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Perfect 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,

Perfect 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 ago
when 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 ago
  Very 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
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - enriquto 8y ago
    No, the idea is that you write "gx" instead of "ĝ". The letters have a different meaning.
    - kevinios 8y ago
      Ok I see. By "Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal.", I had understood that you could actually just use the normal letter and it would still be understood.
snazz 8y ago
For accents to be removed, there can't be any ambiguity. For instance, in Spanish, the words cómo and como, or the many forms of "porque" (with very different meanings) are a source of confusion for many speakers. This wouldn't be any easier without accents. I think that a language would have to be designed from the ground up to get rid of accents for this to be possible.
- schoen 8y ago
  You can potentially replace them with digraphs if the digraphs aren't used for some other purpose, which some Esperantists have done with the x-method, like gxis for ĝis 'until', although some people find that quite ugly. An interesting example to me is that pinyin uses the diacritical marks to mark tones in Chinese, which can be hard to type on a limited system but also hard for Chinese learners to remember. The Gwoyeu_Romatzyh system has different spellings for each vowel depending on the associated tone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_in_Gwoyeu_Romatzyh#Tonal_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_in_Gwoyeu_Romatzyh#To... This is presumably harder to learn but easier for learners to remember. Similarly, Finnish uses double letters to mark a long vowel as opposed to the ā, like maa 'country' which other languages might write as mā. On the other hand, are also vowels ä and ö which are different from a and o, so to find a way to spell Finnish without these marks one would need to find some unused digraph, which might actually be a big challenge, since Wikipedia says > The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she"). If one wanted to write Spanish without the accent marks, it might be possible to find digraph equivalents, such as maybe ou for ó (which is a problem in "estadounidense" but almost nowhere else!). The ñ could be written with nh as in Portuguese (señor/senhor).
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
    This would work for ñ but it wouldn’t necessarily work for replacing accents unless the vowel followed by u becomes an accent - which leads to the estadounidense problem you identified. From what I remember from high school Spanish, there is a default syllable that has an “invisible accent” on its vowel in a Spanish word without accents and the purpose of an accent is to change the syllable that gets emphasized.
kissickas 8y ago
People get around the problem of not being able to type these letters by adding an x or an h (cx, gx, ux). Apparently Zamenhof himself was addressing the issue in order to make the language "simpler," as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_transliteration_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_tr... https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=44907 https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=44907
qznc 8y ago
I guess Ido is such a refactored Esperanto.
- kevinios 8y ago
  Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907. This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language? It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors. I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.
  - BillChapman 8y ago
    The problem would be to get the thousand brains to agree.Now thousands and thousands of brains are applied every day to stretching anbd applying Esperanto to all aspects of life. I have found Esperanto of a lot of use when travelling on my own, to get my bearings within a country. Esperanto may not be perfect, but I've used it successfully in Africa, South America and Europe, and it does the job, serving as a unique common language on my travels in, for example, Armenia and Bulgaria. Esperanto speakers are highly organised. There is a Jarlibro (Yearbook) published annually giving access to a network of local representatives. These people, scattered all over the world and act as 'consuls', providing help and information, and passing on the visitor from another country to his/her contacts. Esperanto does have an Academy, but it is the people who decide in practice.
  - qznc 8y ago
    Regular refactoring seems to be a dangerous thing: Ido was created around a quarter of a century after Esperanto. The name Ido means "offspring" in Esperanto and was so named by its creators because it was a development of Esperanto. The creation of Ido led to a schism between those who believed that Esperanto should be left as it was and those who believed that it had what they perceived as inherent flaws which made it not quite good enough to be the world's international auxiliary language. Those who opposed change maintained that it was endless tinkering that had led, in their opinion, to the decline of Volapük a once popular constructed language that had predated Esperanto's publication by a few years. They would also surely have pointed out that Dr Zamenhof's reform proposals of 1894 had been rejected by popular vote. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_and_Ido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_a... Instead of a single person effort, you could try a group of experts/scientists. That would be Interlingua then.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> Perfect 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.) This is highly subjective view. Of course some people hate diacritics and prefer to write sx instead of ŝ but many have the opposite opinion. As for me sx looks plain disgusting. I would even love to see sh being replaced with ŝ or š or ș in English and the same to happen with sch in German, sz in Polish, ch in French etc. And there have in fact been projects to replace the English alphabet with something that makes more sense and doesn't use combinations of letters to represent a single sound (e.g. the Shavian alphabet). Obviously both ways have their pros and cons, their proponents and opponents so it probably just should be left as it already is in whatever a language.
- kevinios 8y ago
  Completely agree with you that sx doesn't look good at all! My suggestion was not to replace with something that looks worst, but ideally that looks cleaner (didn't actually even know of the sx form before I read all the great comments, I do not know Esperanto)
chillacy 8y ago
Realistically accents are such a small hurdle that if a learner can't stomach it, they're probably not going to make it. It's something like complaining that Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is something you can get over much quicker than the myriad of crazy grammar.
- kevinios 8y ago
  Makes sense. Although if the idea is to choose one language because it has been created with the purpose of being as simple as possible, it might be normal that we want this to be as optimized as possible. If I already know that I'm gonna have to install a fourth keyboard on my smartphone and switch to it every time I write in Esperanto so that accents are easier to type, that might an unnecessary barrier we could get rid of. Basically, this was invented decades ago by a few people. It's 2018, I wonder what language would be produced if several thousands people collaborated online to simplify it to a maximum, while retaining its capacity to express any idea.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Hey I’m all for language experimentation, though if it were truly a modern language designed for the world based on population, consider that it may be a tonal language with characters! Or just use English. Esperanto was created in 1880, it’s older than world war 1, it’s older than English as the international language, and it’s older than Europe having much exposure to Asian languages
StevePerkins 8y ago
Just when I think it's impossible for an HN thread to be sidejacked into an aesthetics discussion. Well played, HN.
- kevinios 8y ago
  Guilty! Felt like it was the perfect audience to ask for a question that I could not ask people around me :-) On HN, there is usually always at least one domain expert on any given topic, so it's a pleasure to know that someone will probably have an answer for you.
titanix2 8y ago
> 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 This is popular misconception shared by a lot of French but actually English has accent and a few other diacritics as well. You can see them in loanwords such as canapé or saké, and on word like coördination.
- kevinios 8y ago
  True, but I suspect they are sufficiently rare not to constitute an argument for a beginner not to learn English (also, correct me if I'm wrong but most of those words have accents because they come from other languages)
  - gcthomas 8y ago
    English had native accents, as in naïve, to show that the double vowel was pronounced as two sounds, but they have declined in use over the year. Cooperate isn't spelt with 'oö', which makes pronouncing it from the spelling difficult. But English has never really been spelt phonetically anyway, so it is now overdue for a reformation really.
- boznz 8y ago
  You may be right but I was Born and went to school in the UK and I don't remember any accents. The first two words are just French and Japanese words we use but the accents are generally left out of English spellings of them without any noticeable difference, the other I've always spelled as "co-ordination" with a dash.. of course if you went to a posh school it is likely done properly.

enriquto 8y ago

when 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 ago
Very 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
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- enriquto 8y ago
  No, the idea is that you write "gx" instead of "ĝ". The letters have a different meaning.
  - kevinios 8y ago
    Ok I see. By "Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal.", I had understood that you could actually just use the normal letter and it would still be understood.

snazz 8y ago

For accents to be removed, there can't be any ambiguity. For instance, in Spanish, the words cómo and como, or the many forms of "porque" (with very different meanings) are a source of confusion for many speakers. This wouldn't be any easier without accents. I think that a language would have to be designed from the ground up to get rid of accents for this to be possible.

schoen 8y ago
You can potentially replace them with digraphs if the digraphs aren't used for some other purpose, which some Esperantists have done with the x-method, like gxis for ĝis 'until', although some people find that quite ugly. An interesting example to me is that pinyin uses the diacritical marks to mark tones in Chinese, which can be hard to type on a limited system but also hard for Chinese learners to remember. The Gwoyeu_Romatzyh system has different spellings for each vowel depending on the associated tone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_in_Gwoyeu_Romatzyh#Tonal_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_in_Gwoyeu_Romatzyh#To... This is presumably harder to learn but easier for learners to remember. Similarly, Finnish uses double letters to mark a long vowel as opposed to the ā, like maa 'country' which other languages might write as mā. On the other hand, are also vowels ä and ö which are different from a and o, so to find a way to spell Finnish without these marks one would need to find some unused digraph, which might actually be a big challenge, since Wikipedia says > The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she"). If one wanted to write Spanish without the accent marks, it might be possible to find digraph equivalents, such as maybe ou for ó (which is a problem in "estadounidense" but almost nowhere else!). The ñ could be written with nh as in Portuguese (señor/senhor).
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
  This would work for ñ but it wouldn’t necessarily work for replacing accents unless the vowel followed by u becomes an accent - which leads to the estadounidense problem you identified. From what I remember from high school Spanish, there is a default syllable that has an “invisible accent” on its vowel in a Spanish word without accents and the purpose of an accent is to change the syllable that gets emphasized.

kissickas 8y ago

People get around the problem of not being able to type these letters by adding an x or an h (cx, gx, ux). Apparently Zamenhof himself was addressing the issue in order to make the language "simpler," as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_transliteration_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_tr... https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=44907 https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=44907

qznc 8y ago

I guess Ido is such a refactored Esperanto.

kevinios 8y ago
Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907. This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language? It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors. I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.
- BillChapman 8y ago
  The problem would be to get the thousand brains to agree.Now thousands and thousands of brains are applied every day to stretching anbd applying Esperanto to all aspects of life. I have found Esperanto of a lot of use when travelling on my own, to get my bearings within a country. Esperanto may not be perfect, but I've used it successfully in Africa, South America and Europe, and it does the job, serving as a unique common language on my travels in, for example, Armenia and Bulgaria. Esperanto speakers are highly organised. There is a Jarlibro (Yearbook) published annually giving access to a network of local representatives. These people, scattered all over the world and act as 'consuls', providing help and information, and passing on the visitor from another country to his/her contacts. Esperanto does have an Academy, but it is the people who decide in practice.
- qznc 8y ago
  Regular refactoring seems to be a dangerous thing: Ido was created around a quarter of a century after Esperanto. The name Ido means "offspring" in Esperanto and was so named by its creators because it was a development of Esperanto. The creation of Ido led to a schism between those who believed that Esperanto should be left as it was and those who believed that it had what they perceived as inherent flaws which made it not quite good enough to be the world's international auxiliary language. Those who opposed change maintained that it was endless tinkering that had led, in their opinion, to the decline of Volapük a once popular constructed language that had predated Esperanto's publication by a few years. They would also surely have pointed out that Dr Zamenhof's reform proposals of 1894 had been rejected by popular vote. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_and_Ido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_a... Instead of a single person effort, you could try a group of experts/scientists. That would be Interlingua then.

qwerty456127 8y ago

> Perfect 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.) This is highly subjective view. Of course some people hate diacritics and prefer to write sx instead of ŝ but many have the opposite opinion. As for me sx looks plain disgusting. I would even love to see sh being replaced with ŝ or š or ș in English and the same to happen with sch in German, sz in Polish, ch in French etc. And there have in fact been projects to replace the English alphabet with something that makes more sense and doesn't use combinations of letters to represent a single sound (e.g. the Shavian alphabet). Obviously both ways have their pros and cons, their proponents and opponents so it probably just should be left as it already is in whatever a language.

kevinios 8y ago
Completely agree with you that sx doesn't look good at all! My suggestion was not to replace with something that looks worst, but ideally that looks cleaner (didn't actually even know of the sx form before I read all the great comments, I do not know Esperanto)

chillacy 8y ago

Realistically accents are such a small hurdle that if a learner can't stomach it, they're probably not going to make it. It's something like complaining that Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is something you can get over much quicker than the myriad of crazy grammar.

kevinios 8y ago
Makes sense. Although if the idea is to choose one language because it has been created with the purpose of being as simple as possible, it might be normal that we want this to be as optimized as possible. If I already know that I'm gonna have to install a fourth keyboard on my smartphone and switch to it every time I write in Esperanto so that accents are easier to type, that might an unnecessary barrier we could get rid of. Basically, this was invented decades ago by a few people. It's 2018, I wonder what language would be produced if several thousands people collaborated online to simplify it to a maximum, while retaining its capacity to express any idea.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Hey I’m all for language experimentation, though if it were truly a modern language designed for the world based on population, consider that it may be a tonal language with characters! Or just use English. Esperanto was created in 1880, it’s older than world war 1, it’s older than English as the international language, and it’s older than Europe having much exposure to Asian languages

StevePerkins 8y ago

Just when I think it's impossible for an HN thread to be sidejacked into an aesthetics discussion. Well played, HN.

kevinios 8y ago
Guilty! Felt like it was the perfect audience to ask for a question that I could not ask people around me :-) On HN, there is usually always at least one domain expert on any given topic, so it's a pleasure to know that someone will probably have an answer for you.

titanix2 8y ago

> 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 This is popular misconception shared by a lot of French but actually English has accent and a few other diacritics as well. You can see them in loanwords such as canapé or saké, and on word like coördination.

kevinios 8y ago
True, but I suspect they are sufficiently rare not to constitute an argument for a beginner not to learn English (also, correct me if I'm wrong but most of those words have accents because they come from other languages)
- gcthomas 8y ago
  English had native accents, as in naïve, to show that the double vowel was pronounced as two sounds, but they have declined in use over the year. Cooperate isn't spelt with 'oö', which makes pronouncing it from the spelling difficult. But English has never really been spelt phonetically anyway, so it is now overdue for a reformation really.
boznz 8y ago
You may be right but I was Born and went to school in the UK and I don't remember any accents. The first two words are just French and Japanese words we use but the accents are generally left out of English spellings of them without any noticeable difference, the other I've always spelled as "co-ordination" with a dash.. of course if you went to a posh school it is likely done properly.