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Esperanto is widely miunderstood by the general public. It's often lumped together with fictional languages (languages from fictional books or movies) like Klin
by gxonatano 5y ago
Esperanto is widely miunderstood by the general public. It's often lumped together with fictional languages (languages from fictional books or movies) like Klingon or Elvish. But there's a very important distinction. Fictional languages like Klingon are created to appear as if they're natural languages—reflecting their fictional cultures' customs, idioms, and ways of thinking. They often have a level of complexity comparable with that of a natural language, but lack the vocabulary and expressivity of a non-fictional language. Esperanto, on the other hand, is better described as an international auxiliary language.
As an international auxiliary language—and by far the most successful, with upwards of 5 million speakers worldwide—Esperanto has a number of notable features:
1. It's arguably the easiest language to learn, for speakers of European and non-European languages alike. It requires an order of magnitude less effort to learn.
That makes the best candidate for a bridge language. Imagine that speakers of two difficult, mutually incomprehensible languages need a common means of communication. They could either attempt to learn one another's languages, or they could learn a bridge language, that would save them a lot of time. English is a terrible candidate for such a language, since it takes 10-20 times more time to learn to fluency, and is full of idioms, irregularities, nonsensical spelling, and other difficulties.
2. As a language with a history of almost 150 years, there is a rich body of literature in Esperanto, which you won't find in any other constructed language. Sure, you can find translations of Tolkien books in Elvish (unsurprisingly), and other token translations, but the largest Esperanto-language libraries have over 30,000 volumes. Many of these are available for free online. Learning Esperanto is thus not just an intellectual exercise, but a means of unlocking a whole wing of the library.
3. As a largely unidiomatic language, Esperanto just makes sense. If you can think of a way to express something, that's usually the correct way of expressing it. That isn't true of most natural languages. (Have you ever been a language learner, surrounded by native speakers, asking them if you're saying something right? Why do we ride on busses but in cars? It's because English is impossibly idiomatic.) Thus, Esperanto is a fantastic candidate for an international scientific or academic language, since it's just easier to say what you mean, and to be understood.
There are so, so many reasons to learn Esperanto, in particular, and those get glossed over when you're lumping it together with other smaller languages. Check out https://lernu.net/ https://lernu.net/ and start learning it.
- jaclaz 5y agoI would say that the difference is between a "constructed" language and a "designed" language, both may be "invented", but the latter (Esperanto) simply is on another level. And this opens the doors to debating whether or not Esperanto was well designed or not.