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Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it
- asutekku 8y agoI love the concept of esperanto but to be honest there are no practical uses for it. Fun language and it teaches you the concepts of others but as I said, not that useful.
- wishinghand 8y ago> to be honest there are no practical uses for it I find this hard to believe as a conclusion anyone could come to. A universal shared language for international communication? People can keep their mother tongue yet no matter how provincial it may be, can still communicate effectively with the rest of the world?
- drugme 8y agoA universal shared language for international communication? In theory, yes - but not in practice. Which is precisely what the above commenter was saying.
- em-bee 8y agowhy not? because not many people speak it? that would be like saying, phones are not practical because not everyone has one. or maybe facebook or google+ are not practical because not everyone is on them. but that is a limitation that has nothing to do with any inherent quality of esperanto, only with it's lack of popularity which is something that can be changed without needing to change esperanto itself.
- krapp 8y agoEsperanto is no more "universal" or "shared" than any other European or Romance language, which is to say its idioms are "universal" only to a limited subset of humanity. Might as well just tell the world to keep using English, or make Westerners learn Mandarin.
- hannob 8y ago> A universal shared language for international communication? That is a very good idea. But in order to be successful such a language needs to be spoken by a large share of people internationally. The best language we have for this is English. It's not perfect, because in large parts of the world, particularly in Asia, many people don't speak it. But it's far better suited than Esperanto in almost every imaginable way.
- the_duke 8y agoBefore WW1, Esperanto was actually becoming popular and was taught in schools in parts of Europe. The nationalistic policies around WW1 and after put a stop to it. I think it's a tremendous shame... it would be so nice to communicate with everyone in a simple language. Note that such a language would not actually need to be actively spoken in normal live much. It just needs to be simple enough to be learn in a short amount of time and to have international backing so it is taught in schools.
- drugme 8y agoNote that such a language would not actually need to be actively spoken in normal life much. Almost by definition - if a language isn't "spoken much" - it isn't really language. But rather a collection of rules and definitions.
- karmasimida 8y ago> A universal shared language for international communication Practical, but we already got one, that is English. Even this post itself is written in English to reach bigger audience. And I would argue Esperanto is hardly universal for the world, more for european languages.
- ghaff 8y agoAnd for Europe, we had Latin before that for scholars and French for diplomats as it was largely Europe’s court language.
- wenc 8y agoTrue, and some people would even call it "globish". (as in "globe") It's a form of non-native English that is as close to being universal as the world has ever seen. This is particularly noticeable in Europe. Due to the European Union's thinning/erasure of borders, there is an order of magnitude more inter-European travel and mobility than 10 years ago. And the most widely understood language between these travelers is English. In Barcelona, vendors would speak to Dutch and Chinese tourists in English. Even in Paris, famous for its disdain of English, the language is fairly widely spoken, not so much to accommodate the British, but visitors from the rest of Europe and the world. Folks quickly figured out that instead of learning multiple European languages (and even then, only be able to communicate with other Europeans and people from former European colonies), they could instead learn English and be able to communicate with not only Europeans but people from Asia, the Middle East, etc. English is used even among people of the same ethnicity. I was with a friend at a restaurant in Chicago's Chinatown, and noticed that my Cantonese-speaking friend had a hard time conveying her order to the Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese waiter, so they both switched to English. The communication was successful.
- beatgammit 8y agoI've heard it's reasonably popular in Japan, so there's that.
- karmasimida 8y agoOnly if you consider that 10% of Japanese vocabulary is already English or English-originated (as Gairaigo).
- mycorrhizal 8y agoOne practical use that has been studied (only a little) is to use Esperanto as a stepping stone to learning other languages. Essentially the idea is that you can first spend a few months learning Esperanto and that might actually speed up the total time for learning a "third" language. I believe school systems in both the UK and France have experimented with this, both with promising results.
- porpoisely 8y agoWe used to have a stepping stone to learn other languages. It was called latin. For some odd reason, we stopped teaching it in our public schools here. But the wealthy private schools still teach latin and give their kids and enormous leg up in their studies.
- ghaff 8y agoAs someone who took Latin in high school, the stepping stone argument always felt a bit disingenuous. There seemed to be a component of not wanting to admit it was being taught primarily because it was part of a traditional Classics education among Western upper classes. As opposed to a useful skill of some sort. I have absolutely nothing against traditional Classics though I’m not sure how good a fit they are with typical US public high schools today. However I’m pretty skeptical that a few years of Latin—as opposed to Spanish, German, or French (which I also took) or something else entirely—is a uniquely good use of time.
- em-bee 8y agoany second language is a stepping stone to later languages. by the time you learn latin and then french, you might as well have learned french directly and then german or chinese. esperanto is different because it is easier to learn, so instead of taking years to mastery, you are done in a few months, and teachers can focus on proper learning techniques without fearing that students get demotivated because it takes so long. then you can apply those techniques to the next languages and hopefully come out ahead
- BillChapman 8y agoNo practical uses! What! Over recent years I have had guided tours of Berlin, Douala (loo it up!), Yerevan and Milan in this planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I’ve discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down and in Armenia when it was a Soviet republic, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, and so on. I recommend it as a very useful and practical way to overcome language barriers. Take an unguided wander around the net. You wil find political stuff, religious stuff, scientific stuff - all in Esperanto.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoYour experience may serve as a rebuttal to the OP about lack of "practical use", but with your couple of posts here I feel you are being very disingenuous and leaving some key things out that would put Esperanto in a bad light. Yes, the Esperanto movement does have a network of proponents around the world that is close-knit and local Esperantists are often willing to show a foreigner around. However, among them are so many weirdos and eccentrics that a person might well be served better by learning either English or the local language and getting all his hospitality and local information through that instead. When I was active in the Esperanto movement, it was common for my fellow Esperantists to joke or kvetch about how certain kinds of political movements or bizarre lifestyles would come out in force at congresses and make everyone else cringe, or how creepy or insufferable one's Pasporta Servo host turned out to be. Something as idealistic and unfashionable as Esperanto is bound to attract more odd people than when using a language like English that is more utilitarian and has less overt shared values.
- beatgammit 8y agoThere's some truth to that, but learning the local language for everywhere you want to travel is very difficult, and learning English can only get you so far. The great thing about Esperanto is that the speakers are very enthusiastic to speak it with other people, so you'll get better than average hospitality. You're also right about the weirdos, so you need to be very careful when selecting a host. I really like the idea of Amikumu, where you chat with people in Esperanto before meeting in person. Meeting more Esperantists is great because you can discuss experiences using Esperanto abroad. I am marginally into the language (I lurk about on Esperanto subreddits, have done the Duolingo course, and visit Lernu.net periodically), but I wouldn't call myself fluent or anything. However, I might try to use it if I go somewhere with generally weak English skills, like Japan or parts of each Europe.
- chillacy 8y agoCompared to other conlangs, esperanto is probably the most useful. Heck, compared to some natural languages, esperanto has a unique usecase of letting you join a very passionate language diaspora with members scattered around the world.
- qwerty456127 8y agoI've once learnt Spanish and found it the easiest language I've ever seen, easier than English, it took just 2 weeks to learn. Then I've started learning Esperanto (as the idea of engineered languages (or whatever) amazes me, I feel like we should engineer everything) with DuoLingo (I don't happen to know any better Esperanto course) and it felt easy yet it was just a tiny bit easier than Spanish so I was wondering why do we need a new easy language when there already is one spoken by so many people (and it also is very similar to it) but continued learning. Then I've found out Esperanto has grammatical cases and stopped, cases make me panic. I still feel like I would like to learn Esperanto to fluency once as I adore its spirit of technocracy, borderlessness and defiance of nationalism.
- amaccuish 8y ago> it took just 2 weeks to learn How are you measuring having "learnt" a language? Because IMHO that's an incredible feet that almost requires you not to sleep! Or do you just mean learning the grammar?
- qwerty456127 8y agoI mean learning it to the point when you can say anything you might want to tell somebody you meet in real life (not in a philosophical discussion club however), looking up some words in a dictionary occasionally: the grammar + basic vocabulary (+ phonetics, orthography etc of course). It is worth mentioning, however, that I've already forgotten almost everything I've learnt of Spanish as practice is vital for remembering and I had absolutely no practice after learning it.
- drugme 8y agolooking up some words in a dictionary occasionally... It is worth mentioning, however, that I've already forgotten almost everything I've learnt of Spanish Well that's the whole point -- you didn't really "learn it", then. You just learned the rough outlines of it.
- 8y ago
- malmsteen 8y agoEsperanto is to English what duckduckgo is to google and bitcoin to money. Only losers who prefer to get stuck on "pure" ideas instead of embracing reality would be interested
- wishinghand 8y agoMaybe a legit thought on the language and money metaphor, but your second one is basically a non-sequitur.
- sctb 8y agoWe've asked you more than once to please follow the guidelines and stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments, so we've banned the account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.coma and we believe you'll start using the site as intended.
- malmsteen 8y agoThere was a bit of irony in the phrasing of my post sorry it was not clearly inspired by trump tweets... I dont think my point was totally unsubstantive though
- zozbot123 8y agoRelevant and entertaining: JBR's "Ranto" about Esperanto - http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ (you can try https, but it was acting up for me somehow. Sorry!)
- myth2018 8y agoYeah, the article is a bit too long, I haven't gone through it yet but I intend to. But I disagree about a few points I've read so far. Esperanto case declinations consist basically of marking direct objects with an -n suffix. You forget it sometimes, and many jokes among Esperanto speakers are about forgetting the accusative, but it is not that hard and gives you some nice flexibilities regarding word ordering. I don't remember of adjectival concords in Esperanto, but I'm not a linguistics expert, I speak Esperanto but maybe there is something there which I haven't realized, or some rule that maybe has become second nature to me due to my mother tongue. It sounds indeed more familiar to european-languages speakers but well, chineses find Esperanto easy so I don't know.. The notation may be a bit clumsy for keyboard users, of course, but one has to consider that computers with ansi keyboards didn't exist by then and, anyway, there is already a widely used convention to overcome the lack of those two funny symbols: to simply use an "x" after the targeted letter. I admire Esperanto's ability of being such a rant magnet. When it comes to other languages, people usually simply don't learn them when they don't feel interested enough.
- jcranmer 8y agoWhen I was in elementary school, we were taught English grammar in English class. Actually, we weren't. We were taught Early Modern Latin grammar using the English language, and everyone pretended that English was somehow a simple variant of Early Modern Latin. Why were we taught such an egregious abomination? Because the traditional study of grammar was in the study of a very rigorous classical Latin and Greek, which was extended to vernacular languages by the Late Middle Ages. For the presciptivists of the Early Modern, it was a short step to use the same framework to try to describe English--and when the framework is woefully underequipped to deal with English grammar, they simply declared that such constructs shouldn't be used because you can't do it in Latin. Linguists only really developed the capability to tackle English about 100 years ago, and primary education still hasn't caught up. The complaint in the rant on Esperanto essentially boils down to pointing out that Zamenhof's idea of what constitutes a sufficient description of a grammar is following that ancient underpowered Latin grammar rubric. The second major theme is that Esperanto doesn't look much beyond Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, and its considerations for what's important, what's omitted, and what's variant is largely derived from consideration of how those languages are similar or different.
- 4thaccount 8y agoGlad to see this on HN. I'm not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours I've put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in Spanish (where I've gone through 3 years of formal education). The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier. For example, all nouns end in "o", questions usually start with "cu". Also, the vocabulary you need is reduced by marking certain things as opposites (if you know the word for good "bona" the word for bad is "Mal" + "bona" or "malbona". I still have a ways to go to learn the language, but I figure I have more chance of learning it than other languages I'm interested in like Spanish and Swedish (relatively easy for native English speakers) and Hungarian and Finnish (far beyond my wildest grasps). There are not many Esperanto speakers you'll meet on the subway, but there is a vibrant online community and international events. It's beneficial to us in the USA and the UK that English is the lingua Franca. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn Mandarin? The Esperanto language was eventually repurposed as an international auxillary language. So everyone learns their native tongue and international discussions (like the U.N.) are all done in Esperanto and you don't need armies of translators. It will never happen, but I really like the concept.
- stevekemp 8y agoI moved to Finland, and as you say Finnish is hard. It does have its pluses though, certainly some of the things that are listed as advantages of Esperanto: * Regular grammar. * Consistent pronunciation. Given the pain of moving to a foreign country and learning their language I'd struggle to learn another language "for fun", without the ability to use it "for real" on a regular basis.
- eximius 8y agoReally? I had read that Finnish was incredibly irregular, to the point that listing out all the irregularities was challenging in and of itself.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
- Koshkin 8y agoThe vocabulary resembles a big pile of stolen goods.
- em-bee 8y agomaybe klingon is more to your liking then.
- myth2018 8y agoWell, but probably most of the languages work this way, maybe all of them. English vocabulary resembles a pile of goods stolen from french, germanic languages and so on.
- krapp 8y ago"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll
- scroot 8y agoThis is intentional: the roots were all taken from what Zamenhof surmised were the "most common" for a given word/concept across Indo-European languages
- PaulHoule 8y agoSometimes I think something gets talked about in science fiction and then it gets stuck in people's heads. Harry Harrison talked about Esperanto in the "Stainless Steel Rat" books and that is why it is so much better known than Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua which is really a cleaned-up Latin that you might already know how to read if you've been exposed to Romance languages much at all.
- bluedevil2k 8y agoI wonder if a better solution for a "universal" language would be a Simplified English, where the English language as spoken in the US/UK is greatly simplified in terms of rules, spelling etc. Go with the Esperanto idea of a common verb tense rule (I go, He go -> I goed, He goed), and clean up the spelling (tough -> tuf, though -> tho). Most people in the world have a grasp of English based on the Internet and entertainment, maybe making it even easier to learn would help them become proficient in it.
- Riverheart 8y agoOh, you mean the proposal by the European Commission :) https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html
- outside1234 8y agoEspecially since this is effectively what is happening - when I speak English with someone from a non-native country I essentially drop into much simpler non-idiomatic vocab set.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoSaw this a lot in Indonesia and Malaysia where specially “manglish” is common. They have a need for English, but not all the rules. Cognates sometimes take their more obvious English phonetic spelling. Issue with those two languages specifically is they don’t have great past present and future tenses. “I have a car” and ^“I had car”* are initially similar and you need to differentiate later, “I have a car but I sell it, so I won’t drive you”. so English with its tenses is important - but “P as in pterodactyl” isn’t.
- inawarminister 8y agoEh? Pernah (had) and dulu (before) are our modifiers to make past tenses, and so is akan for future tense (the exact same usage as will, and less confusing!) Indonesian English is only used by a few people (mostly urban youngsters), but from what I know Manglish is common because some Malaysians refuse/don't see the point in learning Malay, which is sad...
- kevinios 8y agoPerfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.) I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none: - Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion). - They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter). I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc. I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities. 1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters? 2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?) Thanks! ---------------------------- Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto (this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!
- enriquto 8y agowhen I used esperanto on IRC (many years ago), people wrote "cx", "gx" "ux", etc. This seems very standard usage when you are writing on limited charsets. Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal. I actually find the choice of accents cute and I love them.
- kevinios 8y agoVery interesting. I should spend a few minutes reading about it, but: does that mean that accents do not actually have a utility in Esperanto, and that using ĝ or g in the same word does not create two different meanings? Is it just for pronunciation purposes? Edit: The forum link that kissickas's posted answers my question :-) Thanks
- ZhenyaRybanova 8y agoAwesome man! Glad to hear about that. I love the concept!
- billfruit 8y agoDid duolingo remove their Esperanto course? It was there like 2 years ago, but I don't see it now.
- Typhon 8y agoNo, no it's still there at https://www.duolingo.com/courses https://www.duolingo.com/courses
- xiaq 8y agoIf you are into artificial languages, also check out lfn (https://elefen.org https://elefen.org). Like Esperanto, it also features regular spelling and simple syntax, but one key difference is that its vocabulary is almost entirely Romance; it is a artificial Romance creolo. As a result, it is very easy for native speakers of Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) to understand, and it can also serve as a "gateway language" for learning other Romance languages.
- whatshisface 8y agoThe posted link (https://elefen.org https://elefen.org) isn't working for me. Here is another link: http://elefen.org/introdui/en.html http://elefen.org/introdui/en.html
- xiaq 8y agoHmm, http://elefen.org http://elefen.org should work.
- whatshisface 8y agoIt appears that https is not working, but http is. That's not very good because it exposes the details about your visit to observation.
- edflsafoiewq 8y agoWhen it says > e --- like e in “end” or ay in “may” does that mean the sounds are in free variation? Should (2) say "It is phonemically spelled"? Penultimate stress? edit: The answers appear to be in the affirmative. I found them in the grammar.
- jccalhoun 8y agoThe link in the article about native speakers is interesting. 1. All "native" speakers are actually raised bilingual. and 2. George Soros was raised learning esperanto. I am surprised that there isn't some conspiracy about Esperanto
- chillacy 8y agoI've met native speakers, and some things surprised me: 1. Some still have a heavy accent. In fact it tends to be the accent of their parents. (all of us have an accent, it just happens that some of our accents are considered standard english) 2. They tend to be fluent but fluency is also a function of frequency of use, and some non-native speakers reach higher fluency by living with other esperanto speakers and using it daily 3. They all type using `x` notation, since they were typing Eo before Eo keyboards existed, so gxis instead of ĝis
- InfiniteBeing 8y agoI got as far as reading gerda malaperis in esperanto, but then I was done with the language. I didn't want to dedicate anymore time to it.
- antognini 8y agoOne of the nice surprises I had after learning Esperanto a while back was that there is a small but vibrant literature of original novels and poetry in Esperanto. Especially in the first half of the 20th century quite a few gems were written. I've been able to read works about life in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, a Czech Jew's experiences during WWI, and a collection of short stories written by Chinese authors shortly after the Cultural Revolution, all without need of a translator. One Esperanto poet, William Auld, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times before he died about a decade ago.
- ebzzry 8y agoEstas interese, ke je Hacker News ĉi tiu afiŝo atingis. La parolantojn de aliaj lingvoj, preciple la angla-parolantojn mi ne plu kuraĝigas por Esperanton lerni. Estas malŝparo de energio. Anstataŭe, la lingvon mi uzas sen tiu celo. Bedaŭrinde, mi ne certas se bonan diskuton pri tiu temo ni povas havi ĉi tie. Se estas parolantoj ĉi tie, mi anticipas ke la nivelo malaltas. Espereble, pli fortan diskuton mi povas havi aŭ vidi. Kompreneble, mi povas konsenti ke fortas Esperanto. Min mem mi farigis kavio. Mi volis scii, se fakte utilas tiu lingvo. Post preskaŭ kvar monatoj, mi konsciis, ke mi pravis. Jes, fakte funkcias Esperanto. Jes, eĉ la plej bizarajn ideojn mi povas esprimi Esperante. Jes, la lingvon mi subtenos en miaj restantaj jaroj.
- em-bee 8y agoover time, several flaws in the language have been pointed out, and proposals to fix them, as well as alternate approaches to an auxiliary language have been made. and while it can be said that esperanto was not yet able to appeal to the majority, it is wildly more successful than any other attempt. why is that? why have none of the alternatives even made it out of the experimental stage? with any of the well meant proposals in this discussion, it is important to understand what would make those proposals succeed. (and by succeed i mean at first reach a speaker-base that equals that of esperanto) i believe that the results up to now indicate that the quality of the language is not the issue. esperanto is like python 2, but in a world where everyone prefers to use php. or is it? are the flaws in esperanto what's holding back further growth? do we need to start from scratch, and go through the painful stages of initial growth esperanto has already been through?