12 ms·

‘Saluton’: the surprise return of Esperanto

137 points by kawera 9y ago

mlamat 9y ago
Esperanto? Why not Klingon?
- arundelo 9y ago
  Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based on estimates, it's no contest: "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] In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native speakers: "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] (Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.) [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 EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".
  - D-Coder 9y ago
    Prof. Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington estimated 1 million to 2 million fluent Esperanto speakers about a decade ago. He is the only person I've heard of who has done actual research (he produced the number-of-speakers figures for some 100 languages for the World Almanac). Some methodology at http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-methods.html http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-methods.html.
dsr_ 9y ago
I blame Duolingo. Two months with their app brought me from not knowing any Esperanto to being terrible at it.
- ravenstine 9y ago
  I never learned much from Duolingo. It makes learning languages incredibly boring, and my eyes would glaze over every one of the dozens of times I had to match/construct some variance of "der junge trinkt die milsch." I learned more German just reading English translations of Rammstein lyrics. Anything by Pimsleur is still not very interesting, but at least it can hold my attention.
  - Tannic 9y ago
    “Tell the girl you would like to go up to her apartment for a drink.”
  - stevenjohns 9y ago
    Consider coupling Anki[0] with one of the many existing German decks out there[1]. I've been using it for Spanish[2] and I've found it to work extremely well. It has somewhat brought back my interest after Duolingo became repetitive. [0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german [2] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Anki is pretty awesome. I spent about 1000h learning Japanese with Anki so far. Together with Yomichan it's pretty much the ultimate learning tool, imho.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    I learned more French from a day of trying to read Le Petit Prince in French, with the English translation beside, than I did from 3 months of Duolingo. Rote learning just doesn't work that well for most people.
Karrot_Kream 9y ago
In conlang (constructed language) communities, Esperanto is a type of conlang known as an auxlang (auxillary language) that tries to be easily learnable and speakable by many people. Esperanto remains very popular and has tons of high quality learning material (I myself learned it from a book in my local community college public library over a few hours in between summer classes) and translated works. That said, there's plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds. For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones. Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to join in. It's hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter is just light conversation anyway. I've used it in a bar setting with friends and it's a fun way to have a "secret" language. Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in. Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban. The "standard" camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn't have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they are there (including "lo selfri be la .alis. bei bu'u la selmacygu'e", Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) I'm partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.
- wnoise 9y ago
  > In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother. i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language problem.
  - 9y ago
msla 9y ago
Here's perhaps the only large-scale critique of Esperanto from a linguistic perspective, as opposed to a reactionary[1] or nationalist[2] one: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html [1] ("NEW LANGUAGE? DON'T WANNA! WAAH!") [2] ("The language I happen to know best also happens to be the easiest and best and most universal. Funny how that worked out, neh?") This seems to be the biggest unanswerable criticism the Esperantists face: "It looks like some sort of wind‐up‐toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's one part of this world that doesn't need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which is not only the continent whose languages are best covered by online translation services, but also the home of the current de facto global lingua franca: English."
- taoistextremist 9y ago
  To be fair to Esperanto, when it was invented English wasn't nearly the lingua franca it is today, and the Internet didn't exist. I don't think it's fair to critique it just because its original intent was as an auxiliary language. I would argue that intent failed. But it has native speakers, and it has communities who use it, and that itself justifies a language's existence.
  - msla 9y ago
    Esperanto has nothing to be ashamed of as regards its history or current use, but if it's being touted as a modern auxlang which should be used more often, there are a number of problems its promoters have to come to grips with.
    - akvadrako 9y ago
      It's not perfect, but practically it's still the best option. Of all the candidates for an easy to learn international language, it has by at least an order of magnitude the most speakers and materials. For example, the Esperanto wikipedia is larger than the Arabic one. I also haven't seen any of the other conlangs demonstrate they can be both as expressive and easy to master.
    - taoistextremist 9y ago
jameskegel 9y ago
Interestingly, a project I have been tracking, called Monero, has an Esperanto-centric nomenclature for all of their projects, with Monero itself being the name for “coin”
- chillacy 9y ago
  A prominent wallet is called monerujo (ujo makes the word mean container of monero), and the plural form of monero is moneroj. Monero itself of course is mono + -ero, so something like particle of money, like breadcrumbs are to bread or a grain of sand is to the sand as a whole. I'm ashamed that I only recently discovered that was an intentional thing, though the name has caught a sliver of my interest for at least a year now.
  - jameskegel 9y ago
    Well noted. There is another project that I'm fond of in the Monero ecosystem called 'Kovri', which means "to cover, veil, or wrap". It is a router that is i2p compatible, used to further obfuscate personal information for those who require more anonymity than the traditional transactional security of Monero. There may be others, as well.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Honestly this may contribute a lot more than it is given credit for Monero has touched a lot of people since 2014 Would this random tourist have noticed the Esperanto statue in Vienna? Their museum? A passing impression of Monero may be fueling this resurgance and international exposure
tbirrell 9y ago
Learning Esperanto is my New Year's resolution. Are there any successful learners who have tips? Right now my plan is to get through duolingo then figure it out from there.
- antognini 9y ago
  I really, really like Step By Step in Esperanto by Montagu Butler. It's the best introductory textbook of any language that I've read. It's composed of maybe ~1000 or so very short lessons (each is about a paragraph), so it makes it very easy to make a little progress every day even if you only have a couple of minutes before bed. There's a nice mix of reading, translation exercises, pronunciation exercises, and grammar.
- jcreed 9y ago
  http://bertilow.com/pmeg/ http://bertilow.com/pmeg/ is a great post-Duolingo thing to read through if you like reading dense reference grammars (as I do :) There's lots of easy fiction literature; gerda malaperis, la eta princo, etc. Nowadays there's a good amount of vlog content to watch. Evildea has tons, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYs_6gTE3O8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYs_6gTE3O8 has a bunch of fairly ordinary casual conversation between people in it) and I also like https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZLuNvGx99zmlEQL0oR_uvg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZLuNvGx99zmlEQL0oR_uvg
- colanderman 9y ago
  Find a local Esperanto group and go to their meetings. We're all pretty welcoming and most will be glad to help you boost your conversational skills. Also, if you are in the States (or not), check out NASK (Nord-Amerika Somera Kurso). It is a week-long course which takes place across July 4th weekend each year, currently in North Carolina. That is how I built the bulk of my ability. I highly recommend it.
- chillacy 9y ago
  Finish the duolingo tree, then go to a multi-day congress asap, ideally the week-long UK or IJK, for immersion. Facile!
interlingua7 9y ago
Another interesting artificial language is interlingua. Interlingua is very easy to learn for many people in Europe since interlingua words are taken from English, French, Italian and Spanish. Interlingua is a pragmatic solution for a common language across Europe. As a native spanish speaker I was able to understand about a thousand words in one or two hours studying it. Esperanto is like Haskell, interlingua is like C, one is pure with universal rules for derivation, the other is for using the language from the first day for communication.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  Interlingua is the most intriguing conlang for me. It just seems incredibly practical. I'm a native English speaker with only high school french, yet I can pretty much read interlingua despite never having learned it. I imagine native romance language speakers are fluent readers right off the bat. That's huge.
  - geowwy 9y ago
    Folksprak is another one like Interlingua, except based on the Germanic languages. One of the nice things about being an English speaker is you can pick up both pretty easily. Another interesting one is Uròpi which tries to go back to the Indo-European roots of all European languages. It's not as immediately readable as Interlingua or Esperanto but not too bad either: http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html
- zouhair 9y ago
  Is there a non artificial language?
  - backtoyoujim 9y ago
    Perusing online Esperanto sites have yielded this gem: Speak Esperanto Like a Native!™
    - schoen 9y ago
sdfin 9y ago
Apart from entertainment, which other reasons exist to learn Esperanto or some constructed language?
- colanderman 9y ago
  Esperanto media and social gatherings are a good way to expand your cultural horizons. Esperanto speakers tend to hail from many different countries and cultures (especially non-English-speaking ones) so seeking out Esperanto media and groups is an easy way to filter for multicultural content.
- astura 9y ago
  Probably not very many practical reasons over another language. From the little I've been exposed to it (brother took some college classes) Esperanto speaker seem to have their own shared culture and close community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_culture https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-language-duolingo-app-origin-history https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-l...
- adrianN 9y ago
  Learning Esperanto helps you learn other European languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
- firethief 9y ago
  Bilingualism might be good for your brain, and Esperanto takes a fraction of the time to learn as typical natlangs.
mapmeld 9y ago
I used a bunch of Esperanto text sources to make a NLP program (figured it would be easier for a newbie to do since the language is so regular). The code corrected some grammatical errors in the Esperanto Wiki; I did a write-up earlier this month: https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-part-3-correcting-grammar-6d34f93bded1 https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-part-3-correcting-...
jimmcslim 9y ago
Esperanto is also the official second language of the Space Corps in Red Dwarf.
RobertRoberts 9y ago
I learned about Esperanto from the novel series the Stainless Steal Rat. I was really disappointed with the audio books though, because I always pictured him a young guy, maybe a bit pompous or silly. But certainly not an old gruff grouchy guy. :( I thought it was just awesome when 10 years later I found out Esperanto was real!
- lakkal 9y ago
  I thought it was neat that Esperanto was used in the books. I first learned of it in about 1980 from a book belonging to a friend's father, who was in the military. It was called 'Esperanto: The Aggressor Language", because it was used by the US Army in their training games. I GM'd a game of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy where I had the UN exploration teams use Esperanto as a common language.
- D-Coder 9y ago
  Believe it or not, I first heard about Esperanto in a Man From UNCLE book (The Monster Wheel Affair), where the bad guys used Esperanto so no one would know what country they came from.

137 points by kawera 9y ago

mlamat 9y ago

Esperanto? Why not Klingon?

arundelo 9y ago
Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based on estimates, it's no contest: "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] In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native speakers: "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] (Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.) [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 EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".
- D-Coder 9y ago
  Prof. Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington estimated 1 million to 2 million fluent Esperanto speakers about a decade ago. He is the only person I've heard of who has done actual research (he produced the number-of-speakers figures for some 100 languages for the World Almanac). Some methodology at http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-methods.html http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-methods.html.

dsr_ 9y ago

I blame Duolingo. Two months with their app brought me from not knowing any Esperanto to being terrible at it.

ravenstine 9y ago
I never learned much from Duolingo. It makes learning languages incredibly boring, and my eyes would glaze over every one of the dozens of times I had to match/construct some variance of "der junge trinkt die milsch." I learned more German just reading English translations of Rammstein lyrics. Anything by Pimsleur is still not very interesting, but at least it can hold my attention.
- Tannic 9y ago
  “Tell the girl you would like to go up to her apartment for a drink.”
- stevenjohns 9y ago
  Consider coupling Anki[0] with one of the many existing German decks out there[1]. I've been using it for Spanish[2] and I've found it to work extremely well. It has somewhat brought back my interest after Duolingo became repetitive. [0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german [2] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Anki is pretty awesome. I spent about 1000h learning Japanese with Anki so far. Together with Yomichan it's pretty much the ultimate learning tool, imho.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  I learned more French from a day of trying to read Le Petit Prince in French, with the English translation beside, than I did from 3 months of Duolingo. Rote learning just doesn't work that well for most people.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

In conlang (constructed language) communities, Esperanto is a type of conlang known as an auxlang (auxillary language) that tries to be easily learnable and speakable by many people. Esperanto remains very popular and has tons of high quality learning material (I myself learned it from a book in my local community college public library over a few hours in between summer classes) and translated works. That said, there's plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds. For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones. Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to join in. It's hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter is just light conversation anyway. I've used it in a bar setting with friends and it's a fun way to have a "secret" language. Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in. Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban. The "standard" camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn't have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they are there (including "lo selfri be la .alis. bei bu'u la selmacygu'e", Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) I'm partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.

wnoise 9y ago
> In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother. i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language problem.
- 9y ago

msla 9y ago

Here's perhaps the only large-scale critique of Esperanto from a linguistic perspective, as opposed to a reactionary[1] or nationalist[2] one: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html [1] ("NEW LANGUAGE? DON'T WANNA! WAAH!") [2] ("The language I happen to know best also happens to be the easiest and best and most universal. Funny how that worked out, neh?") This seems to be the biggest unanswerable criticism the Esperantists face: "It looks like some sort of wind‐up‐toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's one part of this world that doesn't need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which is not only the continent whose languages are best covered by online translation services, but also the home of the current de facto global lingua franca: English."

taoistextremist 9y ago
To be fair to Esperanto, when it was invented English wasn't nearly the lingua franca it is today, and the Internet didn't exist. I don't think it's fair to critique it just because its original intent was as an auxiliary language. I would argue that intent failed. But it has native speakers, and it has communities who use it, and that itself justifies a language's existence.
- msla 9y ago
  Esperanto has nothing to be ashamed of as regards its history or current use, but if it's being touted as a modern auxlang which should be used more often, there are a number of problems its promoters have to come to grips with.
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    It's not perfect, but practically it's still the best option. Of all the candidates for an easy to learn international language, it has by at least an order of magnitude the most speakers and materials. For example, the Esperanto wikipedia is larger than the Arabic one. I also haven't seen any of the other conlangs demonstrate they can be both as expressive and easy to master.
  - taoistextremist 9y ago

jameskegel 9y ago

Interestingly, a project I have been tracking, called Monero, has an Esperanto-centric nomenclature for all of their projects, with Monero itself being the name for “coin”

chillacy 9y ago
A prominent wallet is called monerujo (ujo makes the word mean container of monero), and the plural form of monero is moneroj. Monero itself of course is mono + -ero, so something like particle of money, like breadcrumbs are to bread or a grain of sand is to the sand as a whole. I'm ashamed that I only recently discovered that was an intentional thing, though the name has caught a sliver of my interest for at least a year now.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  Well noted. There is another project that I'm fond of in the Monero ecosystem called 'Kovri', which means "to cover, veil, or wrap". It is a router that is i2p compatible, used to further obfuscate personal information for those who require more anonymity than the traditional transactional security of Monero. There may be others, as well.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Honestly this may contribute a lot more than it is given credit for Monero has touched a lot of people since 2014 Would this random tourist have noticed the Esperanto statue in Vienna? Their museum? A passing impression of Monero may be fueling this resurgance and international exposure

tbirrell 9y ago

Learning Esperanto is my New Year's resolution. Are there any successful learners who have tips? Right now my plan is to get through duolingo then figure it out from there.

antognini 9y ago
I really, really like Step By Step in Esperanto by Montagu Butler. It's the best introductory textbook of any language that I've read. It's composed of maybe ~1000 or so very short lessons (each is about a paragraph), so it makes it very easy to make a little progress every day even if you only have a couple of minutes before bed. There's a nice mix of reading, translation exercises, pronunciation exercises, and grammar.
jcreed 9y ago
http://bertilow.com/pmeg/ http://bertilow.com/pmeg/ is a great post-Duolingo thing to read through if you like reading dense reference grammars (as I do :) There's lots of easy fiction literature; gerda malaperis, la eta princo, etc. Nowadays there's a good amount of vlog content to watch. Evildea has tons, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYs_6gTE3O8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYs_6gTE3O8 has a bunch of fairly ordinary casual conversation between people in it) and I also like https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZLuNvGx99zmlEQL0oR_uvg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZLuNvGx99zmlEQL0oR_uvg
colanderman 9y ago
Find a local Esperanto group and go to their meetings. We're all pretty welcoming and most will be glad to help you boost your conversational skills. Also, if you are in the States (or not), check out NASK (Nord-Amerika Somera Kurso). It is a week-long course which takes place across July 4th weekend each year, currently in North Carolina. That is how I built the bulk of my ability. I highly recommend it.
chillacy 9y ago
Finish the duolingo tree, then go to a multi-day congress asap, ideally the week-long UK or IJK, for immersion. Facile!

interlingua7 9y ago

Another interesting artificial language is interlingua. Interlingua is very easy to learn for many people in Europe since interlingua words are taken from English, French, Italian and Spanish. Interlingua is a pragmatic solution for a common language across Europe. As a native spanish speaker I was able to understand about a thousand words in one or two hours studying it. Esperanto is like Haskell, interlingua is like C, one is pure with universal rules for derivation, the other is for using the language from the first day for communication.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
Interlingua is the most intriguing conlang for me. It just seems incredibly practical. I'm a native English speaker with only high school french, yet I can pretty much read interlingua despite never having learned it. I imagine native romance language speakers are fluent readers right off the bat. That's huge.
- geowwy 9y ago
  Folksprak is another one like Interlingua, except based on the Germanic languages. One of the nice things about being an English speaker is you can pick up both pretty easily. Another interesting one is Uròpi which tries to go back to the Indo-European roots of all European languages. It's not as immediately readable as Interlingua or Esperanto but not too bad either: http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html
zouhair 9y ago
Is there a non artificial language?
- backtoyoujim 9y ago
  Perusing online Esperanto sites have yielded this gem: Speak Esperanto Like a Native!™
  - schoen 9y ago

sdfin 9y ago

Apart from entertainment, which other reasons exist to learn Esperanto or some constructed language?

colanderman 9y ago
Esperanto media and social gatherings are a good way to expand your cultural horizons. Esperanto speakers tend to hail from many different countries and cultures (especially non-English-speaking ones) so seeking out Esperanto media and groups is an easy way to filter for multicultural content.
astura 9y ago
Probably not very many practical reasons over another language. From the little I've been exposed to it (brother took some college classes) Esperanto speaker seem to have their own shared culture and close community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_culture https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-language-duolingo-app-origin-history https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-l...
adrianN 9y ago
Learning Esperanto helps you learn other European languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
firethief 9y ago
Bilingualism might be good for your brain, and Esperanto takes a fraction of the time to learn as typical natlangs.

mapmeld 9y ago

I used a bunch of Esperanto text sources to make a NLP program (figured it would be easier for a newbie to do since the language is so regular). The code corrected some grammatical errors in the Esperanto Wiki; I did a write-up earlier this month: https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-part-3-correcting-grammar-6d34f93bded1 https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-part-3-correcting-...

jimmcslim 9y ago

Esperanto is also the official second language of the Space Corps in Red Dwarf.

RobertRoberts 9y ago

I learned about Esperanto from the novel series the Stainless Steal Rat. I was really disappointed with the audio books though, because I always pictured him a young guy, maybe a bit pompous or silly. But certainly not an old gruff grouchy guy. :( I thought it was just awesome when 10 years later I found out Esperanto was real!

lakkal 9y ago
I thought it was neat that Esperanto was used in the books. I first learned of it in about 1980 from a book belonging to a friend's father, who was in the military. It was called 'Esperanto: The Aggressor Language", because it was used by the US Army in their training games. I GM'd a game of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy where I had the UN exploration teams use Esperanto as a common language.
D-Coder 9y ago
Believe it or not, I first heard about Esperanto in a Man From UNCLE book (The Monster Wheel Affair), where the bad guys used Esperanto so no one would know what country they came from.