4 ms·

I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there a

I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there are a bunch of other tricks to keep vocabulary reasonable and grammar logical without a bazillion edge cases. It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English. Teaching my kid to speak and then how to read and write has been a recent reminder of just how illogical English is. I would have massively struggled as a non-native speaker.

adastra22 3y ago
> One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 That's true of almost every language though, just not English.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  > That's true of almost every language though This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Don't even think putting Spanish in the same basket of French of German... French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...
    - kragen 3y ago
      spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
      - adastra22 3y ago
        Chinese pronunciation is extremely regular though. Each character has its own pronunciation morphed only by a handful of regular tone rules. Both PRC and Taiwan have regular phonetic alphabets too.
        kragen 3y ago
        english orthography is extremely regular at the word level too; there are only a handful of words like 'desert' which have multiple pronunciations for the same spelling. but, thus considered, the number of rules is extremely large, perhaps several thousand: a hundred or so for the words that do have regular orthography at the letter level, plus one for each exception: 'would', 'one', 'who', 'police', etc. there's a pretty good list in espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_list and espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_rules. en_list has about 5000 rules in it, things like Tycho taIkoU aperitif a#pEr@t'i:f (wouldn't have to) ,wUd@-ntavt@5 $verbf $strend2 while the 7000 or so rules in en_rules are letter-level things like _d) am (i eIm und) am (en @m _) am (en a#m which specify how to pronounce a particular combination of letters in a particular context. i suspect you could probably reduce the 7000 down to 100 with a more expressive system; the schwa-reduction of [a] in "fundamental", the second example above from en_rules, is the same schwa-reduction applied everywhere to english low vowels in unstressed syllables by contrast, es_rules (for Spanish) is 285 lines long, and then there are 391 lines of exceptions (mostly things like "thunderbird" and "software") in es_list in chinese, instead of several thousand rules, you have several tens of thousands of rules, one for each character (which are not in a one-for-one correspondence with words but are roughly as numerous)
        adastra22 3y ago
        I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. You can’t judge one system by the rules used to construct another entirely different system.
        kragen 3y ago
        i'm not sure what you are referring to
  - HKH2 3y ago
    Spanish and German are far more consistent than English. Mandarin Chinese has Pinyin which is modern and quite consistent - Pinyin is very useful because you can type it and select the corresponding Chinese characters.
    - hilux 3y ago
      Mao once considered replacing Chinese characters with Pinyin!
      - HKH2 3y ago
        Mandarin speakers will probably forget how to write characters over time anyway, as they depend so much on Pinyin.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Spanish and German pronunciation are extraordinarily regular, German in particular. Its spelling is regularly updated, most recently just a few years ago. If you are getting fixed up on the one letter = one sound designation (which could be interpreted just as well to apply to German, and almost to Spanish, where one combination of letter always gives the same sound), then this is disingenuous pedantry. English is pretty unique in not having rigid rules for pronunciation as spelling is typically retained from loan languages.
msla 3y ago
I'm not complaining about orthography, but phonology: How easy it is to spell a word matters little if you get your mouth in a tangle trying to pronounce it. Esperanto has sounds most languages don't, and it has them purely because Zamenhof was accustomed to them. A good constructed auxiliary language would have a phonological inventory taken from the most common sounds in all of the world's languages. This page makes that case a lot better: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/i.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/i.html This is partly a consequence of Zamenhof being first, sure: Relatively little was known about global phoneme popularity in the 1800s. But he could have done a bit better than copying his specific dialect of Polish.
mchaver 3y ago
Vocabulary difference is a huge issue though. Korean and Japanese grammar is very different from Chinese, but the shared vocabulary (of Chinese origin) makes it easier to learn one of them if you already speak another one. Also incentives and resources in a target language are very important. Assuming you don't know a Slavic language (I don't), take a look Interslavic. I recognize zero words in the example texts. That might make sense to someone who knows one, but it's going to be an uphill battle for me. Honestly I'd rather invest time in something like Russian or Polish because it gives me access to a lot more native speakers, media and literature.
hilux 3y ago
> It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English. Proposing such an obviously "white European" language as the global lingua franca is incredibly offputting to many people. Yes, English may be the de facto lingua franca, but at least no one is pretending that it's "objectively best," as they are with Esperanto.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Name me a better alternative? This is all theoretical anyway.
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  > Proposing such an obviously "white European" language as the global lingua franca is incredibly offputting to many people. A random person on this planet hears about Esperanto: "Sounds easier than English, I guess." A random woke American hears about Esperanto: "No, silly, let me get offended on your behalf. 'How dare you dream about the world peace, evil white male Zamenhof, how dare you!' Ok, now everyone go back talking English."

adastra22 3y ago

> One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 That's true of almost every language though, just not English.

School-Cotton 3y ago
> That's true of almost every language though This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.
- anthk 3y ago
  Don't even think putting Spanish in the same basket of French of German... French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...
  - kragen 3y ago
    spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Chinese pronunciation is extremely regular though. Each character has its own pronunciation morphed only by a handful of regular tone rules. Both PRC and Taiwan have regular phonetic alphabets too.
      - kragen 3y ago
        english orthography is extremely regular at the word level too; there are only a handful of words like 'desert' which have multiple pronunciations for the same spelling. but, thus considered, the number of rules is extremely large, perhaps several thousand: a hundred or so for the words that do have regular orthography at the letter level, plus one for each exception: 'would', 'one', 'who', 'police', etc. there's a pretty good list in espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_list and espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_rules. en_list has about 5000 rules in it, things like Tycho taIkoU aperitif a#pEr@t'i:f (wouldn't have to) ,wUd@-ntavt@5 $verbf $strend2 while the 7000 or so rules in en_rules are letter-level things like _d) am (i eIm und) am (en @m _) am (en a#m which specify how to pronounce a particular combination of letters in a particular context. i suspect you could probably reduce the 7000 down to 100 with a more expressive system; the schwa-reduction of [a] in "fundamental", the second example above from en_rules, is the same schwa-reduction applied everywhere to english low vowels in unstressed syllables by contrast, es_rules (for Spanish) is 285 lines long, and then there are 391 lines of exceptions (mostly things like "thunderbird" and "software") in es_list in chinese, instead of several thousand rules, you have several tens of thousands of rules, one for each character (which are not in a one-for-one correspondence with words but are roughly as numerous)
        adastra22 3y ago
        I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. You can’t judge one system by the rules used to construct another entirely different system.
        kragen 3y ago
        i'm not sure what you are referring to
- HKH2 3y ago
  Spanish and German are far more consistent than English. Mandarin Chinese has Pinyin which is modern and quite consistent - Pinyin is very useful because you can type it and select the corresponding Chinese characters.
  - hilux 3y ago
    Mao once considered replacing Chinese characters with Pinyin!
    - HKH2 3y ago
      Mandarin speakers will probably forget how to write characters over time anyway, as they depend so much on Pinyin.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Spanish and German pronunciation are extraordinarily regular, German in particular. Its spelling is regularly updated, most recently just a few years ago. If you are getting fixed up on the one letter = one sound designation (which could be interpreted just as well to apply to German, and almost to Spanish, where one combination of letter always gives the same sound), then this is disingenuous pedantry. English is pretty unique in not having rigid rules for pronunciation as spelling is typically retained from loan languages.

msla 3y ago

I'm not complaining about orthography, but phonology: How easy it is to spell a word matters little if you get your mouth in a tangle trying to pronounce it. Esperanto has sounds most languages don't, and it has them purely because Zamenhof was accustomed to them. A good constructed auxiliary language would have a phonological inventory taken from the most common sounds in all of the world's languages. This page makes that case a lot better: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/i.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/i.html This is partly a consequence of Zamenhof being first, sure: Relatively little was known about global phoneme popularity in the 1800s. But he could have done a bit better than copying his specific dialect of Polish.

mchaver 3y ago

Vocabulary difference is a huge issue though. Korean and Japanese grammar is very different from Chinese, but the shared vocabulary (of Chinese origin) makes it easier to learn one of them if you already speak another one. Also incentives and resources in a target language are very important. Assuming you don't know a Slavic language (I don't), take a look Interslavic. I recognize zero words in the example texts. That might make sense to someone who knows one, but it's going to be an uphill battle for me. Honestly I'd rather invest time in something like Russian or Polish because it gives me access to a lot more native speakers, media and literature.

hilux 3y ago

> It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English. Proposing such an obviously "white European" language as the global lingua franca is incredibly offputting to many people. Yes, English may be the de facto lingua franca, but at least no one is pretending that it's "objectively best," as they are with Esperanto.

7thaccount 3y ago
Name me a better alternative? This is all theoretical anyway.
Viliam1234 3y ago
> Proposing such an obviously "white European" language as the global lingua franca is incredibly offputting to many people. A random person on this planet hears about Esperanto: "Sounds easier than English, I guess." A random woke American hears about Esperanto: "No, silly, let me get offended on your behalf. 'How dare you dream about the world peace, evil white male Zamenhof, how dare you!' Ok, now everyone go back talking English."