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Why is it rubbish? It is useful for there to be some lingua franca. There are arguments for why English is a good candidate: - already widely spoken - economic

Why is it rubbish? It is useful for there to be some lingua franca. There are arguments for why English is a good candidate: - already widely spoken - economically important - simple word morphology - no grammatical gender - an alphabetic writing system that is relatively easy to learn There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns In any case, it's what we've got. But it is also true that communicating professionally in a language you learned for that purpose imposes a burden that native speakers don't face. If you find it boring to read attempts to quantify this, maybe this article isn't for you.

JadeNB 3y ago
Thanks for this considered response! > obligatory gender in animate pronouns While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)
zer8k 3y ago
> There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language. It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.
- nradov 3y ago
  Esperanto is mostly based on Indo-European group languages. Compared to English, Esperanto is only marginally easier to learn for people who grew up communicating in languages from other groups like Arabic or Chinese. If we wanted a more neutral language ideally suited to scientific discourse then Lojban would be the "logical" choice. But of course in the real world it's totally impractical. https://mw.lojban.org/ https://mw.lojban.org/

JadeNB 3y ago

Thanks for this considered response! > obligatory gender in animate pronouns While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)

zer8k 3y ago

> There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language. It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.

nradov 3y ago
Esperanto is mostly based on Indo-European group languages. Compared to English, Esperanto is only marginally easier to learn for people who grew up communicating in languages from other groups like Arabic or Chinese. If we wanted a more neutral language ideally suited to scientific discourse then Lojban would be the "logical" choice. But of course in the real world it's totally impractical. https://mw.lojban.org/ https://mw.lojban.org/