2 ms·

People talk about the engineered perfection of Esperanto/Lojban, but perhaps so-called problems with natural languages actually have subtler benefits that we ta

by 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
  I don't think that estonteco is any more out there than many European languages' coinages for "future", e.g. Finnish tulevaisuus, French l'avenir, or Romanian viitor which are all derivations of the verb "to come" and foreign learners don't really have any problem figuring out the meaning. In fact, now that I think about it, Zamenhof may have calqued the Esperanto word specifically on Russian будущее "that which is to be", i.e. " the future".
ken 7y ago
Most, but not all. Agglutinative languages don't seem to use irregular verbs much. When I studied Turkish, I recall learning only one irregular verb. From some googling, Mongolian also has very few. Japanese has a lot, relatively, at around 10 (depending who you ask and how you count). I'm not sure why irregularity would emerge from lossy transmission. I would think regularity would be a greater benefit here. I assume it's just a historical accident that arises when verbs stand on their own and you don't have to do anything with them. When you're just starting to have language, it must take some real insight to realize that there is a special relationship between "go" and "went", and it's the same as the relationship between "be" and "was". But if you regularly (ha) need to agglutinate a pile of endings on your verbs, then using unique words for each tense would quickly become a pain in the butt. I find agglutinative languages are simpler than other types of languages in many ways, and I haven't studied linguistics enough to know if that's inherent to all of them or just coincidence from the small number of such languages I've studied. Turkish plurals are perfectly regular (there are 2 possible endings, depending on the word's final vowel), and Japanese doesn't really have plurals at all. Neither language has gendered words, or definite articles. Turkish has no diphthongs, and Japanese doesn't really (depending on your POV), either. Esperanto actually looks somewhat complex to me! It reminds me of my own (failed) attempt to learn French. It seems to have a lot of baggage from the Romance languages, presumably to make it seem more familiar to those speakers. I'm a little surprised it wasn't simplified further.

by xamuel 7y ago

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
I don't think that estonteco is any more out there than many European languages' coinages for "future", e.g. Finnish tulevaisuus, French l'avenir, or Romanian viitor which are all derivations of the verb "to come" and foreign learners don't really have any problem figuring out the meaning. In fact, now that I think about it, Zamenhof may have calqued the Esperanto word specifically on Russian будущее "that which is to be", i.e. " the future".

ken 7y ago

Most, but not all. Agglutinative languages don't seem to use irregular verbs much. When I studied Turkish, I recall learning only one irregular verb. From some googling, Mongolian also has very few. Japanese has a lot, relatively, at around 10 (depending who you ask and how you count). I'm not sure why irregularity would emerge from lossy transmission. I would think regularity would be a greater benefit here. I assume it's just a historical accident that arises when verbs stand on their own and you don't have to do anything with them. When you're just starting to have language, it must take some real insight to realize that there is a special relationship between "go" and "went", and it's the same as the relationship between "be" and "was". But if you regularly (ha) need to agglutinate a pile of endings on your verbs, then using unique words for each tense would quickly become a pain in the butt. I find agglutinative languages are simpler than other types of languages in many ways, and I haven't studied linguistics enough to know if that's inherent to all of them or just coincidence from the small number of such languages I've studied. Turkish plurals are perfectly regular (there are 2 possible endings, depending on the word's final vowel), and Japanese doesn't really have plurals at all. Neither language has gendered words, or definite articles. Turkish has no diphthongs, and Japanese doesn't really (depending on your POV), either. Esperanto actually looks somewhat complex to me! It reminds me of my own (failed) attempt to learn French. It seems to have a lot of baggage from the Romance languages, presumably to make it seem more familiar to those speakers. I'm a little surprised it wasn't simplified further.