasteful than prejudicing one language's speakers as having an easier time mastering the lexeme). But even choosing which words to make root lexemes and which ones to make compounds is difficult. Should blue and green be separate lexemes? What about blue and azure? Should right be "not-left" but south not be "not-north"? Languages often attach multiple meanings to the same word, and these meanings don't always match up across languages. Grammar is even worse. It's hard to find any grammatical structure that's truly universal across languages; maybe the separation of function between nouns and verbs, but the proclivity to verb nouns is so common in languages that it's questionable how fundamental the distinction actually is. Even the basic meaning of things like mood, aspect, and tense can be hard to settle, since the forms that exist in languages can partially overlap certain combinations (past/present+future versus past+present/future forms being the most well-known). Having to mark cases that don't exist in your native language can be difficult; English users' trouble with the subjunctive is well-known.

yorwba 9y ago
I think if you wanted to construct a language for maximum learnability, you'd have to tackle it both from the perspective of a speaker/writer and a listener/reader. The language should allow a speaker to make any distinction they can in their native language, but not require them to make a distinction that is foreign to them. On the other hand, it should allow a listener to understand any distinction they could understand in their native language, but allow them to ignore everything else. In practice, these requirements are obviously at odds with each other. You have to balance the freedom available to a speaker with the mental capacity of a listener. If you want to accomodate speakers of languages that allow free word order due to case marking, as well as languages that have a fixed word order, you might end up with case marking and marks to indicate a specific fixed word order. But then all of these markings would have to be understood by the listener, who'd have trouble keeping the various forms straight. However, you might be able to quantify the learning effort required and optimize for that. This is obviously hard for grammar and semantics, but could be done for phonetics. Instead of trying to intersect the phoneme sets in use, or giving up and choosing arbitrarily, you could collect statistics on the ability to produce and distinguish various phones, and then optimize for communicability. A speaker can pronounce a phoneme as well as the allophone that is easiest to pronounce for them, a listener can distinguish a pair of phonemes as well as the most similar combination of allophones from them. Then calculate the expectation over all pairings of speaker and listener, maximize the bandwidth accounting for the required error correction, and you get your perfect phoneme set. I'm actually interested what the result might look like, whether there will be a few, clearly separate phonemes, or a huge number with potential overlap, that needs to be compensated by unambiguous vocabulary. It also occurred to me that this might somehow apply to constructing programming languages, but I'm hazy about the details. Maybe something like Python's "one way to do it" vs other languages supporting a variety of styles?

chillacy 9y ago

Interesting to see this on HN. I'm actually at the congress right now in Seoul, I can answer any questions people might have (though this is only my second congress). In general I find that the speakers from Asia have to try harder to be understood because of the reduced shared vocabulary and different phonetics. It seems much easier for a speaker of Spanish or Italian.

kikimaru 9y ago
What is the general feel on "Esperanto vs English as a world language" there?
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  it's english and will be for quite some time. maybe not a perfect language, but good enough, simple enough to learn to OK level (compared to french for example).
- etatoby 9y ago
  This. In particular: what's the purpose of Esperanto now that anybody either speaks English or wishes they did and will make sure their children do?
  - robotoloco 9y ago
    English does not fulfill the neutrality ideal of Esperanto, which many people that speak Esperanto think it's very important. Currently, if you are born in an English speak country, you have such a great advantage over everybody else (starting with you don't have to spend lots of money to learn English, and few people attain native speaking levels later in life). But it is true that the current purpose of Esperanto is more ideal than practical. I study Esperanto because I really like its internal ideals. I study English because I want to eat.
    - msla 9y ago
      Esperanto fails at being neutral because it's inherently oriented towards the subset of European languages Zamenhof based it off of. Someone who speaks German or Czech would have an easier time learning it than someone who speaks Mongolian or Korean or Mandarin Chinese.

erezsh 9y ago

Can anyone recommend any books or essays written in Esperanto by Asian authors? I'm very interested in experiencing these cultures with a non-English skew. Please, only recommend things you have read and liked!

drdaffey 9y ago

I just want to say I wish there were more interest in Idiom Neutral.

akvadrako 9y ago

Here is a good article about the language family of Esperanto: Esperanto: european or asiatic language? (1981) http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...

amelius 9y ago

Here is a youtube video of a man teaching his child to speak Esperanto: [1] I'm not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, it is a nice experiment that probably wouldn't hurt. On the other hand, what is the real benefit? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aN94LWe9ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aN94LWe9ro

dbrgn 9y ago
There are already around ~2000 native Esperanto speakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers Actually, there even exist third generation native Esperantistas already: http://blogs.transparent.com/esperanto/3rd-gen-native-esperanto-speaker-nicole/ http://blogs.transparent.com/esperanto/3rd-gen-native-espera...

xiaq 9y ago

One interesting influence of Chinese on Esperanto is that you now have two ways to use adjectives as predicates. To say "Anna is beautiful" you can use the copular verb est: Anna est bela. Which is like English and most European languages. But you can also say Anna belas. That is, you turn the adjective to a verb and use it as a predicate directly. This mirrors the syntax of Chinese.

etatoby 9y ago
Desu!!! (sorry, I had to)
thriftwy 9y ago
I think it's mostly an influence of Russian/Belorussian: verb form: Анна красива. adjective form: Анна красивая.
- xiaq 9y ago
  Hmm that's also possible. Only those who have studied the history of Esperanto can give us a definite answer, I suppose.
- jwilk 9y ago
  Wait, where's the verb in the first form?
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    красива is predicate (or сказуемое)
- kemerover 9y ago
  It is not a verb form. It is just a short form. Both forms can be used as predicates but have different meanings. For example, "ты болен" and "ты больной" both mean "you are sick", but in the first case it means a temporary state. Another example, "эта юбка коротка" and "эта юбка короткая" both mean "this dress is short", but in the first case it has an implication of being short relative to something. For example, you would use first form to mean that this dress is short for you.

etatoby 9y ago

Television standardized the language of nation-states. Now even the most backward of countrymen speaks or at least understands the common language used on TV, and the local inflections get less and less prominent with each passing generation. (Granted, this was more of a problem in older countries.) The Internet will do the same on a global scale, in the long run, with English being that language, obviously. So what's the purpose of Esperanto, again?

briandear 9y ago
There isn’t a purpose. It’s a contrived language with the historical and cultural relevance of pig latin. The purpose is likely to provide its enthusiasts with a quirky hobby. It’s not any more serious a language as Klingon. Why Duolingo/etc wastes resources supporting such a useless language when they could perhaps support any of the number of dying languages that actually have cultural and historical significance (such as Yiddish, Navajo or any number of African or Asian languages) seems to be a waste.
- freehunter 9y ago
  You could almost say the same thing about those cultural languages though. If me, as a white American, wanted to learn Navajo... what's the point? I'm not Native American, I'm very unlikely to adopt their culture, and my knowing the language isn't really going to further the spread of their culture. So I'd just be learning it as an enthusiast with a quirky hobby and have no one to talk to. The problem with trying to save dying languages is that you need to save their dying culture, too. Otherwise the language is useless, just as useless as Esperanto. If there's no point in Esperanto because it's a language without a culture, there's no point in learning a language without learning their culture. And culture is often a very tricky, very closely guarded thing. What we have with Esperanto is a brand new culture that's been created, one that's a lot more relatable to a wider audience than Kasanga or Iñapari.

amelius 9y ago

I don't get the philosophy behind the Esperanto language. Why didn't the inventors pick a popular language like English or Spanish, and fixed their inconsistencies, rather than invent a whole new language? Were there political reasons?

litehacker 9y ago
1. It is meant to be an international language. They tried to blend in as many languages as possible. Otherwise someone speaking German, for example would have a harder time picking it up than someone who already speaks Spanish or English. 2. The Esperanto culture is post-nationalistic. They purposely did not want to align with a specific country, and be global.
fusiongyro 9y ago
This is kind of a let-me-google-that-for-you situation, but the nickel explanation is that Zamenhof saw a culturally-neutral international language as being important for building peace, furthering humanism and combating nationalism. If you look at the historical context, it makes more sense. Most of the criticism aimed at Esperanto today is about how badly executed the language itself is, but it unquestionably got further towards the larger goals than any other constructed language.
robotoloco 9y ago
The main reason was neutrality, and respect for the popular language. 'Fixing' the inconsistencies of a language means getting rid of its identity, and culture. You may be able to do that with a dead language, but not with a living one. As for neutrality, an English or Spanish speaker would always have the advantage, thus the idea that everybody can meet on a ground as even as possible. Esperanto tried to solve that by not belonging to any people, or any nation. It ended up being Eurocentric, but to some extent it does fulfill its neutrality motivation
bbctol 9y ago
Yes, Esperanto was a deeply political project. The ultimate goal was to spread international unity and peace, rather than just to create an interesting language. At the time, it was taken very seriously by not insignificant numbers of people, and the movement intersected with other late 19th/early 20th century idealist movements, sometimes in unfortunate ways (eventually, both the Nazis and Soviets viewed Esperantists as spies, which pretty definitively shut down its momentum.)

luxpir 9y ago

A symbolic language, such as Bliss[0][1][2], avoids cringe-worthy issues with accents and comprehension, at the cost of being written only. Sign languages do the same. International Sign Language[3] + Bliss are in theory the perfect combination for intergalactic communication. Blind people, unfortunately, would have to continue to suffer English until such time that direct brain stimulation becomes feasible. EDIT: Key point in all seriousness: the Bliss language has enabled thousands of cerebral palsy sufferers to communicate with a full range of expression. Sadly curbed in recent years by the much more limited pre-phrased, Hawking-like computer voices. Alternatives exist. Listen to the radio shows in [1] to find out more. The BBC one I found particularly moving. The Radiolab one starts at 5min, goes on for some 30mins. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols [1] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08y26qf http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08y26qf, http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/ [2] - https://archive.org/details/mrsymbolman https://archive.org/details/mrsymbolman [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign

mcguire 9y ago
Another fascinating chapter in the history of perfect languages. "... McNaughton’s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a “misinterpretation”. For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable —according to the English definition of tomato— even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss’s system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English. (2009, p. 189) Bliss complaints about his symbols “being abused” by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. In spite of this, in 1975 Bliss granted an exclusive world license, for use with disabled children, to the new Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton (later called Blissymbolics Communication International, BCI). Nevertheless, in 1977 Bliss claimed that this agreement was violated so that he was deprived of effective control of his symbol system."

awkwarddaturtle 9y ago

Esperanto isn't an asian language. It has nothing to do with asia or asian languages ( however you define "asia" ). Just because a meeting about esperanto is being held in asia or that there were some fans of esperanto in asia doesn't make it "asian".