34 ms·

How Does Esperanto Sound?

203 points by martinrue 7y ago

CodeCube 7y ago
This is the first time I've actually heard Esperanto spoken aloud ... very cool, thanks for posting. What drove you to learn Esperanto originally?
- martinrue 7y ago
  Glad you enjoyed it! Originally I read about it on Wikipedia, and studied it just because it was super geeky and cool to me. Later I started attending events and met people, and at this point I have lots of international friends through the language. I wrote a bit more about this on my blog, which you may find interesting: https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18 https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18
sivers 7y ago
A couple years ago, I sat down to check out Esperanto the same way that any of us programming language nerds check out another programming language. Polyglot Benny Lewis recommends that if you don't know any foreign language, the best place to start is Esperanto, because it's so easy. See https://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-esperanto/ https://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-esperanto/ I intended to give it about an hour, one Sunday, so I sat down in my chair at 4pm, and went to the most recommended tutorial: https://lernu.net/ https://lernu.net/ I had so many “whoa!” and “wow!” and “this is amazing!” moments while checking it out that I didn't get out of my chair until almost midnight. I didn't even notice the house had grown dark around me. It's a really fun, simple, easy language to learn. I ended up learning it for six months to a conversational level. I found someone fluent in https://www.italki.com/ https://www.italki.com/ and we talked by Skype for three hours per week. I used Anki flashcards to memorize vocabulary. I slowly read a few books in Esperanto. After six months, I attended the international Esperanto conference in Seoul, Korea, and spoke only Esperanto for a few days. I was glad I was doing it, and somewhat glad I did it, but in hindsight maybe should have used that time to learn Mandarin or another language where I can communicate with people that don't speak English. Still, I miss it. Esperanto is wonderfully designed. I highly recommend anyone curious go to https://lernu.net/ https://lernu.net/ and work their way through the course there, even if that's all you do.
- martinrue 7y ago
  Thanks for the useful links Derek. I still remember your email to me, telling me you had started learning the language. I'd love to read a future blog post about your experience :)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Nadya 7y ago
  >After six months, I attended the international Esperanto conference in Seoul, Korea, and spoke only Esperanto for a few days. I was glad I was doing it, and somewhat glad I did it, but in hindsight maybe should have used that time to learn Mandarin or another language where I can communicate with people that don't speak English. Esperanto is a language where you can communicate with people that don't speak English ;) If you weren't already bilingual - the best part about Esperanto is it teaches you how to learn a second language by doing it. It also gets out of your way since, for Romantic-based languages, the grammar and vocabulary mostly stays out of your way and you can focus more on "actually learning" than on building vocab or remembering weird edge cases in the grammar. Your time spent learning Esperanto may have actually created a solid foundation to learning Mandarin, if that's what you desire to learn! There are studies that learning Esperanto can aid in learning other languages [0], although many of them are quite dated. It seems many of the studies agree that unless you're already particularly adept at learning a new language - learning Esperanto will aid you in learning other languages. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    The studies listed on the Wikipedia page are not particularly persuasive, and some of them have a heavy pro-Eseperanto bias in construction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019 has a more thorough criticism of one of the studies in particular.
    - hk__2 7y ago
jcranmer 7y ago
> Exploring the problem further, I discovered that Slavic languages have a good overlap with the sounds found in Esperanto, especially vowel sounds. Better yet, many professional TTS engines have Polish voices. There's a strong case to be made that Esperanto was designed to have the phonemic inventory of the dialect of its creator, an Eastern Polish dialect. See http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html#01 http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html#01.
- gordonguthrie 7y ago
  It clearly is a Western Slavonic language relexified into Romance - the orthography has the characteristic Slavic 1 symbol/1 sound and is distinctly Hussite (ie accents on a short Latin). The core case system has 4 cases (down from the 6/7 of Polish) - except with remnants of more in the Correlatives. Modern Hebrew - created by a colleague of Zamenhof is also a Western Slavonic - except relexified into Semintic (so I believe - I have no Hebrew). It all makes the Western Slavonics a super interesting language group...
  - AprilArcus 7y ago
    I think you're just saying that because of the palatal affricates, which English very notably also has. The phonemic inventory of Esperanto looks like English minus its weirdest features, i.e. the interdental fricatives and tense/lax vowel distinction. The case system, as you describe it, sounds Germanic, not Slavic.
    - gordonguthrie 7y ago
      Except that Zamenhof spoke Slavic languages as a native - and not German nor English - and specifically chose Romance languages to relexify - there is no discernable German or English influence on the language
      - gordonguthrie 7y ago
        And the case system differentiates between indirect objects of motion and position (like Polish) and doesn't have a genitive (which German does) And also English has like 12-16 vowel sounds and Esperanto (like the Slavics) has half that many
Koshkin 7y ago
Sounds like Italian to me...
- martinrue 7y ago
  I can assure you, it's Esperanto :)
  - anderiv 7y ago
    FYI, the date header on your (most excellent) post says "26 Oct 2019". :)
    - martinrue 7y ago
      Oops... I guess I was thinking about the future too much :)
      - gordonguthrie 7y ago
        Not often Esperantists get accused of living in the future tho ;-)
sudosteph 7y ago
Great work! I had been hoping that an alexa-esque voice for Eperanto would be created one day, though I realized Amazon had no financial incentive to do it. I'm amazed it sounds as good as it does when it was a one-man side project. Even as a very casual esperantist, I could understand it without much difficulty. Thank you for doing this and sharing your work.
- martinrue 7y ago
  Thank you for the appreciation, I appreciate it :) Please feel free to take it and create some cool Alexa thing with it... that'd be awesome.
  - gordonguthrie 7y ago
    I just turned on the sofa and asked my Orla if she thought Alexa in Esperanto would be a good idea and to my surprise she said yes ;-)
    - martinrue 7y ago
      All the stuff behind Parol is OSS (https://git.io/fjb5n https://git.io/fjb5n), do bonvolu senti sin libera Esperantigi aferojn :)
SomeProgrammer_ 7y ago
Personal thoughts, Esperanto is designed & spoken with notable allophony to help accommodate different regional usages. For example, the <r> in Esperanto can be pronounced allophonically as the "French R", "American R", "Spanish R", etc. However, a lot of conlangers have noticed that there are a lot of consonant clusters and basic phonemes that don't seem to have nice analogues in many languages - like Esperanto's affricates, affricate & fricative clusters, etc. On top of that, the language is phonemically regular in the sense that there are no natural-sounding phonemic irregularities that one might normally expect. In my view, Esperanto sounds fine. It has it's own aesthetic. Though at the same time, I find that because a lot of Esperanto was designed without a global audience in mind, there are a lot of "approximations" to what Zamenhoff, the original creator of Esperanto, maybe had anticipated that the language would sound like.
- gordonguthrie 7y ago
  'designed without a global audience in mind' - it was exactly designed with a global audience in mind - but I think Zemnhof didn't have the exposure to the width of linguistic research he would have now
  - SomeProgrammer_ 7y ago
    I think the _idea_ of a global audience was in mind, but when looking at who was a part of the discussions & how the language exists, it's pretty clear that a lot of cultures, nations, languages, and speech varieties weren't a part of the design process. Maybe it could be said that Zamenhof's conceptions of "global audience" were those who were closest to hegemonic and/or supernational influence, which I think I'd agree with. But I wouldn't call his design nor process particularly culturally inclusive.
    - gordonguthrie 7y ago
      For an amateur, living at the fringes of both Europe and the Russian empire, I think the boy Zamenhof done good for the 19th century
wolfgke 7y ago
Relevant: the yuri visual novel "The Expression Amrilato" about a girl that is stranded in a world where everybody speaks Juliamo (the in-game name for Esperanto) instead of Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Expression_Amrilato&oldid=903669020 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Expression_Am... https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato
antognini 7y ago
If anyone is interested in listening to a little more Esperanto, there's a great Esperanto podcast: http://pola-retradio.org/ http://pola-retradio.org/ It's been a long while since I listened to it, but the speech is very fluent and it's about as close to as a "neutral" Esperanto accent as you'll get.
- martinrue 7y ago
  As well as https://kern.punkto.info https://kern.punkto.info, which covers lots of diverse subjects, including many technical ones.
amp108 7y ago
I have read the pronunciation is bad in the 1966 film Incubus/Inkubo, (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)) but William Shatner acts like he's a native speaker in it.
jujun 7y ago
I speak Esperanto since I was 15 years old, (now I am 30). I even met my GF with it 10 years ago. It's something great to meet very interesting and generous people anywhere on earth. And it's also a nice programming language.
- ferzul 7y ago
  mi trovis mian edzinon per Esperanto, sed mi devis lerni alian lingvon por paroli kun ŝia familio, kiuj ne parolas Esperanton
  - martinrue 7y ago
    Instruu al ŝia familio Esperanton - eble tio pli facilus :)
    - schoen 7y ago
      Sed li "devis lerni", do mi pensas ke li jam lernis la lingvon de ŝia familio!
      - quickthrower2 7y ago
        Bonega! Bonega!
nydel 7y ago
from my experience, most words in esperanto should have the emphasis on the second-to-final syllable. this is a good guideline! mi esTAS STUdando ... sounds weird. mi EStas stuDANdo ... sounds right. this works almost everywhere because of esperanto's constructed nature and following uniformity.
- schoen 7y ago
  It's not just an informal guideline, but #10 of Zamenhof's 16 rules of Esperanto grammar from the 1905 Fundamento de Esperanto. http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_angla.html http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_an...
umvi 7y ago
Even if Esperanto were widely adopted, there would be nothing to keep it from developing edge cases and funky grammar exceptions over time just like every other language. Esperanto only works for scholarly types that adhere strictly to the rules, not lazy uneducated people who just want to communicate something with as little effort as possible and don't care if they aren't adhering to the grammar. Also, you'd get localized variants depending on the region.
- adrianN 7y ago
  The process of languages acquiring idiosyncrasies takes a really long time. I'd suspect it's even slower for auxiliary languages. Esperanto would likely remain relatively simple for centuries. Just compare English from the time of the British Empire to now. It's still basically the same language, despite (or because of?) the huge number of people learning it as a second language.
- nabla9 7y ago
  That's why Esperanto would be a good universal second language. There would be no native speakers, you would only speak it with speakers of other languages, or read books in it.
  - biztos 7y ago
    Isn't that what Latin was for centuries? And just like some people (Italians?) had certain advantages in learning their Latin, some people have advantages in learning Esperanto.
- biztos 7y ago
  The lazy uneducated poets would butcher the language first, followed closely by the lazy uneducated lawyers. The day might come when lazy uneducated CEO's pervert it even further, but I'm gonna have to circle back with you on that and touch base later.
darkhorn 7y ago
Huh! Doesn't have vowel harmony. Not gonna work for me.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zubi 7y ago
Excellent work, and indeed it sounds pretty much neutral. One question though: I always thought Esperanto pronunciation and letters map quite one-to-one with Turkish, have you considered basing your work on Turkish instead of Polish? Except ŭ, Esperanto vowels have exactly the same sound as they do in Turkish. Among the consonants, ĥ and c don't map, but all others do. Even ĉ, ŝ, ĝ and ĵ map to one specific letter with the identical sound.
jodrellblank 7y ago
Bonan voĉon :) Kiam oni finas frazon kun " ?", la ilo eraras, ekzemple: "testing in english?" funkcias, sed "testing in english ?" malfunkcias. (When you end a phrase with a space then a question mark, the tool gives an error, "failed to fetch").
6thaccount2 7y ago
I've been learning on Duolingo and Richardson's book. It really is simply so elegant. Easy to learn, easy to read, easy to understand, easy to speak. It just sounds cool to me as well. I think at 3 weeks in I had made more progress than 3 years of Spanish as you don't have to worry about irregularities and even the vocabulary is easy to remember.
tyingq 7y ago
I hear something (tonal, tempo, not the words really) like the Spanish they speak in Argentina. Like if someone tried mimicking them using nonsense sounds. I guess that makes sense, since Argentina has significant Italian influence?
travisgriggs 7y ago
This being HN and all, I’m curious if anyone has any experience using Esperanto as a base language for code. Are there any code bases out there where the names of variables and functions and stuff are expressed in Esperanto?
tracker1 7y ago
I wonder if there are still more Klingon speakers than Esperanto today. I don't know that outside linguist circles I'd see as much value in learning Esperanto as a more broadly used language. I took up a little bit of French and German (and Klingon) when I was young, but it's been 25-30 years since I've spoken either and don't remember anything.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  > I wonder if there are still more Klingon speakers than Esperanto today. I believe there were never more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers. More precisely, I doubt there are any Klingon speakers -- where "speaker" doesn't mean a person who memorized a few words and sentences, but who can spend one hour talking fluently about their favorite topic -- but even assuming there are any, I really doubt there would be one hundred of them, worldwide. On the other hand, I have met hundreds of Esperanto speakers at various Esperanto-related activities, and they are quite able to talk the whole day without having to use another language. I used to be fluent at that language, too. But maybe that's just my bubble. Could you perhaps give me a link to e.g. people giving a lecture in Klingon in front of live audience, preferably on a topic other than constructed languages?
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Not sure about numbers, but there's the Klingon Language Institute[1], which recently had a conference[2]. I mainly remember it being said that there were more conversational Klingon speakers than Esparanto around a decade ago. [1] https://www.kli.org/ https://www.kli.org/ [2] https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-javdich/ https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-javdich/
    - Viliam1234 7y ago
      Klingon Language Institute has a web page in English, but not in Klingon. That usually does not happen to Esperanto organizations. Having two books translated to Klingon is impressive. To compare, the library of UEA offers 770 books in Esperanto in category "Translated Prose", and 362 in category "Original Prose". https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=prtr https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=prtr https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=pror https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=pror There is also a Wikipedia in Esperanto, with over 1/4 million articles. Fewer than English with almost 6 million articles, but still more than many languages with millions of native speakers. https://eo.wikipedia.org/ https://eo.wikipedia.org/ This is why I find the statement about more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers very unlikely, whether now or a decade ago. (Klingon Language Institute boasts about growing fast, while Esperanto speakers usually complain about stagnation; which makes it even less likely that the statement would be true a decade ago if it isn't true now.)
thosakwe 7y ago
Might be due to a lack of practical experience (or the low audio quality in the video), but I found it difficult to understand what the human speakers were saying in some parts. As for Parol, though, it was clear as day, and very easy to understand. Nice work!
Savageman 7y ago
A friend of mine has a started to create a new language fit for European citizen. It is based on a translator-based computer program and performs a synthesis of European languages. Each word is the result of a democratic choice made by an algorithm, so that it is the closest to that of the majority of European languages. The website is in French, but there's a paragraph written in Europa (the name of the language) that starts with "Vos have comprendet que haver ambition". I'm really curious how people can understand it without any learning. http://www.europeo.li http://www.europeo.li They have another website, with video of people speaking and this article about built languages is quite interesting: https://www.europa-lingua.org/en/tour-de-table-des-langues-construites-quelle-langue-pour-leurope/ https://www.europa-lingua.org/en/tour-de-table-des-langues-c...
ibps965 7y ago
we are going to discuss how you can prepare for IBPS exam at home-without coaching. If you have correct strategy you it will be very easy to clear any IBPS EXAM at home. http://www.ibpsexamguide.in/ http://www.ibpsexamguide.in/

203 points by martinrue 7y ago

This is the first time I've actually heard Esperanto spoken aloud ... very cool, thanks for posting. What drove you to learn Esperanto originally?

martinrue 7y ago
Glad you enjoyed it! Originally I read about it on Wikipedia, and studied it just because it was super geeky and cool to me. Later I started attending events and met people, and at this point I have lots of international friends through the language. I wrote a bit more about this on my blog, which you may find interesting: https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18 https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18

sivers 7y ago

A couple years ago, I sat down to check out Esperanto the same way that any of us programming language nerds check out another programming language. Polyglot Benny Lewis recommends that if you don't know any foreign language, the best place to start is Esperanto, because it's so easy. See https://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-esperanto/ https://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-esperanto/ I intended to give it about an hour, one Sunday, so I sat down in my chair at 4pm, and went to the most recommended tutorial: https://lernu.net/ https://lernu.net/ I had so many “whoa!” and “wow!” and “this is amazing!” moments while checking it out that I didn't get out of my chair until almost midnight. I didn't even notice the house had grown dark around me. It's a really fun, simple, easy language to learn. I ended up learning it for six months to a conversational level. I found someone fluent in https://www.italki.com/ https://www.italki.com/ and we talked by Skype for three hours per week. I used Anki flashcards to memorize vocabulary. I slowly read a few books in Esperanto. After six months, I attended the international Esperanto conference in Seoul, Korea, and spoke only Esperanto for a few days. I was glad I was doing it, and somewhat glad I did it, but in hindsight maybe should have used that time to learn Mandarin or another language where I can communicate with people that don't speak English. Still, I miss it. Esperanto is wonderfully designed. I highly recommend anyone curious go to https://lernu.net/ https://lernu.net/ and work their way through the course there, even if that's all you do.

martinrue 7y ago
Thanks for the useful links Derek. I still remember your email to me, telling me you had started learning the language. I'd love to read a future blog post about your experience :)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Nadya 7y ago
>After six months, I attended the international Esperanto conference in Seoul, Korea, and spoke only Esperanto for a few days. I was glad I was doing it, and somewhat glad I did it, but in hindsight maybe should have used that time to learn Mandarin or another language where I can communicate with people that don't speak English. Esperanto is a language where you can communicate with people that don't speak English ;) If you weren't already bilingual - the best part about Esperanto is it teaches you how to learn a second language by doing it. It also gets out of your way since, for Romantic-based languages, the grammar and vocabulary mostly stays out of your way and you can focus more on "actually learning" than on building vocab or remembering weird edge cases in the grammar. Your time spent learning Esperanto may have actually created a solid foundation to learning Mandarin, if that's what you desire to learn! There are studies that learning Esperanto can aid in learning other languages [0], although many of them are quite dated. It seems many of the studies agree that unless you're already particularly adept at learning a new language - learning Esperanto will aid you in learning other languages. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
- jcranmer 7y ago
  The studies listed on the Wikipedia page are not particularly persuasive, and some of them have a heavy pro-Eseperanto bias in construction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019 has a more thorough criticism of one of the studies in particular.
  - hk__2 7y ago

jcranmer 7y ago

> Exploring the problem further, I discovered that Slavic languages have a good overlap with the sounds found in Esperanto, especially vowel sounds. Better yet, many professional TTS engines have Polish voices. There's a strong case to be made that Esperanto was designed to have the phonemic inventory of the dialect of its creator, an Eastern Polish dialect. See http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html#01 http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html#01.

gordonguthrie 7y ago
It clearly is a Western Slavonic language relexified into Romance - the orthography has the characteristic Slavic 1 symbol/1 sound and is distinctly Hussite (ie accents on a short Latin). The core case system has 4 cases (down from the 6/7 of Polish) - except with remnants of more in the Correlatives. Modern Hebrew - created by a colleague of Zamenhof is also a Western Slavonic - except relexified into Semintic (so I believe - I have no Hebrew). It all makes the Western Slavonics a super interesting language group...
- AprilArcus 7y ago
  I think you're just saying that because of the palatal affricates, which English very notably also has. The phonemic inventory of Esperanto looks like English minus its weirdest features, i.e. the interdental fricatives and tense/lax vowel distinction. The case system, as you describe it, sounds Germanic, not Slavic.
  - gordonguthrie 7y ago
    Except that Zamenhof spoke Slavic languages as a native - and not German nor English - and specifically chose Romance languages to relexify - there is no discernable German or English influence on the language
    - gordonguthrie 7y ago
      And the case system differentiates between indirect objects of motion and position (like Polish) and doesn't have a genitive (which German does) And also English has like 12-16 vowel sounds and Esperanto (like the Slavics) has half that many

Koshkin 7y ago

Sounds like Italian to me...

martinrue 7y ago
I can assure you, it's Esperanto :)
- anderiv 7y ago
  FYI, the date header on your (most excellent) post says "26 Oct 2019". :)
  - martinrue 7y ago
    Oops... I guess I was thinking about the future too much :)
    - gordonguthrie 7y ago
      Not often Esperantists get accused of living in the future tho ;-)

sudosteph 7y ago

Great work! I had been hoping that an alexa-esque voice for Eperanto would be created one day, though I realized Amazon had no financial incentive to do it. I'm amazed it sounds as good as it does when it was a one-man side project. Even as a very casual esperantist, I could understand it without much difficulty. Thank you for doing this and sharing your work.

martinrue 7y ago
Thank you for the appreciation, I appreciate it :) Please feel free to take it and create some cool Alexa thing with it... that'd be awesome.
- gordonguthrie 7y ago
  I just turned on the sofa and asked my Orla if she thought Alexa in Esperanto would be a good idea and to my surprise she said yes ;-)
  - martinrue 7y ago
    All the stuff behind Parol is OSS (https://git.io/fjb5n https://git.io/fjb5n), do bonvolu senti sin libera Esperantigi aferojn :)

SomeProgrammer_ 7y ago

Personal thoughts, Esperanto is designed & spoken with notable allophony to help accommodate different regional usages. For example, the <r> in Esperanto can be pronounced allophonically as the "French R", "American R", "Spanish R", etc. However, a lot of conlangers have noticed that there are a lot of consonant clusters and basic phonemes that don't seem to have nice analogues in many languages - like Esperanto's affricates, affricate & fricative clusters, etc. On top of that, the language is phonemically regular in the sense that there are no natural-sounding phonemic irregularities that one might normally expect. In my view, Esperanto sounds fine. It has it's own aesthetic. Though at the same time, I find that because a lot of Esperanto was designed without a global audience in mind, there are a lot of "approximations" to what Zamenhoff, the original creator of Esperanto, maybe had anticipated that the language would sound like.

gordonguthrie 7y ago
'designed without a global audience in mind' - it was exactly designed with a global audience in mind - but I think Zemnhof didn't have the exposure to the width of linguistic research he would have now
- SomeProgrammer_ 7y ago
  I think the _idea_ of a global audience was in mind, but when looking at who was a part of the discussions & how the language exists, it's pretty clear that a lot of cultures, nations, languages, and speech varieties weren't a part of the design process. Maybe it could be said that Zamenhof's conceptions of "global audience" were those who were closest to hegemonic and/or supernational influence, which I think I'd agree with. But I wouldn't call his design nor process particularly culturally inclusive.
  - gordonguthrie 7y ago
    For an amateur, living at the fringes of both Europe and the Russian empire, I think the boy Zamenhof done good for the 19th century

wolfgke 7y ago

Relevant: the yuri visual novel "The Expression Amrilato" about a girl that is stranded in a world where everybody speaks Juliamo (the in-game name for Esperanto) instead of Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Expression_Amrilato&oldid=903669020 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Expression_Am... https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato

antognini 7y ago

If anyone is interested in listening to a little more Esperanto, there's a great Esperanto podcast: http://pola-retradio.org/ http://pola-retradio.org/ It's been a long while since I listened to it, but the speech is very fluent and it's about as close to as a "neutral" Esperanto accent as you'll get.

martinrue 7y ago
As well as https://kern.punkto.info https://kern.punkto.info, which covers lots of diverse subjects, including many technical ones.

amp108 7y ago

I have read the pronunciation is bad in the 1966 film Incubus/Inkubo, (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)) but William Shatner acts like he's a native speaker in it.

jujun 7y ago

I speak Esperanto since I was 15 years old, (now I am 30). I even met my GF with it 10 years ago. It's something great to meet very interesting and generous people anywhere on earth. And it's also a nice programming language.

ferzul 7y ago
mi trovis mian edzinon per Esperanto, sed mi devis lerni alian lingvon por paroli kun ŝia familio, kiuj ne parolas Esperanton
- martinrue 7y ago
  Instruu al ŝia familio Esperanton - eble tio pli facilus :)
  - schoen 7y ago
    Sed li "devis lerni", do mi pensas ke li jam lernis la lingvon de ŝia familio!
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      Bonega! Bonega!

nydel 7y ago

from my experience, most words in esperanto should have the emphasis on the second-to-final syllable. this is a good guideline! mi esTAS STUdando ... sounds weird. mi EStas stuDANdo ... sounds right. this works almost everywhere because of esperanto's constructed nature and following uniformity.

schoen 7y ago
It's not just an informal guideline, but #10 of Zamenhof's 16 rules of Esperanto grammar from the 1905 Fundamento de Esperanto. http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_angla.html http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_an...

umvi 7y ago

Even if Esperanto were widely adopted, there would be nothing to keep it from developing edge cases and funky grammar exceptions over time just like every other language. Esperanto only works for scholarly types that adhere strictly to the rules, not lazy uneducated people who just want to communicate something with as little effort as possible and don't care if they aren't adhering to the grammar. Also, you'd get localized variants depending on the region.

adrianN 7y ago
The process of languages acquiring idiosyncrasies takes a really long time. I'd suspect it's even slower for auxiliary languages. Esperanto would likely remain relatively simple for centuries. Just compare English from the time of the British Empire to now. It's still basically the same language, despite (or because of?) the huge number of people learning it as a second language.
nabla9 7y ago
That's why Esperanto would be a good universal second language. There would be no native speakers, you would only speak it with speakers of other languages, or read books in it.
- biztos 7y ago
  Isn't that what Latin was for centuries? And just like some people (Italians?) had certain advantages in learning their Latin, some people have advantages in learning Esperanto.
biztos 7y ago
The lazy uneducated poets would butcher the language first, followed closely by the lazy uneducated lawyers. The day might come when lazy uneducated CEO's pervert it even further, but I'm gonna have to circle back with you on that and touch base later.

darkhorn 7y ago

Huh! Doesn't have vowel harmony. Not gonna work for me.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

zubi 7y ago

Excellent work, and indeed it sounds pretty much neutral. One question though: I always thought Esperanto pronunciation and letters map quite one-to-one with Turkish, have you considered basing your work on Turkish instead of Polish? Except ŭ, Esperanto vowels have exactly the same sound as they do in Turkish. Among the consonants, ĥ and c don't map, but all others do. Even ĉ, ŝ, ĝ and ĵ map to one specific letter with the identical sound.

jodrellblank 7y ago

Bonan voĉon :) Kiam oni finas frazon kun " ?", la ilo eraras, ekzemple: "testing in english?" funkcias, sed "testing in english ?" malfunkcias. (When you end a phrase with a space then a question mark, the tool gives an error, "failed to fetch").

6thaccount2 7y ago

I've been learning on Duolingo and Richardson's book. It really is simply so elegant. Easy to learn, easy to read, easy to understand, easy to speak. It just sounds cool to me as well. I think at 3 weeks in I had made more progress than 3 years of Spanish as you don't have to worry about irregularities and even the vocabulary is easy to remember.

tyingq 7y ago

I hear something (tonal, tempo, not the words really) like the Spanish they speak in Argentina. Like if someone tried mimicking them using nonsense sounds. I guess that makes sense, since Argentina has significant Italian influence?

travisgriggs 7y ago

This being HN and all, I’m curious if anyone has any experience using Esperanto as a base language for code. Are there any code bases out there where the names of variables and functions and stuff are expressed in Esperanto?

tracker1 7y ago

I wonder if there are still more Klingon speakers than Esperanto today. I don't know that outside linguist circles I'd see as much value in learning Esperanto as a more broadly used language. I took up a little bit of French and German (and Klingon) when I was young, but it's been 25-30 years since I've spoken either and don't remember anything.

Viliam1234 7y ago
> I wonder if there are still more Klingon speakers than Esperanto today. I believe there were never more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers. More precisely, I doubt there are any Klingon speakers -- where "speaker" doesn't mean a person who memorized a few words and sentences, but who can spend one hour talking fluently about their favorite topic -- but even assuming there are any, I really doubt there would be one hundred of them, worldwide. On the other hand, I have met hundreds of Esperanto speakers at various Esperanto-related activities, and they are quite able to talk the whole day without having to use another language. I used to be fluent at that language, too. But maybe that's just my bubble. Could you perhaps give me a link to e.g. people giving a lecture in Klingon in front of live audience, preferably on a topic other than constructed languages?
- tracker1 7y ago
  Not sure about numbers, but there's the Klingon Language Institute[1], which recently had a conference[2]. I mainly remember it being said that there were more conversational Klingon speakers than Esparanto around a decade ago. [1] https://www.kli.org/ https://www.kli.org/ [2] https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-javdich/ https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-javdich/
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    Klingon Language Institute has a web page in English, but not in Klingon. That usually does not happen to Esperanto organizations. Having two books translated to Klingon is impressive. To compare, the library of UEA offers 770 books in Esperanto in category "Translated Prose", and 362 in category "Original Prose". https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=prtr https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=prtr https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=pror https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=pror There is also a Wikipedia in Esperanto, with over 1/4 million articles. Fewer than English with almost 6 million articles, but still more than many languages with millions of native speakers. https://eo.wikipedia.org/ https://eo.wikipedia.org/ This is why I find the statement about more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers very unlikely, whether now or a decade ago. (Klingon Language Institute boasts about growing fast, while Esperanto speakers usually complain about stagnation; which makes it even less likely that the statement would be true a decade ago if it isn't true now.)

thosakwe 7y ago

Might be due to a lack of practical experience (or the low audio quality in the video), but I found it difficult to understand what the human speakers were saying in some parts. As for Parol, though, it was clear as day, and very easy to understand. Nice work!

Savageman 7y ago

A friend of mine has a started to create a new language fit for European citizen. It is based on a translator-based computer program and performs a synthesis of European languages. Each word is the result of a democratic choice made by an algorithm, so that it is the closest to that of the majority of European languages. The website is in French, but there's a paragraph written in Europa (the name of the language) that starts with "Vos have comprendet que haver ambition". I'm really curious how people can understand it without any learning. http://www.europeo.li http://www.europeo.li They have another website, with video of people speaking and this article about built languages is quite interesting: https://www.europa-lingua.org/en/tour-de-table-des-langues-construites-quelle-langue-pour-leurope/ https://www.europa-lingua.org/en/tour-de-table-des-langues-c...

ibps965 7y ago

we are going to discuss how you can prepare for IBPS exam at home-without coaching. If you have correct strategy you it will be very easy to clear any IBPS EXAM at home. http://www.ibpsexamguide.in/ http://www.ibpsexamguide.in/