5 ms·

The language really is as easy to adapt as advertised. Too bad it got clamped, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it suddently resurfaced among youth as some k

by panxyh 4y ago

The language really is as easy to adapt as advertised. Too bad it got clamped, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it suddently resurfaced among youth as some koombayah meme.

sshine 4y ago
I think it’ll continue to be this undying language that done people perpetually pick up. Takes 3-6 months to learn fluently, and a lifetime to find other speakers. ;-) Maybe in the next 100 years, some neo hippie collective of a not insignificant size decides to make it the preferred language of their community. It’d be cool to walk into a part of a city where Esperanto is the norm, like Chinatown or the Jewish neighbourhood.
- runarberg 4y ago
  I think every 10th comment I make on HN is arguing against the notion that technology will fix the problem. But I think now I’m gonna do the opposite. It seems like technology is indeed well on its way of making the need of an international auxiliary language obsolete. For government functions live translation is something skilled translators can do pretty easily, and for common folks, live machine translations is getting better and more accessible. I for example read many tweets written in languages I don’t understand. And I think it is only a matter of time before other social platforms (including GitHub and HN) catches on to provide accessible translation tools so people can read and write in their native language, and have machines translate for them. As for communicating face to face, surely there could be a device (or more likely a phone app) that does that, but mostly I think people will just continue to learn an auxiliary language or two and find a common language to communicate in, only using the translation app as a backup in emergencies.
- nsilvestri 4y ago
  Anecdata, but I've met a whole two other Esperanto speakers (that I know of) in the wild since I began learning it a couple years ago! It's not prominent with the general population, but I do think there are certain types of people whom are more inclined to learn it.
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    There was this Physics instructor whose scripts were in Esperanto - the guy was well liked by the students, however he was an Esperantist
  - bbzealot 4y ago
    Fun fact, George Soros (the banker much targeted by conspiracy theorists) is a native Esperanto speaker, as he was raised to speak the language but his father, who was a well known Esperanto speaker
    - JetAlone 4y ago
      I didn't know that. Fascinating to hear there actually is a native speaker of it. I was aware from reading the wikipedia article that Esperanto was championed by the Ba'hai and Oomoto religious groups, among others. I had also forgotten that Theosophy promoted it as well. Plenty of different Christian groups tried using it too, even Jack Chick, famous for his maligning of D&D.
      - sshine 4y ago
        I've heard there is around 1000 native speakers in the world. I've met one such. His parents met at a conference, and only had Esperanto in common. I've been at music festivals where I met people who did not speak English, so Esperanto was our best common language.
  - sshine 4y ago
    Anecdata: In recent times, to a high degree: programmers. I attended one music festival with a high presence of volunteers from the Esperanto community, and among these people, ~20% were programmers. The grammar is mostly regular. It seems like the thing a stubborn introvert likes: You can hardly use it anywhere, but it has nice properties. And unlike Lojban, Esperanto is something you can learn to fluency fast on your own on the internet.
7thaccount 4y ago
Yep. A few months of just very casual study took me MUCH further than 3 years of daily Spanish in school. The regular grammar and 10,000 other nice additions takes so many complexities out of the language. It also just sounds beautiful to me.
scroot 4y ago
One of the more interesting parts of the Esperanto story is that right at the moment when world organizations were starting to take it seriously (in this case, the defunct League of Nations), the movement split between the users of Ido -- a spinoff of Esperanto -- and the Esperantists themselves. It was due to this split that the League failes to make a firm recommendation on a specific international auxiliary language, because they were waiting to see what would happen
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  Of note is that the LoN effort was championed by Japan and China. This may be surprising if you know how Esperanto draws mostly from Polish and other European languages, but consider that the contemporary diplomatic languages were French and English (still are). It would have put everyone on a more even footing.
  - nz 4y ago
    It is not _too_ surprising, since Esperanto also shares some coincidental features with Chinese -- its regularity makes the word-building process similar to Chinese. Perhaps poetically, the regularity of roots and affixes does for the arbitrariness of word-building (compared to the lexicons of European languages), what a phonetic alphabet does for the arbitrariness of writing (compared to logographic scripts used in East Asia). Worth checking out: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/westernlanguage.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/westernlanguage...
  - scroot 4y ago
    > Of note is that the LoN effort was championed by Japan and China. I didn't know that! What a missed opportunity. I spent many months buried in archives reading old Esperantist magazines from around the world (Revuoj) to try to piece together this story. Was so much fun!
  - yorwba 4y ago
    > It would have put everyone on a more even footing. This may seem obvious - after all, Esperanto is an "easier" language than French or English – but I doubt it. Much of what makes Esperanto easy for speakers of related European languages is the large amount of shared vocabulary, allowing even a beginner to guess the meaning of many words when encountering them for the first time. Then there is the grammar that would be familiar if you already know a related European language: affixes on verbs to express tense, affixes on nouns to express gender and number. Starting from Chinese, those advantages don't really apply. It helps a bit that the affixes are predictable: Whereas "sleeped" would be considered incorrect, though understandable, "dormis" is just the expected form. But while the root "dorm" is associated with sleeping in many languages influenced by Latin, from the Chinese perspective it's just a nonsense syllable (or three). Then there's the thing that there's no grammatical tense in Chinese at all, only grammatical aspect. The perfective aspect (indicating completion of an action) often corresponds to past tense, but when used to describe completion in the future, that's no longer the case. So there's no simple one-to-one correspondence the way a French or English speaker can map their native language's tense system onto Esperanto. Im my experience, Chinese Esperantists struggle with vocabulary and verb tenses about as often as they would in English. (Consider also the case of Pseudo -Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese created by writing Japanese using as many kanji as possible and removing all grammatical affixes, resulting in text that often allows Chinese speakers to guess the meaning based on shared vocabulary. It's surprisingly good for Japanese → Chinese one-way communication, but pretty useless for anyone who doesn't have the shared context necessary to make sense of it.)
urthor 4y ago
Going by how programming languages go. When the core idea gets popular, the young and hip crowd will invent a new language (Rust) that does the exact same thing as an old language (Ada). And do away with Esperanto.
- leke 4y ago
  Continuing with the Rust analogy, here's a tour of Rust in Interlingue https://tourofrust.com/00_ie.html https://tourofrust.com/00_ie.html

by panxyh 4y ago

The language really is as easy to adapt as advertised. Too bad it got clamped, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it suddently resurfaced among youth as some koombayah meme.

sshine 4y ago

I think it’ll continue to be this undying language that done people perpetually pick up. Takes 3-6 months to learn fluently, and a lifetime to find other speakers. ;-) Maybe in the next 100 years, some neo hippie collective of a not insignificant size decides to make it the preferred language of their community. It’d be cool to walk into a part of a city where Esperanto is the norm, like Chinatown or the Jewish neighbourhood.

runarberg 4y ago
I think every 10th comment I make on HN is arguing against the notion that technology will fix the problem. But I think now I’m gonna do the opposite. It seems like technology is indeed well on its way of making the need of an international auxiliary language obsolete. For government functions live translation is something skilled translators can do pretty easily, and for common folks, live machine translations is getting better and more accessible. I for example read many tweets written in languages I don’t understand. And I think it is only a matter of time before other social platforms (including GitHub and HN) catches on to provide accessible translation tools so people can read and write in their native language, and have machines translate for them. As for communicating face to face, surely there could be a device (or more likely a phone app) that does that, but mostly I think people will just continue to learn an auxiliary language or two and find a common language to communicate in, only using the translation app as a backup in emergencies.
nsilvestri 4y ago
Anecdata, but I've met a whole two other Esperanto speakers (that I know of) in the wild since I began learning it a couple years ago! It's not prominent with the general population, but I do think there are certain types of people whom are more inclined to learn it.
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  There was this Physics instructor whose scripts were in Esperanto - the guy was well liked by the students, however he was an Esperantist
- bbzealot 4y ago
  Fun fact, George Soros (the banker much targeted by conspiracy theorists) is a native Esperanto speaker, as he was raised to speak the language but his father, who was a well known Esperanto speaker
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    I didn't know that. Fascinating to hear there actually is a native speaker of it. I was aware from reading the wikipedia article that Esperanto was championed by the Ba'hai and Oomoto religious groups, among others. I had also forgotten that Theosophy promoted it as well. Plenty of different Christian groups tried using it too, even Jack Chick, famous for his maligning of D&D.
    - sshine 4y ago
      I've heard there is around 1000 native speakers in the world. I've met one such. His parents met at a conference, and only had Esperanto in common. I've been at music festivals where I met people who did not speak English, so Esperanto was our best common language.
- sshine 4y ago
  Anecdata: In recent times, to a high degree: programmers. I attended one music festival with a high presence of volunteers from the Esperanto community, and among these people, ~20% were programmers. The grammar is mostly regular. It seems like the thing a stubborn introvert likes: You can hardly use it anywhere, but it has nice properties. And unlike Lojban, Esperanto is something you can learn to fluency fast on your own on the internet.

7thaccount 4y ago

Yep. A few months of just very casual study took me MUCH further than 3 years of daily Spanish in school. The regular grammar and 10,000 other nice additions takes so many complexities out of the language. It also just sounds beautiful to me.

scroot 4y ago

One of the more interesting parts of the Esperanto story is that right at the moment when world organizations were starting to take it seriously (in this case, the defunct League of Nations), the movement split between the users of Ido -- a spinoff of Esperanto -- and the Esperantists themselves. It was due to this split that the League failes to make a firm recommendation on a specific international auxiliary language, because they were waiting to see what would happen

shadowofneptune 4y ago
Of note is that the LoN effort was championed by Japan and China. This may be surprising if you know how Esperanto draws mostly from Polish and other European languages, but consider that the contemporary diplomatic languages were French and English (still are). It would have put everyone on a more even footing.
- nz 4y ago
  It is not _too_ surprising, since Esperanto also shares some coincidental features with Chinese -- its regularity makes the word-building process similar to Chinese. Perhaps poetically, the regularity of roots and affixes does for the arbitrariness of word-building (compared to the lexicons of European languages), what a phonetic alphabet does for the arbitrariness of writing (compared to logographic scripts used in East Asia). Worth checking out: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/westernlanguage.htm http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/westernlanguage...
- scroot 4y ago
  > Of note is that the LoN effort was championed by Japan and China. I didn't know that! What a missed opportunity. I spent many months buried in archives reading old Esperantist magazines from around the world (Revuoj) to try to piece together this story. Was so much fun!
- yorwba 4y ago
  > It would have put everyone on a more even footing. This may seem obvious - after all, Esperanto is an "easier" language than French or English – but I doubt it. Much of what makes Esperanto easy for speakers of related European languages is the large amount of shared vocabulary, allowing even a beginner to guess the meaning of many words when encountering them for the first time. Then there is the grammar that would be familiar if you already know a related European language: affixes on verbs to express tense, affixes on nouns to express gender and number. Starting from Chinese, those advantages don't really apply. It helps a bit that the affixes are predictable: Whereas "sleeped" would be considered incorrect, though understandable, "dormis" is just the expected form. But while the root "dorm" is associated with sleeping in many languages influenced by Latin, from the Chinese perspective it's just a nonsense syllable (or three). Then there's the thing that there's no grammatical tense in Chinese at all, only grammatical aspect. The perfective aspect (indicating completion of an action) often corresponds to past tense, but when used to describe completion in the future, that's no longer the case. So there's no simple one-to-one correspondence the way a French or English speaker can map their native language's tense system onto Esperanto. Im my experience, Chinese Esperantists struggle with vocabulary and verb tenses about as often as they would in English. (Consider also the case of Pseudo -Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese created by writing Japanese using as many kanji as possible and removing all grammatical affixes, resulting in text that often allows Chinese speakers to guess the meaning based on shared vocabulary. It's surprisingly good for Japanese → Chinese one-way communication, but pretty useless for anyone who doesn't have the shared context necessary to make sense of it.)

urthor 4y ago

Going by how programming languages go. When the core idea gets popular, the young and hip crowd will invent a new language (Rust) that does the exact same thing as an old language (Ada). And do away with Esperanto.

leke 4y ago
Continuing with the Rust analogy, here's a tour of Rust in Interlingue https://tourofrust.com/00_ie.html https://tourofrust.com/00_ie.html