5 ms·

Glad 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 (wh

Glad 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Really? 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
    Indeed, while there is a logic to Finnish's system of consonant gradation (changes to the consonants of words in different noun and verb forms), it is only completely graspable by those with some knowledge of historical linguistics. Ordinary learners have to simply memorize many things by rote. This is why Harjoitus tekee mestarin, a popular workbook series for foreign learners of Finnish, provides hundreds of pages of exercises to help students memorize the different noun declensions and verb conjugations, and it is not an easy task. Then, after you have learned the complicated written language, learning the actual spoken Finnish used in everyday life involves learning even more such exceptions. (Finland has diglossia not too different from, say, what reigned in Greece until the 1970s).
philsnow 8y ago
You must accept that Esperanto is many times easier for westerners to learn than anybody else, though, right? If we really wanted a "neutral language" for the vast majority of people we should have based the language on Malagasy or something.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Anecdotally, most esperantists at conventions are from europe, especially France. It's probably a combination of it being easier for europeans combined with europeans having more vacation days. There are a lot of japanese esperantists too but they don't go to conventions until after retirement, which I found quite sad.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  China is one of the strongest supporters of Esperanto and it seems like they are satisfied with the neutrality of it. It is "basically an isolating language"¹, which is more common in Asia, and anyway a lot easier to learn than another regional language. [1] http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...
- cageface 8y ago
  I've been learning Vietnamese for the past few years and I have to say it's been very refreshing to realize how little of the complex grammar typical in Western languages you really need to communicate. Vietnamese throws verb conjugation, tenses, plurals, possessives, etc out the window and is still a perfectly expressive language. I understand a lot more why people often reject the idea that Esperanto is a universal language because it brings a ton of grammatical baggage that, for example, many Asian languages don't have.
  - kurtisc 8y ago
    I've been learning for a few months. So far my favourite parts are that the word for right (direction) is the same as a word for right (correct), that months and days are named 'Nth month/day', and that refrigerator is 'cold cabinet'.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier. This is an illusion generated by the fact that Esperanto has no community of speakers. Your language can be as unusable as you want as long as nobody has to use it. Compare this quote I collected from Wikipedia years ago: > In Esperanto each transitive verb has two present participles (active and passive), two past participles, and two future participles. Some speakers have also analogously constructed two conditional participles, which are not in widespread use and are not officially sanctioned by the Akademio de Esperanto, but which are nonetheless readily understood. Wikipedia today still acknowledges the conditional participles of Esperanto, but protests that they're just a joke, not a real part of the language. But grammatical innovation is guaranteed to occur if a language is ever spoken by more than one person. This neatly summarizes the problem with the concept of a perfectly regular language that's easy to learn -- as soon as people try, those qualities are immediately lost. Esperanto picked up a group of speakers whose native languages had conditional participles, and now Esperanto has them too, even though the existence of conditional participles is a violation of every founding principle of Esperanto. --- > 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). Again, this is an illusion caused by the fact that Esperanto has no speakers. If you look at a real language, Latin, you'll notice that it's much easier to read Latin written in the Renaissance by non-native speakers than Latin written in the Roman Republic by native speakers. Those Renaissance writers were writing in a foreign language, their native language was grammatically closer to yours, and the result is that their Latin is incredibly straightforward. In contrast, Caesar's De Bello Gallico is known for the clarity of the prose, but it is nevertheless infinitely more complex (for a modern reader), because Caesar was writing in his own native tongue.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  At least in Europe, the Esperanto community is large enough, with frequent enough events or everyday interaction at the main organizations’ offices, that some Esperantists even spend a substantial portion of their year among it, so your assertion that Esperanto has no community of speakers is false. I say that not to defend Esperanto; I myself ultimately left the Esperanto movement because I found this community to be a bit too demanding of one’s fealty and, in a sense, cult-like. And this community of active speakers who meet in person is definitely small, but it nonetheless exists. The rest of your post I broadly agree with.
porpoisely 8y ago
Instead of malbona, why not unbona or ungood? Or to express a greater good, can I suggest doubleplusgood? It's so strange how some of the merits of esperanto you listed reminds me of the merits of 1984's Newspeak. I caught the esperanto bug briefly in high school too, but I quickly gave up on it as the initial novelty wore off. Esperanto is a nice idea but impractical. Idealism only gets you so far. There are hundreds or thousands of years worth of literature, history, culture, etc tied to the major languages that already exist. Esperanto is not going to overcome this advantage of incumbent languages. You brought up an interesting point. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn mandarin? If I was forced to learn a language, I'd rather learn mandarin than esperanto. And as frustrating as irregular aspects of languages can be, the irregularity leads to the beauty of languages. There is history to the frustrating aspects of language. And though esperanto might be useful for the UN, it is useless everywhere else. Almost everyone on earth lives with or near people who speak the same language as them. Think about it? In your day to day experience, when do you really need esperanto? For most people, the answer is never.
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  I was waiting for the newspeak argument. If we were talking about Toki-Pona I would agree, but Esperanto doesn't dumb you down and Sapir-Whorf isn't proved either. Also, I'd certainly talk to a whole lot more international folks if I could speak with them. I know a lot of people who travel places where the natives don't speak English. That alone would be helpful.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  The goal of Esperanto is having a quick, easy way for people around the world to communicate with each other. You don't need to live near Esperanto speakers to use it online, by mail, or while traveling.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Esperanto is basically a ticket to joining a global diaspora where members are extremely supportive, they’ll go out of their way to meet up with you and be friends. In English you’re just another joe, so there’s that. It’s not for everyone, in fact this works only insofar as Esperanto is not mainstream! Also I never use Esperanto at home, only when I travel. It’s a great way to meet people from all around the world and chat about culture and life.

stevekemp 8y ago

I 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 ago
Really? 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
  Indeed, while there is a logic to Finnish's system of consonant gradation (changes to the consonants of words in different noun and verb forms), it is only completely graspable by those with some knowledge of historical linguistics. Ordinary learners have to simply memorize many things by rote. This is why Harjoitus tekee mestarin, a popular workbook series for foreign learners of Finnish, provides hundreds of pages of exercises to help students memorize the different noun declensions and verb conjugations, and it is not an easy task. Then, after you have learned the complicated written language, learning the actual spoken Finnish used in everyday life involves learning even more such exceptions. (Finland has diglossia not too different from, say, what reigned in Greece until the 1970s).

philsnow 8y ago

You must accept that Esperanto is many times easier for westerners to learn than anybody else, though, right? If we really wanted a "neutral language" for the vast majority of people we should have based the language on Malagasy or something.

chillacy 8y ago
Anecdotally, most esperantists at conventions are from europe, especially France. It's probably a combination of it being easier for europeans combined with europeans having more vacation days. There are a lot of japanese esperantists too but they don't go to conventions until after retirement, which I found quite sad.
akvadrako 8y ago
China is one of the strongest supporters of Esperanto and it seems like they are satisfied with the neutrality of it. It is "basically an isolating language"¹, which is more common in Asia, and anyway a lot easier to learn than another regional language. [1] http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...
cageface 8y ago
I've been learning Vietnamese for the past few years and I have to say it's been very refreshing to realize how little of the complex grammar typical in Western languages you really need to communicate. Vietnamese throws verb conjugation, tenses, plurals, possessives, etc out the window and is still a perfectly expressive language. I understand a lot more why people often reject the idea that Esperanto is a universal language because it brings a ton of grammatical baggage that, for example, many Asian languages don't have.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  I've been learning for a few months. So far my favourite parts are that the word for right (direction) is the same as a word for right (correct), that months and days are named 'Nth month/day', and that refrigerator is 'cold cabinet'.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier. This is an illusion generated by the fact that Esperanto has no community of speakers. Your language can be as unusable as you want as long as nobody has to use it. Compare this quote I collected from Wikipedia years ago: > In Esperanto each transitive verb has two present participles (active and passive), two past participles, and two future participles. Some speakers have also analogously constructed two conditional participles, which are not in widespread use and are not officially sanctioned by the Akademio de Esperanto, but which are nonetheless readily understood. Wikipedia today still acknowledges the conditional participles of Esperanto, but protests that they're just a joke, not a real part of the language. But grammatical innovation is guaranteed to occur if a language is ever spoken by more than one person. This neatly summarizes the problem with the concept of a perfectly regular language that's easy to learn -- as soon as people try, those qualities are immediately lost. Esperanto picked up a group of speakers whose native languages had conditional participles, and now Esperanto has them too, even though the existence of conditional participles is a violation of every founding principle of Esperanto. --- > 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). Again, this is an illusion caused by the fact that Esperanto has no speakers. If you look at a real language, Latin, you'll notice that it's much easier to read Latin written in the Renaissance by non-native speakers than Latin written in the Roman Republic by native speakers. Those Renaissance writers were writing in a foreign language, their native language was grammatically closer to yours, and the result is that their Latin is incredibly straightforward. In contrast, Caesar's De Bello Gallico is known for the clarity of the prose, but it is nevertheless infinitely more complex (for a modern reader), because Caesar was writing in his own native tongue.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
At least in Europe, the Esperanto community is large enough, with frequent enough events or everyday interaction at the main organizations’ offices, that some Esperantists even spend a substantial portion of their year among it, so your assertion that Esperanto has no community of speakers is false. I say that not to defend Esperanto; I myself ultimately left the Esperanto movement because I found this community to be a bit too demanding of one’s fealty and, in a sense, cult-like. And this community of active speakers who meet in person is definitely small, but it nonetheless exists. The rest of your post I broadly agree with.

porpoisely 8y ago

Instead of malbona, why not unbona or ungood? Or to express a greater good, can I suggest doubleplusgood? It's so strange how some of the merits of esperanto you listed reminds me of the merits of 1984's Newspeak. I caught the esperanto bug briefly in high school too, but I quickly gave up on it as the initial novelty wore off. Esperanto is a nice idea but impractical. Idealism only gets you so far. There are hundreds or thousands of years worth of literature, history, culture, etc tied to the major languages that already exist. Esperanto is not going to overcome this advantage of incumbent languages. You brought up an interesting point. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn mandarin? If I was forced to learn a language, I'd rather learn mandarin than esperanto. And as frustrating as irregular aspects of languages can be, the irregularity leads to the beauty of languages. There is history to the frustrating aspects of language. And though esperanto might be useful for the UN, it is useless everywhere else. Almost everyone on earth lives with or near people who speak the same language as them. Think about it? In your day to day experience, when do you really need esperanto? For most people, the answer is never.

4thaccount 8y ago
I was waiting for the newspeak argument. If we were talking about Toki-Pona I would agree, but Esperanto doesn't dumb you down and Sapir-Whorf isn't proved either. Also, I'd certainly talk to a whole lot more international folks if I could speak with them. I know a lot of people who travel places where the natives don't speak English. That alone would be helpful.
JoshMnem 8y ago
The goal of Esperanto is having a quick, easy way for people around the world to communicate with each other. You don't need to live near Esperanto speakers to use it online, by mail, or while traveling.
chillacy 8y ago
Esperanto is basically a ticket to joining a global diaspora where members are extremely supportive, they’ll go out of their way to meet up with you and be friends. In English you’re just another joe, so there’s that. It’s not for everyone, in fact this works only insofar as Esperanto is not mainstream! Also I never use Esperanto at home, only when I travel. It’s a great way to meet people from all around the world and chat about culture and life.