In conlang (constructed language) communities, Esperanto is a type of conlang known as an auxlang (auxillary language) that tries to be easily learnable and speakable by many people. Esperanto remains very popular and has tons of high quality learning material (I myself learned it from a book in my local community college public library over a few hours in between summer classes) and translated works.
That said, there's plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.
For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones. Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to join in. It's hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter is just light conversation anyway. I've used it in a bar setting with friends and it's a fun way to have a "secret" language.
Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in. Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban. The "standard" camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn't have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they are there (including "lo selfri be la .alis.
bei bu'u la selmacygu'e", Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) I'm partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.
> In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother").
Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother.
i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language problem.
Thank you for the quick overview.
I also got interested in Lojban. I am trying to incorporate the learning of the language in to some of my routines.
For example, for software projects, where I can, I use Lojban named classes, functions, test strings (instead of 'lorem ... '), and even comments.
There are some youtube clips of songs in Lojban, I played them for my family and, unfortunately, response was negative (music was not that nice, and it sounds harsh as you noted).
I think Lojban might have an interesting future as requirements specification and STEM-papers language.
Because it is purposefully unambiguous to interpret.
May be like a modern day Latin, or something...
> Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.
Esperanto is still very easy to learn for Asians, at least more than natural languages. Some of its largest support comes from China, including being taught in grade school, giving university degrees and Radio Peking broadcasts since 1964¹.
On top of that, the premise that Esperanto belongs to the western family is not accurate. "Esperanto is basically an isolating language".²
For those that found this comment intriguing I'd recommend the book "In the land of invented languages". It covers a number of conlangs. Lojban seems quite interesting, I've been meaning to start learning it as well as exploring it as adapting it into a programming language that can be spoken and used to convey general ideas.
Toki pona is fun. I was trying to get my partner to learn it so we could have an obscure way to communicate simple things. Depending on the company switching to spanish (although our proficiency is pretty low) is sometimes effective.
I'd love to keep abreast of interesting conlangs, are there any communities you'd recommend?
The fact that Esperanto is more difficult to learn for non-europeans can also be seen as a feature. It enables the use of Esperanto as an introductory European language. There is pretty good evidence that spending a year learning Esperanto before learning, say, English, leads to better English skills than spending an extra year on English.
Thanks for the note on Toki Pona, my son is learning other languages, and I dabbled in quite a few over the years, and this looks like fun to just play around with. :)
Would you mind giving some links to those Toki Pona Telegram groups? I've wanted to learn for a while, and talking with people seems like a good way to do that.
I have always found Toki Pona incredibly creepy. It's like someone read about Newspeak in 1984 and decided "yes, that sounds great, let's do exactly this" unironically.
I never learned much from Duolingo. It makes learning languages incredibly boring, and my eyes would glaze over every one of the dozens of times I had to match/construct some variance of "der junge trinkt die milsch." I learned more German just reading English translations of Rammstein lyrics. Anything by Pimsleur is still not very interesting, but at least it can hold my attention.
I find Memrise much more interesting and "powerful". It only shows you sentences and relies on your brain to know how the grammar works (a bit like how a child learns how to speak).
Another interesting artificial language is interlingua. Interlingua is very easy to learn for many people in Europe since interlingua words are taken from English, French, Italian and Spanish. Interlingua is a pragmatic solution for a common language across Europe. As a native spanish speaker I was able to understand about a thousand words in one or two hours studying it. Esperanto is like Haskell, interlingua is like C, one is pure with universal rules for derivation, the other is for using the language from the first day for communication.
Interlingua is the most intriguing conlang for me. It just seems incredibly practical. I'm a native English speaker with only high school french, yet I can pretty much read interlingua despite never having learned it. I imagine native romance language speakers are fluent readers right off the bat. That's huge.
I used a bunch of Esperanto text sources to make a NLP program (figured it would be easier for a newbie to do since the language is so regular). The code corrected some grammatical errors in the Esperanto Wiki; I did a write-up earlier this month: https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-part-3-correcting-...
[2] ("The language I happen to know best also happens to be the easiest and best and most universal. Funny how that worked out, neh?")
This seems to be the biggest unanswerable criticism the Esperantists face:
"It looks like some sort of wind‐up‐toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's one part of this world that doesn't need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which is not only the continent whose languages are best covered by online translation services, but also the home of the current de facto global lingua franca: English."
To be fair to Esperanto, when it was invented English wasn't nearly the lingua franca it is today, and the Internet didn't exist.
I don't think it's fair to critique it just because its original intent was as an auxiliary language. I would argue that intent failed. But it has native speakers, and it has communities who use it, and that itself justifies a language's existence.
My biggest problem with the idea of a universal language is that it might lead us to understand each other better. This would cause no end of strife and suffering. Suppose it caught on. Imagine the trolling that would happen once anybody could troll anybody else, anywhere in the world!
Surprisingly this is actually the reason Esperanto is somewhat popular in China. My understanding is that it is often used as a "stepping-stone" language before teaching European national languages. (I have no source for this, beside anecdotes, and having met someone who taught such a course - among other languages - at a Chinese university.)
(I don't know why you're downvoted, you bring up a valid point.)
Pretty much spot on critique. I agree that Esperanto has a fairly thriving community but it doesn't cut as a proper auxiliary language.
I think the concept of Esperanto should be redone under current linguistics knowledge and technology. We will probably end with another half-backed attempt but maybe it would advance Humanity a little more towards having a shared neutral language.
* ambiguity
* tons of exceptions
* in my opinion, it's too simple for its own good, which results in overloaded words. Because individual words, especially the short ones, carry little meaning, you bang two or three of them together and get a completely different meaning.
Learning Esperanto is my New Year's resolution. Are there any successful learners who have tips? Right now my plan is to get through duolingo then figure it out from there.
I really, really like Step By Step in Esperanto by Montagu Butler. It's the best introductory textbook of any language that I've read. It's composed of maybe ~1000 or so very short lessons (each is about a paragraph), so it makes it very easy to make a little progress every day even if you only have a couple of minutes before bed. There's a nice mix of reading, translation exercises, pronunciation exercises, and grammar.
Find a local Esperanto group and go to their meetings. We're all pretty welcoming and most will be glad to help you boost your conversational skills.
Also, if you are in the States (or not), check out NASK (Nord-Amerika Somera Kurso). It is a week-long course which takes place across July 4th weekend each year, currently in North Carolina. That is how I built the bulk of my ability. I highly recommend it.
Interestingly, a project I have been tracking, called Monero, has an Esperanto-centric nomenclature for all of their projects, with Monero itself being the name for “coin”
A prominent wallet is called monerujo (ujo makes the word mean container of monero), and the plural form of monero is moneroj. Monero itself of course is mono + -ero, so something like particle of money, like breadcrumbs are to bread or a grain of sand is to the sand as a whole. I'm ashamed that I only recently discovered that was an intentional thing, though the name has caught a sliver of my interest for at least a year now.
I learned about Esperanto from the novel series the Stainless Steal Rat. I was really disappointed with the audio books though, because I always pictured him a young guy, maybe a bit pompous or silly. But certainly not an old gruff grouchy guy. :(
I thought it was just awesome when 10 years later I found out Esperanto was real!
I thought it was neat that Esperanto was used in the books. I first learned of it in about 1980 from a book belonging to a friend's father, who was in the military. It was called 'Esperanto: The Aggressor Language", because it was used by the US Army in their training games.
Believe it or not, I first heard about Esperanto in a Man From UNCLE book (The Monster Wheel Affair), where the bad guys used Esperanto so no one would know what country they came from.
Esperanto media and social gatherings are a good way to expand your cultural horizons. Esperanto speakers tend to hail from many different countries and cultures (especially non-English-speaking ones) so seeking out Esperanto media and groups is an easy way to filter for multicultural content.
Probably not very many practical reasons over another language. From the little I've been exposed to it (brother took some college classes) Esperanto speaker seem to have their own shared culture and close community.
Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based on estimates, it's no contest:
"Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1]
"In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2]
In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native
speakers:
"As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3]
(Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.)
EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|8 years ago|reply
That said, there's plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.
For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones. Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to join in. It's hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter is just light conversation anyway. I've used it in a bar setting with friends and it's a fun way to have a "secret" language.
Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in. Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban. The "standard" camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn't have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they are there (including "lo selfri be la .alis. bei bu'u la selmacygu'e", Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) I'm partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.
[+] [-] wnoise|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother.
i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language problem.
[+] [-] maga_2020|8 years ago|reply
For example, for software projects, where I can, I use Lojban named classes, functions, test strings (instead of 'lorem ... '), and even comments.
There are some youtube clips of songs in Lojban, I played them for my family and, unfortunately, response was negative (music was not that nice, and it sounds harsh as you noted).
I think Lojban might have an interesting future as requirements specification and STEM-papers language. Because it is purposefully unambiguous to interpret. May be like a modern day Latin, or something...
[+] [-] akvadrako|8 years ago|reply
Esperanto is still very easy to learn for Asians, at least more than natural languages. Some of its largest support comes from China, including being taught in grade school, giving university degrees and Radio Peking broadcasts since 1964¹.
On top of that, the premise that Esperanto belongs to the western family is not accurate. "Esperanto is basically an isolating language".²
[1] http://esperanto.cri.cn/2521/2017/12/27/172s196652.htm
[2] http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...
[+] [-] XR0CSWV3h3kZWg|8 years ago|reply
Toki pona is fun. I was trying to get my partner to learn it so we could have an obscure way to communicate simple things. Depending on the company switching to spanish (although our proficiency is pretty low) is sometimes effective.
I'd love to keep abreast of interesting conlangs, are there any communities you'd recommend?
[+] [-] adrianN|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diggernet|8 years ago|reply
http://ifiction.org/games/playz.php?cat=1&game=378&mode=html
Edit: Say, shouldn't there be an Esperanto translation?
[+] [-] owenversteeg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] D-Coder|8 years ago|reply
Harder than what? At least the grammar, pronunciation, and word-building are very regular. Almost any national language will be harder than Esperanto.
[+] [-] Camillo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsr_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] F_r_k|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interlingua7|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HumanDrivenDev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tome|8 years ago|reply
* Esperanto, because a significant number of people already speak it
* Ido, because it's a significantly improved version of Esperanto
* Novial, because it is significantly more rationally structured than Ido
* Interlingua, because it's a significantly more rationally structured version of languages around 700 million people already speak
[+] [-] zouhair|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mapmeld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msla|8 years ago|reply
http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html
[1] ("NEW LANGUAGE? DON'T WANNA! WAAH!")
[2] ("The language I happen to know best also happens to be the easiest and best and most universal. Funny how that worked out, neh?")
This seems to be the biggest unanswerable criticism the Esperantists face:
"It looks like some sort of wind‐up‐toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's one part of this world that doesn't need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which is not only the continent whose languages are best covered by online translation services, but also the home of the current de facto global lingua franca: English."
[+] [-] taoistextremist|8 years ago|reply
I don't think it's fair to critique it just because its original intent was as an auxiliary language. I would argue that intent failed. But it has native speakers, and it has communities who use it, and that itself justifies a language's existence.
[+] [-] sevensor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colanderman|8 years ago|reply
(I don't know why you're downvoted, you bring up a valid point.)
[+] [-] im_dario|8 years ago|reply
I think the concept of Esperanto should be redone under current linguistics knowledge and technology. We will probably end with another half-backed attempt but maybe it would advance Humanity a little more towards having a shared neutral language.
[+] [-] laretluval|8 years ago|reply
A nice early Esperanto song goes:
En densa Afrika ĝangalo sovaĝaj nigruloj sen Di' jam solvis la lingvan problemon, per tam-tam' disiĝas la kri'...
This sounds very ominous now.
[+] [-] ruricolist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0rsuk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amflare|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antognini|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colanderman|8 years ago|reply
Also, if you are in the States (or not), check out NASK (Nord-Amerika Somera Kurso). It is a week-long course which takes place across July 4th weekend each year, currently in North Carolina. That is how I built the bulk of my ability. I highly recommend it.
[+] [-] jcreed|8 years ago|reply
There's lots of easy fiction literature; gerda malaperis, la eta princo, etc.
Nowadays there's a good amount of vlog content to watch. Evildea has tons, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYs_6gTE3O8 has a bunch of fairly ordinary casual conversation between people in it) and I also like https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZLuNvGx99zmlEQL0oR_uvg
[+] [-] chillacy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameskegel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chillacy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ringaroundthetx|8 years ago|reply
Monero has touched a lot of people since 2014
Would this random tourist have noticed the Esperanto statue in Vienna? Their museum?
A passing impression of Monero may be fueling this resurgance and international exposure
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|8 years ago|reply
I thought it was just awesome when 10 years later I found out Esperanto was real!
[+] [-] lakkal|8 years ago|reply
I GM'd a game of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy where I had the UN exploration teams use Esperanto as a common language.
[+] [-] D-Coder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdfin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colanderman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astura|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_culture
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-l...
[+] [-] firethief|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
[+] [-] jimmcslim|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlamat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arundelo|8 years ago|reply
"Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1]
"In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2]
In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native speakers:
"As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3]
(Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers
EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".