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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 n
by 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 agowhat'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 agoFrom 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 agoLojban'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 agoI 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 agoIt's conceptually interesting, but aesthetically it sounds horrible.
- leke 4y agoI like it, but couldn't get past having to learn the argument order of each predicate.
- vkou 4y agoThere's strength in numbers, as the author points out, if your goal is to convince a few billion people to speak the language, it doesn't matter much if you're starting with 5,000 speakers, or 5,000,000. If your goal is to hang out with other language geeks, the latter one sounds preferable, but at that point, you may as well be learning Quenya or Klingon.
- sshine 4y ago> > it's the most popular constructed language, meaning there are good resources and actual people (few, ok) to talk to. > if your goal is to convince a few billion people to speak the language I'd go with English or Chinese. > If your goal is to hang out with other language geeks, the latter one sounds preferable, but at that point, you may as well be learning Quenya or Klingon. Esperanto is popular enough that I'll randomly run into Esperantists on a street corner in my city, and I'll get newsletters about local Esperanto events. (And yes, there's a lot of retired people who are into Esperanto because it used to be more popular.) That is literally not happening for Quenya, Klingon, Lojban, Ido, or Interlingua. It may be happening for Toki Pona, but then again, tomo tawa supa mi pi lon sewi li jo e kala linja mute mute.
- grey_earthling 4y agojan utala li toki e ni: ni!
- em-bee 4y agowell, for klingon at least there are star trek conventions where you can go and impress people with your language skills.
- nmz 4y agoInterlingua isn't an improvement over esperanto, Interlingua is what esperanto tried to be and actually succeeds in it. Esperanto tried to be auxiliary and fails at it. instead of becoming an international language it becomes another language to learn. while interlingua is a language you already know but have never learned. you just have to learn to speak.
- F3nd0 4y agoEsperanto was always another language to learn. The idea was never that you people would be able to read Esperanto without learning it; that's pretty much impossible, considering the diversity between languages (even looking just at Europe). The idea was to have a language that would be easy to learn and speak, owing to a simple, regular grammar, and using internationally recognisable words where possible. Interlingua may be readily intelligible to speakers of Romance languages, but is its grammar any simpler than Esperanto's? Or is comparatively more complex and difficult to learn? Because that's what ultimately matters for the rest of the world's population who do not speak a Romance language.
- PaulHoule 4y agoEnglish has a lot of Latin in it, plus if you are a cosmopolitan English speaker you probably get exposed to some French, Spanish (if only when you read the wrong side of a brochure at Home Depot and realize you understood it anyway), Latin, Italian, Portuguese, etc. Interlingua doesn’t claim to serve any community outside European language users, but it does succeed at that, I think. Overall interlingua is about as simple and regular as can be. A Chinese speaker might still be better off learning English but I can’t imagine they’d find interlingua any harder than any natural language.
- nmz 4y agoFWIW As a non native English speaker, it is a terrible language to learn and understand. I have been using it for 2 decades and I still need subtitles for movies, not to mention all the irregularity and exceptions to rules (Honestly, when you have more exceptions than rules, can you even say you have rules at all).