10 ms·

Esperanto is not my favourite artificial language (2002)

80 points by adamrezich 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
Personally I like Interlingua which is basically a cleaned-up latin. If you've gotten a good dose of exposure to Romance languages you might be able to read it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua#Samples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua#Samples
- sdsd 4y ago
  >Personally I like Interlingua which is basically a cleaned-up latin. I on the other hand like it messy and stick with good old fashioned Latin (as an added bonus, the language of my ancient and noble church). Et numquam mutabo, irrumo Interlinguam!
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Church Latin is quite different from Classical Latin, though - and surely only the latter truly counts as "old fashioned"? ~
    - fullmoon 4y ago
      Medieval Latin isn’t really that much different than latin from the classical period.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Pronunciation-wise it sounds pretty different to me.
- Rendello 4y ago
  I find Lingua Franca Nova very readable (I speak French decently as a second language), plus it has a very nice flag! https://lfn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca_nova https://lfn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca_nova
- sshine 4y ago
  Both Interlingua and Ido are improvements over Esperanto. But as it is with any language, programming language, or ecosystem in general: There is strength in numbers. Esperanto is great because it's easy to learn (Europeans have an advantage, ok) and it's the most popular constructed language, meaning there are good resources and actual people (few, ok) to talk to.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    what's the general feeling on Lojban these days? used to know a guy who was a unix command line wizard and lojban enthusiast
    - nmz 4y ago
      From what I can see the language is in constant development. there is a telegram group called ckule. but its a damn tough language to get through.
    - sshine 4y ago
      Lojban's selling point is that it's easy to computationally parse, but not necessarily that easy to learn to speak. I'd want to try to learn it again eventually, but I failed miserably the first time. As an academic curiosity I think it's doing great.
    - inawarminister 4y ago
      I kinda wonder if you can encode knowledge in Lojban and have a more efficient language model using it then only translate to English at the output (if needed). Is there any study on the informational density of Lojban/loglan?
    - int_19h 4y ago
      It's conceptually interesting, but aesthetically it sounds horrible.
    - leke 4y ago
      I like it, but couldn't get past having to learn the argument order of each predicate.
- stavros 4y ago
  Wow, I can basically understand every word. It must be even easier for speakers of a more Romantic language (French, Spanish, Romanian, etc).
- inawarminister 4y ago
  Yeah, I've been needling people in Discord servers by writing up Interlingua and most of the time most people are able to read it and respond back in English or Romance languages Si solmente nos ha un sorta de interlingua traducentes del linguas major, assi le personas pote scriber in interlingua sin que non necessariamente apprender lo.
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    Looks (too) close to Spanish. (Also, I’ve been under impression for a while now that Spanish is the closest thing to a “modernized” version of Latin that we already have.)
- billfruit 4y ago
  There is also another Interlingua which is also called as Latina-Sine-Flexione.
Sniffnoy 4y ago
See also, Justin Rye's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto": http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/
dang 4y ago
We changed the URL from https://web.archive.org/web/20021210061212/http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/esp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021210061212/http://www.cix.co... to what appears to be the article's canonical location (since the page says it's the author's website). It's fine to post archive.org links if there's really no other way, but please search first. I found this one by simply googling the title.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  when I initially made this submission 41 days ago the un-archived page looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20220212091844/http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/esp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220212091844/http://www.cix.co... but now that I've resubmitted it from the Second Chance Pool, you're right, it does seem to be back up. I had assumed the page had been taken down permanently.
  - dang 4y ago
    The URL that works is not on that domain but http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm It was a good submission in any case!
alexambarch 4y ago
If you want to pick up a new language purely for fun, I wholeheartedly recommend toki pona[1]. Its small vocabulary (<200 words) and simple grammar force you to break down complex thoughts into simple ideas. This feels limiting at first, but because there isn't a prescribed way to express certain ideas, it can provide an interesting look at how you see the world compared to others. As a quick example, there is no word for "child" in toki pona, many speakers say "jan lili" (small person), while others choose to say "jan sin" (new person). It's shockingly easy to learn and one can become pretty proficient in very little time. There's a great community to learn from on Discord[2], along with plenty of great online resources like /dev/urandom's toki pona page[3]. [1]: https://tokipona.org https://tokipona.org [2]: https://discord.gg/nbgXCC6 https://discord.gg/nbgXCC6 [3]: https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/ https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/
- poulpy123 4y ago
  But a child is neither a small person nor a new person...
  - kangalioo 4y ago
    Child is used in many contexts, and not all of them are covered by "small person" or "new person", true. But I think the point is that you can come up with a precise alternative term for"child" in most contexts.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- nmz 4y ago
  I don't like toki pona. if you're going to have 200 words, why make them long or random? hell, you could have a consonant and a vowel or 2 and you'd have have all of your words and now they could easily be composable together. votgil[1] is basically this but with a single vowel, I haven't dived too deep but it gets close to what it should be. There's also the fact that if you're going to go the toki pona way, you need to go even deeper into the fundamentals of life in order to achieve the right composability. (Think math but for objects). Blyss symbolics also seems to be a better option. Nevertheless it was fun to learn toki pona. and I probably would not have heard of interlingua,blyss, votgil, lojban without it. [1] http://www.ostracodfiles.com/votgil/main.html http://www.ostracodfiles.com/votgil/main.html
anon400232 4y ago
> Myth: Esperanto is internationally neutral, Somewhat. It is a matter of degree, relative to what came before. > and is the best (some say the only) candidate for an eventual world-wide auxiliary language. I'm not in a position to say what is best for such a purpose. > Reality: Esperanto is overwhelmingly European in design, content and aspiration, and has nothing in common with most non-European languages - such as Arabic and Swahili, two other languages which are widely used as linguae francae in other parts of the world. Sounds plausible, but I'll need to verify. > It is thus woefully deficient for world-wide auxiliary use - ... This does not follow. What are some convincing supporting arguments? >... a role which English, for all its faults, has been fulfilling perfectly well for decades. Perfect? This kind of reasoning is laughable.
- msla 4y ago
  English is the IAL as far as air traffic control is concerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English > Aviation English is the de facto international language of civil aviation. With the expansion of air travel in the 20th century, there were safety concerns about the ability of pilots and air traffic controllers to communicate. In 1951, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommended in "ICAO Annex 10 ICAO (Vol I, 5.2.1.1.2) to the International Chicago Convention" that English be universally used for "international aeronautical radiotelephony communications."[1] Despite being a recommendation only, ICAO aviation English was widely accepted.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    To be fair, the greatest aviation disaster of all time was caused by a mutual misunderstanding from English's complexity and diversity, causing two 747s to believe they both had right of way on an air strip and then they crashed into each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
    - vikingerik 4y ago
      This is true, but the counterpoint is that we'll never know the converse - we'll never know how many accidents didn't happen thanks to using a single language universally.
munk-a 4y ago
I think the clear winner of functionality, form and easy of finding fellow speakers definitely goes to Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil Which, slightly less sarcastically, is probably a great runic language for us to start using for posterity on long lived markers (like at radioactive waste sites) since any Ithkuil manual or reference is so incredibly dense that it's rot rate can probably be measured on the scale of centuries.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  Wouldn't information density be a bad thing for such uses? If one part of the rune is damaged, you lose a ton of information. Contrast with e.g. Latin, Greek, Sumerian, etc. in which inscriptions are heavily damaged, but the meaning is still deducible. Consider this fragmented sentence: T___reside_t_of__he_Unit___tates__s_Joe_B__en A sufficiently determined future archaeologist will be able to figure out what it originally said with some degree of accuracy. The lack of density is essentially functioning as parity bits.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    If you think information preservation is important enough to warrant repetition wouldn't it be more efficient to repeat the few highly significant characters several times rather than hope that the deterioration of characters happens to allow significance to still be gleaned? If the sentiment takes 1/6th of the characters to express you could just replicate it six times which would probably have a better chance of surviving wear than a single sentiment written once. Also - we, living humans, are very good at context based inference due to our high familiarity with the language - but someone who didn't know that "President" was a political position or had never heard of Joe Biden or the US would probably struggle to piece together even what that sentence was trying to convey. "They reside at of the Unit Potates. S'Cuppa Joe By Den"
    - gamegoblin 4y ago
      Re: context, a future archaeologist would have more examples of the language, just like we have lots of examples of Latin, Greek, and Sumerian which allow us to learn the language with enough context to decipher the more damaged inscriptions. The trickiest part might be the name Joe Biden which isn't a part of English, per se. Correspondingly, there are ancient kings whose names we only have fragmented versions of for the same reason. Ithkuil would obviously also need a large corpus for future archaeologists to decipher, otherwise the runes are meaningless. Re: repetition - erasure coding (parity bits, basically) is far more efficient than duplication for data durability. How much this applies to natural language (where extraneous characters act sort of like parity bits) I am unsure, but there is nothing stopping you from just mapping your natural language to a binary code and using actual parity bits. Obviously, a future archaeologist will need to know what kind of erasure coding scheme you are using, but that is actually much simpler to convey than the corpus of the language itself. It's pretty simple math.
martinrue 4y ago
The article is well-written and makes some good arguments about things that could be better, but like all languages (including conlangs), they're never going to be perfect and they're always going to have biases and rough bits. I started studying Esperanto 4 years ago and it has become a fluent second language for me at this point. I now almost have more friends who speak the language than don't. While the language could be improved (by fixing word order and dropping the accusative, among other things mentioned here), it's still clear to me that Esperanto is a very easy language to learn. My comparative experience with Spanish has been much harder going. Thanks to Esperanto I've spent time living abroad with Esperanto-speaking friends from different countries, travelled to local and international hangouts, and met some of the most open-minded and lovely people. Outside of the hobbyist and academic contexts, there are a surprising number of people who actively use Esperanto (as well as create things: books, music, poetry, apps) and a cool international community to explore. Just wanted to add a positive take. P.S. There are a few articles on my blog about my own personal experience with the language and some projects I've worked on, in case anyone's curious: https://martinrue.com/articles https://martinrue.com/articles
- F3nd0 4y ago
  Another reason no language is going to be perfect is that people will disagree on what constitutes perfection. For example, I have always found the flexible word order and the accusative to be a very beautiful trait of Esperanto, and would consider it a downgrade if they were removed from the language. :-)
yieldcrv 4y ago
Pretty telling that they felt the need to make such a long prologue about why not to be offended Is the Esperanto community better now?
- gxonatano 4y ago
  I think it's more telling about the rant and the ranter than the Esperanto community. Although the Esperanto community is pretty used to non-Esperantists or Esperanto beginners denouncing the language without trying to understand it first, and so there are going to be objections to a rant like this, for sure. See my commment above.
mdorazio 4y ago
For those interested in languages... After studying Chinese (Mandarin), Esperanto has always struck me as being not all that great for a constructed language. Chinese is somewhat remarkable in that if you ignore the logographic writing system and tone-based pronunciation, the grammar is remarkably simple and clear. No grammatical gender, no conjugation, particles instead of prefixes/suffixes for basically everything important - you can pick up the basic rules in a couple days. Interlingua is (by design) much closer to this simplicity in a Western-based language. Some Chinese examples for fun (hoping HN supports Unicode)... To make something plural, you just add 们. I/me is 我, so we/us is 我们. He/him is 他, so they/them is 他们. No need for separate base words - learn the normal nouns/pronouns and one particle and you're done. Same concept for possessive, you just add 的. Using the above, my is 我的. His is 他的. Their is 他们的. Easy. Want past tense? Don't mess with the base words; again just add a particle, in this case 了. Go is 去 so went is 去了. Eat is 吃 so ate is 吃了. Easy. Learn the verb once and it never changes. Forms of "to be" are similarly simple - the base words again don't change, you just add the "to be" word you want and get on with your life. Want to say "I am American"? America = 美国 and person is 人, so American is literally "America person" 美国人. Am for non-adjectives is 是. "I am American" = 我是美国人. "We are American" = 我们是美国人. Easy. Compare this to something like Italian, where "I am American" = Sono americano, but "We are American" = Noi siamo americani. Absurd in comparison.
- wingerlang 4y ago
  Similar to Thai, a lot of particles.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Composition over inheritance, not only useful in CS but also in linguistics. It makes sense not because both use languages but because both manipulate non-physical abstraction and thus come up with similar paradigms. Composition is akin to agglutinized languages where there is a base and affixes are added to convey concepts like subject, object, plurality etc, such as Chinese or Thai. Inheritance is akin to fusional languages, like Latin, where each word is a root and changes (or declines) based on the aforementioned concepts by for example changing the word itself.
sockfish 4y ago
I've always wondered if machine learning would help here - we already have language agnostic embeddings (LaBSE, LASER) - now all we need is a way to pronounce them. Perhaps you could learn one by training an autoencoder that is constrained somehow just like the human vocal chords are
gxonatano 4y ago
Speaking as an Esperantist, I've heard arguments like this over and over, from disgruntled Esperanto beginners, who half-heartedly learned portions of the language, motivated by fallacious utopian impulses, and then abandoned it completely, after deciding that it isn't "perfect" or "international enough," or "easy enough," or something else. That's naive and short-sighted. The fact of the matter remains that Esperanto is the most successful, most widely spoken international auxiliary language. It has the largest community, probably the friendliest community of any international language, and has the largest body of literature, with over 30K books published in the language, and with hundreds of new books published each year. It remains the easiest to learn, even for speakers of non-European languages. I know this because I've met tons of Chinese and Japanese Esperantists, who've all learned it after learning English, or Spanish, or Korean, and conclude that Esperanto is orders of magnitude easier and more intuitive than those languages. It's not completely logical, obviously (Lojban is probably more logical) but is incredibly logical and intuitive, compared to any natural language. It's maybe not as easy as Toki Pona, with its vocabulary of 100 or so words, but it's still pretty damn easy. I learned Esperanto in a matter of weeks, rather than years. Esperanto is not as concise as a language like Volapuk, either, but that concision comes with too many trade-offs. Sure, it's all a matter of personal taste, but if you learn Lojban or Toki Pona, or even Ido, you'll be able to speak with, at most, tens of other speakers, instead of millions, and read maybe ten books total, rather than tens of thousands in Esperanto. With Esperanto you'll be able to use operating systems like GNOME and websites like DuckDuckGo, Google, Facebook, and Mastodon, all using Esperanto. You'll be able to watch thousands of videos on sites like Tubaro and Youtube. You'll be able to follow hundreds of Twitter and Mastodon users. You'll be able to listen to thousands of Esperanto-language songs and podcast episodes. You'll be able to play games like The Expression Amrilato, and read comic books like Saga, which have Esperanto-language components. Best of all, you'll be able to travel the world with Pasporta Servo, staying for free with Esperantists along the way. There are also conferences attended by thousands of people, summer-long residential courses, and even universities which use the language. Virtually none of that stuff is available in other constructed languages. As the writer of this article himself admits, Esperanto isn't perfect. Obviously. It was never intended to be. Nor was it intended to be perfectly international, with word roots derived from all languages throughout the world, equally. Nor was it intended to be perfectly easy, or perfectly well-distributed among easy phonemes. But Esperanto is an excellent compromise between all these factors, and is a hugely enjoyable, expressive language with a large and welcoming community. The proof, for me, of its expressivity, is that so many classics of western literature, and of world literature, including much of Shakespeare's works, have been very eloquently and poetically translated into Esperanto. That's not true of any other constructed language. All natural languages evolve, and so does Esperanto. Esperanto reform and evolution has been happening since the beginning. What's absurd is the beginners, or even total non-speakers who insist on reform before even learning the language to a competent level. I think this has to do with utopian feelings. They think Esperanto should be perfect, and so when they learn enough of it to realize that there are faults, they give up on it altogether. But would anyone do that with say, German? French? It's a language. It has faults. Get over it. The difference is that Esperanto has probably 1% of the faults, irregularities, and idiosyncrasies of any other language. I'd argue that everyone should learn Esperanto. It takes virtually no time or effort, compared to learning any other language, so it's basically a language you get for free. Like pseudo-code. And the worlds it opens up for you are so immense. Rather than debate about whether Esperanto is perfect or not, just learn it. You won't regret it.

80 points by adamrezich 4y ago

Personally I like Interlingua which is basically a cleaned-up latin. If you've gotten a good dose of exposure to Romance languages you might be able to read it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua#Samples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua#Samples

sdsd 4y ago
>Personally I like Interlingua which is basically a cleaned-up latin. I on the other hand like it messy and stick with good old fashioned Latin (as an added bonus, the language of my ancient and noble church). Et numquam mutabo, irrumo Interlinguam!
- int_19h 4y ago
  Church Latin is quite different from Classical Latin, though - and surely only the latter truly counts as "old fashioned"? ~
  - fullmoon 4y ago
    Medieval Latin isn’t really that much different than latin from the classical period.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Pronunciation-wise it sounds pretty different to me.
Rendello 4y ago
I find Lingua Franca Nova very readable (I speak French decently as a second language), plus it has a very nice flag! https://lfn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca_nova https://lfn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca_nova
sshine 4y ago
Both Interlingua and Ido are improvements over Esperanto. But as it is with any language, programming language, or ecosystem in general: There is strength in numbers. Esperanto is great because it's easy to learn (Europeans have an advantage, ok) and it's the most popular constructed language, meaning there are good resources and actual people (few, ok) to talk to.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  what's the general feeling on Lojban these days? used to know a guy who was a unix command line wizard and lojban enthusiast
  - nmz 4y ago
    From what I can see the language is in constant development. there is a telegram group called ckule. but its a damn tough language to get through.
  - sshine 4y ago
    Lojban's selling point is that it's easy to computationally parse, but not necessarily that easy to learn to speak. I'd want to try to learn it again eventually, but I failed miserably the first time. As an academic curiosity I think it's doing great.
  - inawarminister 4y ago
    I kinda wonder if you can encode knowledge in Lojban and have a more efficient language model using it then only translate to English at the output (if needed). Is there any study on the informational density of Lojban/loglan?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    It's conceptually interesting, but aesthetically it sounds horrible.
  - leke 4y ago
    I like it, but couldn't get past having to learn the argument order of each predicate.
stavros 4y ago
Wow, I can basically understand every word. It must be even easier for speakers of a more Romantic language (French, Spanish, Romanian, etc).
inawarminister 4y ago
Yeah, I've been needling people in Discord servers by writing up Interlingua and most of the time most people are able to read it and respond back in English or Romance languages Si solmente nos ha un sorta de interlingua traducentes del linguas major, assi le personas pote scriber in interlingua sin que non necessariamente apprender lo.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  Looks (too) close to Spanish. (Also, I’ve been under impression for a while now that Spanish is the closest thing to a “modernized” version of Latin that we already have.)
billfruit 4y ago
There is also another Interlingua which is also called as Latina-Sine-Flexione.

Sniffnoy 4y ago

See also, Justin Rye's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto": http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

dang 4y ago

We changed the URL from https://web.archive.org/web/20021210061212/http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/esp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021210061212/http://www.cix.co... to what appears to be the article's canonical location (since the page says it's the author's website). It's fine to post archive.org links if there's really no other way, but please search first. I found this one by simply googling the title.

adamrezich 4y ago
when I initially made this submission 41 days ago the un-archived page looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20220212091844/http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/esp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220212091844/http://www.cix.co... but now that I've resubmitted it from the Second Chance Pool, you're right, it does seem to be back up. I had assumed the page had been taken down permanently.
- dang 4y ago
  The URL that works is not on that domain but http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm It was a good submission in any case!

alexambarch 4y ago

If you want to pick up a new language purely for fun, I wholeheartedly recommend toki pona[1]. Its small vocabulary (<200 words) and simple grammar force you to break down complex thoughts into simple ideas. This feels limiting at first, but because there isn't a prescribed way to express certain ideas, it can provide an interesting look at how you see the world compared to others. As a quick example, there is no word for "child" in toki pona, many speakers say "jan lili" (small person), while others choose to say "jan sin" (new person). It's shockingly easy to learn and one can become pretty proficient in very little time. There's a great community to learn from on Discord[2], along with plenty of great online resources like /dev/urandom's toki pona page[3]. [1]: https://tokipona.org https://tokipona.org [2]: https://discord.gg/nbgXCC6 https://discord.gg/nbgXCC6 [3]: https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/ https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/

poulpy123 4y ago
But a child is neither a small person nor a new person...
- kangalioo 4y ago
  Child is used in many contexts, and not all of them are covered by "small person" or "new person", true. But I think the point is that you can come up with a precise alternative term for"child" in most contexts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nmz 4y ago
I don't like toki pona. if you're going to have 200 words, why make them long or random? hell, you could have a consonant and a vowel or 2 and you'd have have all of your words and now they could easily be composable together. votgil[1] is basically this but with a single vowel, I haven't dived too deep but it gets close to what it should be. There's also the fact that if you're going to go the toki pona way, you need to go even deeper into the fundamentals of life in order to achieve the right composability. (Think math but for objects). Blyss symbolics also seems to be a better option. Nevertheless it was fun to learn toki pona. and I probably would not have heard of interlingua,blyss, votgil, lojban without it. [1] http://www.ostracodfiles.com/votgil/main.html http://www.ostracodfiles.com/votgil/main.html

anon400232 4y ago

> Myth: Esperanto is internationally neutral, Somewhat. It is a matter of degree, relative to what came before. > and is the best (some say the only) candidate for an eventual world-wide auxiliary language. I'm not in a position to say what is best for such a purpose. > Reality: Esperanto is overwhelmingly European in design, content and aspiration, and has nothing in common with most non-European languages - such as Arabic and Swahili, two other languages which are widely used as linguae francae in other parts of the world. Sounds plausible, but I'll need to verify. > It is thus woefully deficient for world-wide auxiliary use - ... This does not follow. What are some convincing supporting arguments? >... a role which English, for all its faults, has been fulfilling perfectly well for decades. Perfect? This kind of reasoning is laughable.

msla 4y ago
English is the IAL as far as air traffic control is concerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English > Aviation English is the de facto international language of civil aviation. With the expansion of air travel in the 20th century, there were safety concerns about the ability of pilots and air traffic controllers to communicate. In 1951, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommended in "ICAO Annex 10 ICAO (Vol I, 5.2.1.1.2) to the International Chicago Convention" that English be universally used for "international aeronautical radiotelephony communications."[1] Despite being a recommendation only, ICAO aviation English was widely accepted.
- monocasa 4y ago
  To be fair, the greatest aviation disaster of all time was caused by a mutual misunderstanding from English's complexity and diversity, causing two 747s to believe they both had right of way on an air strip and then they crashed into each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    This is true, but the counterpoint is that we'll never know the converse - we'll never know how many accidents didn't happen thanks to using a single language universally.

munk-a 4y ago

I think the clear winner of functionality, form and easy of finding fellow speakers definitely goes to Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil Which, slightly less sarcastically, is probably a great runic language for us to start using for posterity on long lived markers (like at radioactive waste sites) since any Ithkuil manual or reference is so incredibly dense that it's rot rate can probably be measured on the scale of centuries.

gamegoblin 4y ago
Wouldn't information density be a bad thing for such uses? If one part of the rune is damaged, you lose a ton of information. Contrast with e.g. Latin, Greek, Sumerian, etc. in which inscriptions are heavily damaged, but the meaning is still deducible. Consider this fragmented sentence: T___reside_t_of__he_Unit___tates__s_Joe_B__en A sufficiently determined future archaeologist will be able to figure out what it originally said with some degree of accuracy. The lack of density is essentially functioning as parity bits.
- munk-a 4y ago
  If you think information preservation is important enough to warrant repetition wouldn't it be more efficient to repeat the few highly significant characters several times rather than hope that the deterioration of characters happens to allow significance to still be gleaned? If the sentiment takes 1/6th of the characters to express you could just replicate it six times which would probably have a better chance of surviving wear than a single sentiment written once. Also - we, living humans, are very good at context based inference due to our high familiarity with the language - but someone who didn't know that "President" was a political position or had never heard of Joe Biden or the US would probably struggle to piece together even what that sentence was trying to convey. "They reside at of the Unit Potates. S'Cuppa Joe By Den"
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    Re: context, a future archaeologist would have more examples of the language, just like we have lots of examples of Latin, Greek, and Sumerian which allow us to learn the language with enough context to decipher the more damaged inscriptions. The trickiest part might be the name Joe Biden which isn't a part of English, per se. Correspondingly, there are ancient kings whose names we only have fragmented versions of for the same reason. Ithkuil would obviously also need a large corpus for future archaeologists to decipher, otherwise the runes are meaningless. Re: repetition - erasure coding (parity bits, basically) is far more efficient than duplication for data durability. How much this applies to natural language (where extraneous characters act sort of like parity bits) I am unsure, but there is nothing stopping you from just mapping your natural language to a binary code and using actual parity bits. Obviously, a future archaeologist will need to know what kind of erasure coding scheme you are using, but that is actually much simpler to convey than the corpus of the language itself. It's pretty simple math.

martinrue 4y ago

The article is well-written and makes some good arguments about things that could be better, but like all languages (including conlangs), they're never going to be perfect and they're always going to have biases and rough bits. I started studying Esperanto 4 years ago and it has become a fluent second language for me at this point. I now almost have more friends who speak the language than don't. While the language could be improved (by fixing word order and dropping the accusative, among other things mentioned here), it's still clear to me that Esperanto is a very easy language to learn. My comparative experience with Spanish has been much harder going. Thanks to Esperanto I've spent time living abroad with Esperanto-speaking friends from different countries, travelled to local and international hangouts, and met some of the most open-minded and lovely people. Outside of the hobbyist and academic contexts, there are a surprising number of people who actively use Esperanto (as well as create things: books, music, poetry, apps) and a cool international community to explore. Just wanted to add a positive take. P.S. There are a few articles on my blog about my own personal experience with the language and some projects I've worked on, in case anyone's curious: https://martinrue.com/articles https://martinrue.com/articles

F3nd0 4y ago
Another reason no language is going to be perfect is that people will disagree on what constitutes perfection. For example, I have always found the flexible word order and the accusative to be a very beautiful trait of Esperanto, and would consider it a downgrade if they were removed from the language. :-)

yieldcrv 4y ago

Pretty telling that they felt the need to make such a long prologue about why not to be offended Is the Esperanto community better now?

gxonatano 4y ago
I think it's more telling about the rant and the ranter than the Esperanto community. Although the Esperanto community is pretty used to non-Esperantists or Esperanto beginners denouncing the language without trying to understand it first, and so there are going to be objections to a rant like this, for sure. See my commment above.

mdorazio 4y ago

For those interested in languages... After studying Chinese (Mandarin), Esperanto has always struck me as being not all that great for a constructed language. Chinese is somewhat remarkable in that if you ignore the logographic writing system and tone-based pronunciation, the grammar is remarkably simple and clear. No grammatical gender, no conjugation, particles instead of prefixes/suffixes for basically everything important - you can pick up the basic rules in a couple days. Interlingua is (by design) much closer to this simplicity in a Western-based language. Some Chinese examples for fun (hoping HN supports Unicode)... To make something plural, you just add 们. I/me is 我, so we/us is 我们. He/him is 他, so they/them is 他们. No need for separate base words - learn the normal nouns/pronouns and one particle and you're done. Same concept for possessive, you just add 的. Using the above, my is 我的. His is 他的. Their is 他们的. Easy. Want past tense? Don't mess with the base words; again just add a particle, in this case 了. Go is 去 so went is 去了. Eat is 吃 so ate is 吃了. Easy. Learn the verb once and it never changes. Forms of "to be" are similarly simple - the base words again don't change, you just add the "to be" word you want and get on with your life. Want to say "I am American"? America = 美国 and person is 人, so American is literally "America person" 美国人. Am for non-adjectives is 是. "I am American" = 我是美国人. "We are American" = 我们是美国人. Easy. Compare this to something like Italian, where "I am American" = Sono americano, but "We are American" = Noi siamo americani. Absurd in comparison.

wingerlang 4y ago
Similar to Thai, a lot of particles.
satvikpendem 4y ago
Composition over inheritance, not only useful in CS but also in linguistics. It makes sense not because both use languages but because both manipulate non-physical abstraction and thus come up with similar paradigms. Composition is akin to agglutinized languages where there is a base and affixes are added to convey concepts like subject, object, plurality etc, such as Chinese or Thai. Inheritance is akin to fusional languages, like Latin, where each word is a root and changes (or declines) based on the aforementioned concepts by for example changing the word itself.

sockfish 4y ago

I've always wondered if machine learning would help here - we already have language agnostic embeddings (LaBSE, LASER) - now all we need is a way to pronounce them. Perhaps you could learn one by training an autoencoder that is constrained somehow just like the human vocal chords are

gxonatano 4y ago

Speaking as an Esperantist, I've heard arguments like this over and over, from disgruntled Esperanto beginners, who half-heartedly learned portions of the language, motivated by fallacious utopian impulses, and then abandoned it completely, after deciding that it isn't "perfect" or "international enough," or "easy enough," or something else. That's naive and short-sighted. The fact of the matter remains that Esperanto is the most successful, most widely spoken international auxiliary language. It has the largest community, probably the friendliest community of any international language, and has the largest body of literature, with over 30K books published in the language, and with hundreds of new books published each year. It remains the easiest to learn, even for speakers of non-European languages. I know this because I've met tons of Chinese and Japanese Esperantists, who've all learned it after learning English, or Spanish, or Korean, and conclude that Esperanto is orders of magnitude easier and more intuitive than those languages. It's not completely logical, obviously (Lojban is probably more logical) but is incredibly logical and intuitive, compared to any natural language. It's maybe not as easy as Toki Pona, with its vocabulary of 100 or so words, but it's still pretty damn easy. I learned Esperanto in a matter of weeks, rather than years. Esperanto is not as concise as a language like Volapuk, either, but that concision comes with too many trade-offs. Sure, it's all a matter of personal taste, but if you learn Lojban or Toki Pona, or even Ido, you'll be able to speak with, at most, tens of other speakers, instead of millions, and read maybe ten books total, rather than tens of thousands in Esperanto. With Esperanto you'll be able to use operating systems like GNOME and websites like DuckDuckGo, Google, Facebook, and Mastodon, all using Esperanto. You'll be able to watch thousands of videos on sites like Tubaro and Youtube. You'll be able to follow hundreds of Twitter and Mastodon users. You'll be able to listen to thousands of Esperanto-language songs and podcast episodes. You'll be able to play games like The Expression Amrilato, and read comic books like Saga, which have Esperanto-language components. Best of all, you'll be able to travel the world with Pasporta Servo, staying for free with Esperantists along the way. There are also conferences attended by thousands of people, summer-long residential courses, and even universities which use the language. Virtually none of that stuff is available in other constructed languages. As the writer of this article himself admits, Esperanto isn't perfect. Obviously. It was never intended to be. Nor was it intended to be perfectly international, with word roots derived from all languages throughout the world, equally. Nor was it intended to be perfectly easy, or perfectly well-distributed among easy phonemes. But Esperanto is an excellent compromise between all these factors, and is a hugely enjoyable, expressive language with a large and welcoming community. The proof, for me, of its expressivity, is that so many classics of western literature, and of world literature, including much of Shakespeare's works, have been very eloquently and poetically translated into Esperanto. That's not true of any other constructed language. All natural languages evolve, and so does Esperanto. Esperanto reform and evolution has been happening since the beginning. What's absurd is the beginners, or even total non-speakers who insist on reform before even learning the language to a competent level. I think this has to do with utopian feelings. They think Esperanto should be perfect, and so when they learn enough of it to realize that there are faults, they give up on it altogether. But would anyone do that with say, German? French? It's a language. It has faults. Get over it. The difference is that Esperanto has probably 1% of the faults, irregularities, and idiosyncrasies of any other language. I'd argue that everyone should learn Esperanto. It takes virtually no time or effort, compared to learning any other language, so it's basically a language you get for free. Like pseudo-code. And the worlds it opens up for you are so immense. Rather than debate about whether Esperanto is perfect or not, just learn it. You won't regret it.