4 ms·

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,

by 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.)
antognini 4y ago
There was also a unit of currency that some Esperantists proposed called the "Spesmilo." A few banks used it prior to WWI (one of which was a bank called Ĉekbanko Esperantista that conducted its business in Esperanto). Its legacy lives on in the modern age in a Unicode character for the currency: ₷
- leke 4y ago
  Wow, I did not know that!
leke 4y ago
Yeah, they were at one point accepting entries and I believe various other languages were submitted, including one I am currently learning called Interlingue (aka Occidental). https://occidental-lang.com/ https://occidental-lang.com/ You can even learn the Rust programming language in Occidental.

by scroot 4y ago

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.)

antognini 4y ago

There was also a unit of currency that some Esperantists proposed called the "Spesmilo." A few banks used it prior to WWI (one of which was a bank called Ĉekbanko Esperantista that conducted its business in Esperanto). Its legacy lives on in the modern age in a Unicode character for the currency: ₷

leke 4y ago
Wow, I did not know that!

leke 4y ago

Yeah, they were at one point accepting entries and I believe various other languages were submitted, including one I am currently learning called Interlingue (aka Occidental). https://occidental-lang.com/ https://occidental-lang.com/ You can even learn the Rust programming language in Occidental.