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Wishful thinking, but I do wish that Esperanto or Lojban has been successful in becoming a lingua franca. Ideally everyone would know the global language and wh

Wishful thinking, but I do wish that Esperanto or Lojban has been successful in becoming a lingua franca. Ideally everyone would know the global language and whatever their local, mother tongue is, no matter how obscure. I think it’s a good solution to certain languages dying out as well as linguistic imperialism.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto or something like it. He came from a time, place, and personal perspective when "diversity" wasn't valued like it is today. (Similarly, he dabbled in creating a universal religion that adherents of other religions could compromise towards.) It wasn't until after the mid-20th century that the Esperanto movement started talking about supporting the world's minority languages, and even then not all parts of the organized movement got on board. From a sociolinguistic view, it seems likely that if Esperanto were the universal language, minority-language speakers would abandon their native languages for it in many circumstances ("domain loss") just as they do for English, French, Spanish, etc. in various parts of the world.
- technothrasher 7y ago
  L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto I think you're doing him a bit of a disservice here. His idea wasn't to kill other languages at all. He felt that if you only had to learn Esperanto to communicate with the rest of the world, you would, in fact, be able to spend more time enriching your own language. As he wrote in "Unua Libro": "How different would the case be, had we but two languages to learn; we should know them infinitely better, and the languages themselves would grow richer, and reach a higher degrees of perfection than is found in any of those now existing"
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    The Unua Libro was written (naturally, as its title shows) early in Zamenhof’s activity. In later years, he went further and further down the path of "all humanity being one" rhetoric.
    - n4r9 7y ago
      Interesting. This seems counter-intuitive for someone who spoke many languages and apparently delighted in their diversity. I also agree with the comment above yours that wanting humanity to "be one" and to be able to communicate universally, is not mutually exclusive with them maintaining their separate languages concurrently. Do you have any suggested sources for me to read about Zamenhof's later views?
      - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
        My understanding of Zamenhof’s views is based on reading his complete works in the edition prepared by that Japanese Esperantist, which I could do as I was closely involved with an Esperanto library. As this was some years ago and I am no longer involved in Esperanto, I am sorry that I cannot cite a specific passage, but I am quite sure that my claim is correct, and I would urge you to go to those sources.
olau 7y ago
If you were to start a new language today, wouldn't it make more sense to start with an existing common language, like English, and make simplifications to it until you reach something like Esperanto? The only downside I can think of is that we're taught in school that slightly different spelling etc. is strictly incorrect, so there's a stigma you'd somehow have to overcome for the native speakers.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  So, like an English creole? There are plenty of these around, and none of them has become popular as an enduring cross-language standard in the way English itself has. (Modern English itself is mildly creolized compared to other major languages, though.) Esperanto actually makes a bit more sense from that POV.
  - Freak_NL 7y ago
    I would argue that English already ended up with a simplified variant in the form of international English as practised by many second language learners of English. It's not American English, it's not British English, but it hovers somewhere in between, and tends towards leaving out the idioms that require a higher degree of literacy (and being well-read in particular). It's the language spoken at international conferences, colleges outside of the Anglosphere, and political summits; and countless bastardized variants are practised by tourists world-wide. Bear in mind that ⅔ of all the English speakers (over a billion people) are second language users of the language. Of course what you are left with is a language that doesn't really reach its potential for beautiful prose until you settle for a specific 'proper' variant of English — with all its bells and whistles, comparatively fixed orthography, and quaint expressions.
- chillacy 7y ago
  Isn’t that sort of Esperanto? When it was made French was the dominant language in Europe so most Esperanto words come from French, then the grammar was simplified but still allows for French word orderings.
Causality1 7y ago
Esperanto has a far worse problem with linguistic imperialism than English does. Esperanto is a hobby/philosophy for denizens of rich Western countries to play with. English, while not being a fully neutral playing ground, is orders of magnitude better able to connect disparate communities and give the underprivileged greater opportunities.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > Esperanto is a hobby/philosophy for denizens of rich Western countries to play with. I am a long since ex- Esperantist who is not keen to defend the language and movement, but your post is way off the mark. Esperanto was a decently big fad in the former Eastern Bloc, because learning it allowed you to correspond with exotic foreigners and maybe even get visa invitations to go visit other countries (for Esperanto events) you otherwise might never dream of. Sure, some of those countries are now much more prosperous and developed, but they weren’t then. My memories of European Esperanto congresses decades ago are a lot of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians clearly on the lookout for a Western European spouse, or stuffing their suitcases with local goods they could sell back home. Similarly, West Africa has always had its own local Esperanto scene, for roughly the same reasons of being able to get visas etc. There was a lively Esperanto community in Yugoslavia, which was a non-aligned country that had more travel opportunities, but still wasn’t a "rich Western country".
- chillacy 7y ago
  It’s not perfect but I’ve spoken to enough Esperantists in Asia who have remarked that English is way way way harder and speakers are less forgiving.
  - D-Coder 7y ago
    "It’s not perfect but I’ve spoken to enough Esperantists in Asia who have remarked that English is way way way harder and speakers are less forgiving." Anecdote: We had a Japanese Esperantist visiting a local meeting in the US and of course asked if Esperanto is really ten times easier than English for Japanese speakers. His reply (in Esperanto): "No. It's a hundred times easier."
clavalle 7y ago
Esperanto comes with its own brand of linguistic cultural assumptions that are antiquated, at best, this day and age.
nilkn 7y ago
Is there any reason to think Esperanto would retain its grammatical simplicity if it were to actually become a lingua franca? Once it's truly out in the world to a much larger degree, there would be no way to "control" it anymore.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
xamuel 7y ago
People talk about the engineered perfection of Esperanto/Lojban, but perhaps so-called problems with natural languages actually have subtler benefits that we take for granted. People hate irregular verbs, but there must be some reason why they persist in natural languages. My personal theory is that natural languages contain emergent coding theory to allow native speakers to better understand each other when speaking in a "noisy" channel (including when the "noise" is just the fact that they're both chattering super fast because, you know, they're having a natural conversation).
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Esperanto doesn't have 'engineered perfection', it has either awful, awkward, or endearing flaws and irregularities depending on how you want to look at them. (Kombo - not a comb, but an act of combing something, even though it's a noun word ending; Norda, Suda the compass directions north and south instead of Norda, Malnorda, "kaseto" a cassette or a small "kaso", and so on, k.t.p.). They could be avoided in an engineered perfect language, and even the creator of Esperanto went on to make another language (Ido) using what he learned the first time to improve on some of the flaws he saw, which nobody took up and he later abandoned. My layperson's view on it is that "everything is regularised" means "no convenient shortcuts" for the benefit of "anyone around the world can use it". That's a huge problem for day to day use when you and your friends have to willingly choose to say an inconvenient sentence over and over and over, just so that a person from a thousand miles away could understand you if they were ever here. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons - you do what's more convenient locally in the short term, and the long term wider scope suffers for it. Esperanto's original ideas were to have many compound words - make them up on the fly, to keep the vocabulary load smaller. It took off early in French speaking regions and gained a lot of French-root loan words, and then got compound word alternatives, so there ended up being multiple ways to say the same thing. e.g. eyeglasses are okulvitroj (eye + glasses). They're also okulvitro (singular) because imperfection. And they are nazumo, from pince-nez, which is nose+"related in a non-specific way" suffix. Then you get really weird words built up from suffix games like "estonteco" which is a "play with words" way of saying "the future"; there's no way I'm going to create or deconstruct that on the fly, possibly no way you'd work it out without learning it.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto or something like it. He came from a time, place, and personal perspective when "diversity" wasn't valued like it is today. (Similarly, he dabbled in creating a universal religion that adherents of other religions could compromise towards.) It wasn't until after the mid-20th century that the Esperanto movement started talking about supporting the world's minority languages, and even then not all parts of the organized movement got on board. From a sociolinguistic view, it seems likely that if Esperanto were the universal language, minority-language speakers would abandon their native languages for it in many circumstances ("domain loss") just as they do for English, French, Spanish, etc. in various parts of the world.

technothrasher 7y ago
L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto I think you're doing him a bit of a disservice here. His idea wasn't to kill other languages at all. He felt that if you only had to learn Esperanto to communicate with the rest of the world, you would, in fact, be able to spend more time enriching your own language. As he wrote in "Unua Libro": "How different would the case be, had we but two languages to learn; we should know them infinitely better, and the languages themselves would grow richer, and reach a higher degrees of perfection than is found in any of those now existing"
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  The Unua Libro was written (naturally, as its title shows) early in Zamenhof’s activity. In later years, he went further and further down the path of "all humanity being one" rhetoric.
  - n4r9 7y ago
    Interesting. This seems counter-intuitive for someone who spoke many languages and apparently delighted in their diversity. I also agree with the comment above yours that wanting humanity to "be one" and to be able to communicate universally, is not mutually exclusive with them maintaining their separate languages concurrently. Do you have any suggested sources for me to read about Zamenhof's later views?
    - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      My understanding of Zamenhof’s views is based on reading his complete works in the edition prepared by that Japanese Esperantist, which I could do as I was closely involved with an Esperanto library. As this was some years ago and I am no longer involved in Esperanto, I am sorry that I cannot cite a specific passage, but I am quite sure that my claim is correct, and I would urge you to go to those sources.

olau 7y ago

If you were to start a new language today, wouldn't it make more sense to start with an existing common language, like English, and make simplifications to it until you reach something like Esperanto? The only downside I can think of is that we're taught in school that slightly different spelling etc. is strictly incorrect, so there's a stigma you'd somehow have to overcome for the native speakers.

zozbot234 7y ago
So, like an English creole? There are plenty of these around, and none of them has become popular as an enduring cross-language standard in the way English itself has. (Modern English itself is mildly creolized compared to other major languages, though.) Esperanto actually makes a bit more sense from that POV.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  I would argue that English already ended up with a simplified variant in the form of international English as practised by many second language learners of English. It's not American English, it's not British English, but it hovers somewhere in between, and tends towards leaving out the idioms that require a higher degree of literacy (and being well-read in particular). It's the language spoken at international conferences, colleges outside of the Anglosphere, and political summits; and countless bastardized variants are practised by tourists world-wide. Bear in mind that ⅔ of all the English speakers (over a billion people) are second language users of the language. Of course what you are left with is a language that doesn't really reach its potential for beautiful prose until you settle for a specific 'proper' variant of English — with all its bells and whistles, comparatively fixed orthography, and quaint expressions.
chillacy 7y ago
Isn’t that sort of Esperanto? When it was made French was the dominant language in Europe so most Esperanto words come from French, then the grammar was simplified but still allows for French word orderings.

Causality1 7y ago

Esperanto has a far worse problem with linguistic imperialism than English does. Esperanto is a hobby/philosophy for denizens of rich Western countries to play with. English, while not being a fully neutral playing ground, is orders of magnitude better able to connect disparate communities and give the underprivileged greater opportunities.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> Esperanto is a hobby/philosophy for denizens of rich Western countries to play with. I am a long since ex- Esperantist who is not keen to defend the language and movement, but your post is way off the mark. Esperanto was a decently big fad in the former Eastern Bloc, because learning it allowed you to correspond with exotic foreigners and maybe even get visa invitations to go visit other countries (for Esperanto events) you otherwise might never dream of. Sure, some of those countries are now much more prosperous and developed, but they weren’t then. My memories of European Esperanto congresses decades ago are a lot of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians clearly on the lookout for a Western European spouse, or stuffing their suitcases with local goods they could sell back home. Similarly, West Africa has always had its own local Esperanto scene, for roughly the same reasons of being able to get visas etc. There was a lively Esperanto community in Yugoslavia, which was a non-aligned country that had more travel opportunities, but still wasn’t a "rich Western country".
chillacy 7y ago
It’s not perfect but I’ve spoken to enough Esperantists in Asia who have remarked that English is way way way harder and speakers are less forgiving.
- D-Coder 7y ago
  "It’s not perfect but I’ve spoken to enough Esperantists in Asia who have remarked that English is way way way harder and speakers are less forgiving." Anecdote: We had a Japanese Esperantist visiting a local meeting in the US and of course asked if Esperanto is really ten times easier than English for Japanese speakers. His reply (in Esperanto): "No. It's a hundred times easier."

clavalle 7y ago

Esperanto comes with its own brand of linguistic cultural assumptions that are antiquated, at best, this day and age.

nilkn 7y ago

Is there any reason to think Esperanto would retain its grammatical simplicity if it were to actually become a lingua franca? Once it's truly out in the world to a much larger degree, there would be no way to "control" it anymore.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

xamuel 7y ago

People talk about the engineered perfection of Esperanto/Lojban, but perhaps so-called problems with natural languages actually have subtler benefits that we take for granted. People hate irregular verbs, but there must be some reason why they persist in natural languages. My personal theory is that natural languages contain emergent coding theory to allow native speakers to better understand each other when speaking in a "noisy" channel (including when the "noise" is just the fact that they're both chattering super fast because, you know, they're having a natural conversation).

jodrellblank 7y ago
Esperanto doesn't have 'engineered perfection', it has either awful, awkward, or endearing flaws and irregularities depending on how you want to look at them. (Kombo - not a comb, but an act of combing something, even though it's a noun word ending; Norda, Suda the compass directions north and south instead of Norda, Malnorda, "kaseto" a cassette or a small "kaso", and so on, k.t.p.). They could be avoided in an engineered perfect language, and even the creator of Esperanto went on to make another language (Ido) using what he learned the first time to improve on some of the flaws he saw, which nobody took up and he later abandoned. My layperson's view on it is that "everything is regularised" means "no convenient shortcuts" for the benefit of "anyone around the world can use it". That's a huge problem for day to day use when you and your friends have to willingly choose to say an inconvenient sentence over and over and over, just so that a person from a thousand miles away could understand you if they were ever here. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons - you do what's more convenient locally in the short term, and the long term wider scope suffers for it. Esperanto's original ideas were to have many compound words - make them up on the fly, to keep the vocabulary load smaller. It took off early in French speaking regions and gained a lot of French-root loan words, and then got compound word alternatives, so there ended up being multiple ways to say the same thing. e.g. eyeglasses are okulvitroj (eye + glasses). They're also okulvitro (singular) because imperfection. And they are nazumo, from pince-nez, which is nose+"related in a non-specific way" suffix. Then you get really weird words built up from suffix games like "estonteco" which is a "play with words" way of saying "the future"; there's no way I'm going to create or deconstruct that on the fly, possibly no way you'd work it out without learning it.