4 ms·

I did not want to say that speaking a second language to communicate with everyone is a bad thing. In my opinion, having one or a few well established communic

by fwn 8y ago

I did not want to say that speaking a second language to communicate with everyone is a bad thing. In my opinion, having one or a few well established communication languages works pretty well right now, although adoption could of course improve. My comment was mostly targeted at the concept of Esperanto. As far as my knowledge goes, it is a culture-free designer language made to ailinate people from the literature and thoughts of the past. Based on that I have difficulties to see it in a more favourable light.

adrianN 8y ago
I think you have the wrong impression of the language. Esperanto was made to encourage the sharing of culture, knowledge and ideas over language barriers, not to alienate people from anything. Maybe check out the introduction of the book that introduced Esperanto: http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html
- fwn 8y ago
  I have to admit that it has been a while since I have read about it, but reading the introduction right now, it sounds pretty consistent with what I remembered. It states it is neutral, which it obviously can not be. Just because a language doesn't impose current biases (which Esperanto does) that does not mean that it will not impose its very own, new biases. From there it gets highly problematic: The thought that languages shouldn't get translated into each other but should get cleared and isolated by translating them only to and from Esperanto is something you would expect George Orwell to come up with. With this I don't want to say that the current, grown concept (mostly English, Mandarin, Hindu, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) isn't without its flaws, just that Esperanto has those flaws as well, plus its (new) design issues and the dystopian political agenda of its enthusiasts. (Like the culture filter I mentioned from the introduction.) Would you personally see something positive in the adoption of Esperanto compared to the current model? I'm curious.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Weird how you and I get so different impressions from reading the same text :) It's hard to learn English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hindi. At least for Chinese and Arabic there is a multitude of mutually unintelligible topolects that you'd also have to learn. Each of them takes at least ten years to master. I'd strongly prefer it if we had one language that most people speak reasonably well. English gets you quite far (outside of Asia at least) but English is a lot harder than Esperanto. Esperanto has a number of flaws, most notably it's too Euro-centric making it harder to learn for people who don't speak a romance or germanic language. There are other conlangs that try to address that deficiency, but they are a lot less popular than even Esperanto. I don't really mind which language wins, but I want to live in a world where I can interact with everybody without having to learn dozens of languages. I learned English reasonably well so I can interact with large parts of the "western" Internet, but that's just a tiny echo chamber compared to all content.

by fwn 8y ago

adrianN 8y ago

I think you have the wrong impression of the language. Esperanto was made to encourage the sharing of culture, knowledge and ideas over language barriers, not to alienate people from anything. Maybe check out the introduction of the book that introduced Esperanto: http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html

fwn 8y ago
I have to admit that it has been a while since I have read about it, but reading the introduction right now, it sounds pretty consistent with what I remembered. It states it is neutral, which it obviously can not be. Just because a language doesn't impose current biases (which Esperanto does) that does not mean that it will not impose its very own, new biases. From there it gets highly problematic: The thought that languages shouldn't get translated into each other but should get cleared and isolated by translating them only to and from Esperanto is something you would expect George Orwell to come up with. With this I don't want to say that the current, grown concept (mostly English, Mandarin, Hindu, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) isn't without its flaws, just that Esperanto has those flaws as well, plus its (new) design issues and the dystopian political agenda of its enthusiasts. (Like the culture filter I mentioned from the introduction.) Would you personally see something positive in the adoption of Esperanto compared to the current model? I'm curious.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Weird how you and I get so different impressions from reading the same text :) It's hard to learn English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hindi. At least for Chinese and Arabic there is a multitude of mutually unintelligible topolects that you'd also have to learn. Each of them takes at least ten years to master. I'd strongly prefer it if we had one language that most people speak reasonably well. English gets you quite far (outside of Asia at least) but English is a lot harder than Esperanto. Esperanto has a number of flaws, most notably it's too Euro-centric making it harder to learn for people who don't speak a romance or germanic language. There are other conlangs that try to address that deficiency, but they are a lot less popular than even Esperanto. I don't really mind which language wins, but I want to live in a world where I can interact with everybody without having to learn dozens of languages. I learned English reasonably well so I can interact with large parts of the "western" Internet, but that's just a tiny echo chamber compared to all content.