Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)
I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:
- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).
- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).
I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.
I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.
1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?
2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)
Thanks!
----------------------------
Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.
> Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)
This is highly subjective view. Of course some people hate diacritics and prefer to write sx instead of ŝ but many have the opposite opinion. As for me sx looks plain disgusting. I would even love to see sh being replaced with ŝ or š or ș in English and the same to happen with sch in German, sz in Polish, ch in French etc. And there have in fact been projects to replace the English alphabet with something that makes more sense and doesn't use combinations of letters to represent a single sound (e.g. the Shavian alphabet). Obviously both ways have their pros and cons, their proponents and opponents so it probably just should be left as it already is in whatever a language.
People get around the problem of not being able to type these letters by adding an x or an h (cx, gx, ux). Apparently Zamenhof himself was addressing the issue in order to make the language "simpler," as well.
For accents to be removed, there can't be any ambiguity. For instance, in Spanish, the words cómo and como, or the many forms of "porque" (with very different meanings) are a source of confusion for many speakers. This wouldn't be any easier without accents. I think that a language would have to be designed from the ground up to get rid of accents for this to be possible.
Realistically accents are such a small hurdle that if a learner can't stomach it, they're probably not going to make it. It's something like complaining that Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is something you can get over much quicker than the myriad of crazy grammar.
when I used esperanto on IRC (many years ago), people wrote "cx", "gx" "ux", etc. This seems very standard usage when you are writing on limited charsets. Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal. I actually find the choice of accents cute and I love them.
> I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none
This is popular misconception shared by a lot of French but actually English has accent and a few other diacritics as well. You can see them in loanwords such as canapé or saké, and on word like coördination.
Glad to see this on HN. I'm not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours I've put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in Spanish (where I've gone through 3 years of formal education).
The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier. For example, all nouns end in "o", questions usually start with "cu". Also, the vocabulary you need is reduced by marking certain things as opposites (if you know the word for good "bona" the word for bad is "Mal" + "bona" or "malbona".
I still have a ways to go to learn the language, but I figure I have more chance of learning it than other languages I'm interested in like Spanish and Swedish (relatively easy for native English speakers) and Hungarian and Finnish (far beyond my wildest grasps).
There are not many Esperanto speakers you'll meet on the subway, but there is a vibrant online community and international events.
It's beneficial to us in the USA and the UK that English is the lingua Franca. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn Mandarin? The Esperanto language was eventually repurposed as an international auxillary language. So everyone learns their native tongue and international discussions (like the U.N.) are all done in Esperanto and you don't need armies of translators. It will never happen, but I really like the concept.
> The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier.
This is an illusion generated by the fact that Esperanto has no community of speakers. Your language can be as unusable as you want as long as nobody has to use it.
Compare this quote I collected from Wikipedia years ago:
> In Esperanto each transitive verb has two present participles (active and passive), two past participles, and two future participles. Some speakers have also analogously constructed two conditional participles, which are not in widespread use and are not officially sanctioned by the Akademio de Esperanto, but which are nonetheless readily understood.
Wikipedia today still acknowledges the conditional participles of Esperanto, but protests that they're just a joke, not a real part of the language. But grammatical innovation is guaranteed to occur if a language is ever spoken by more than one person. This neatly summarizes the problem with the concept of a perfectly regular language that's easy to learn -- as soon as people try, those qualities are immediately lost. Esperanto picked up a group of speakers whose native languages had conditional participles, and now Esperanto has them too, even though the existence of conditional participles is a violation of every founding principle of Esperanto.
---
> I'm not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours I've put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in Spanish (where I've gone through 3 years of formal education).
Again, this is an illusion caused by the fact that Esperanto has no speakers. If you look at a real language, Latin, you'll notice that it's much easier to read Latin written in the Renaissance by non-native speakers than Latin written in the Roman Republic by native speakers. Those Renaissance writers were writing in a foreign language, their native language was grammatically closer to yours, and the result is that their Latin is incredibly straightforward. In contrast, Caesar's De Bello Gallico is known for the clarity of the prose, but it is nevertheless infinitely more complex (for a modern reader), because Caesar was writing in his own native tongue.
I moved to Finland, and as you say Finnish is hard. It does have its pluses though, certainly some of the things that are listed as advantages of Esperanto:
* Regular grammar.
* Consistent pronunciation.
Given the pain of moving to a foreign country and learning their language I'd struggle to learn another language "for fun", without the ability to use it "for real" on a regular basis.
You must accept that Esperanto is many times easier for westerners to learn than anybody else, though, right? If we really wanted a "neutral language" for the vast majority of people we should have based the language on Malagasy or something.
Instead of malbona, why not unbona or ungood? Or to express a greater good, can I suggest doubleplusgood? It's so strange how some of the merits of esperanto you listed reminds me of the merits of 1984's Newspeak.
I caught the esperanto bug briefly in high school too, but I quickly gave up on it as the initial novelty wore off.
Esperanto is a nice idea but impractical. Idealism only gets you so far. There are hundreds or thousands of years worth of literature, history, culture, etc tied to the major languages that already exist. Esperanto is not going to overcome this advantage of incumbent languages.
You brought up an interesting point. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn mandarin? If I was forced to learn a language, I'd rather learn mandarin than esperanto. And as frustrating as irregular aspects of languages can be, the irregularity leads to the beauty of languages. There is history to the frustrating aspects of language.
And though esperanto might be useful for the UN, it is useless everywhere else. Almost everyone on earth lives with or near people who speak the same language as them. Think about it? In your day to day experience, when do you really need esperanto? For most people, the answer is never.
I wonder if a better solution for a "universal" language would be a Simplified English, where the English language as spoken in the US/UK is greatly simplified in terms of rules, spelling etc. Go with the Esperanto idea of a common verb tense rule (I go, He go -> I goed, He goed), and clean up the spelling (tough -> tuf, though -> tho). Most people in the world have a grasp of English based on the Internet and entertainment, maybe making it even easier to learn would help them become proficient in it.
I would love that, but there is one potential issue: English is really hard to pronounce well, and therefore it takes years to understand it well. There are many ways to pronounce the same combination of letters, depending which word they are part of (like "ough", etc.). Words have emphasis that also make them more difficult to pronounce.
Many non-native English speaker I know (myself included) still have a hard time understanding some English words after 15-20 years or more of English as a second language and having lived in English-speaking countries for years. A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.
On the contrary, after a few minutes/hours of learning Spanish pronunciation, one is usually able to write words that they hear pronounced slowly, since they are written as they are pronounced and there is only "one" way to pronounce them. Same for Esperanto I believe, or language like Korean (although it's a different alphabet so it takes more time for anyone used to the latin alphabet, but it is still phonetic).
Especially since this is effectively what is happening - when I speak English with someone from a non-native country I essentially drop into much simpler non-idiomatic vocab set.
Whatever, inventing a new language (even based on another one heavily) only makes sense if it is going to be better than all the other existing by orders of magnitude. IMHO just making an existing language slightly easier to learn while annoying all the existing speakers (English speakers reading a text won't immediately recognize tuf as tough) does not qualify. As long as we don't manage to produce a distinct engineered language so unquestionably amazing that a huge part of the people would adopt it readily the only viable alternative remaining is just sticking with an existing language that is reasonably easy to learn (e.g. English is usually considered easier to learn than Chinese or even than French but I'd love to know if it actually is easier for people whose native language is neither Indo-European nor Sino-Tibetan and uses a different kind of alphabet) and already is spoken by a significant portion of the whole set of people it is meant for.
Fixing the spelling in a way which pleases everyone is a challenge (pure phonetic spelling likely makes it significantly harder to read for Latin-language speakers as well as English speakers, for example)
But in general the quirks in English are quite easy to drop without losing meaning, things like definite and definite articles can be made optional and then you end up with something not dissimilar to how many basic ESL speakers from different countries communicate with each other anyway...
Estas interese, ke je Hacker News ĉi tiu afiŝo atingis.
La parolantojn de aliaj lingvoj, preciple la angla-parolantojn mi ne plu kuraĝigas por Esperanton lerni. Estas malŝparo de energio. Anstataŭe, la lingvon mi uzas sen tiu celo.
Bedaŭrinde, mi ne certas se bonan diskuton pri tiu temo ni povas havi ĉi tie. Se estas parolantoj ĉi tie, mi anticipas ke la nivelo malaltas. Espereble, pli fortan diskuton mi povas havi aŭ vidi.
Kompreneble, mi povas konsenti ke fortas Esperanto. Min mem mi farigis kavio. Mi volis scii, se fakte utilas tiu lingvo. Post preskaŭ kvar monatoj, mi konsciis, ke mi pravis. Jes, fakte funkcias Esperanto. Jes, eĉ la plej bizarajn ideojn mi povas esprimi Esperante. Jes, la lingvon mi subtenos en miaj restantaj jaroj.
I love the concept of esperanto but to be honest there are no practical uses for it. Fun language and it teaches you the concepts of others but as I said, not that useful.
No practical uses! What! Over recent years I have had guided tours of Berlin, Douala (loo it up!), Yerevan and Milan in this planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I’ve discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down and in Armenia when it was a Soviet republic, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, and so on. I recommend it as a very useful and practical way to overcome language barriers.
Take an unguided wander around the net. You wil find political stuff, religious stuff, scientific stuff - all in Esperanto.
Compared to other conlangs, esperanto is probably the most useful. Heck, compared to some natural languages, esperanto has a unique usecase of letting you join a very passionate language diaspora with members scattered around the world.
One practical use that has been studied (only a little) is to use Esperanto as a stepping stone to learning other languages. Essentially the idea is that you can first spend a few months learning Esperanto and that might actually speed up the total time for learning a "third" language. I believe school systems in both the UK and France have experimented with this, both with promising results.
I find this hard to believe as a conclusion anyone could come to. A universal shared language for international communication? People can keep their mother tongue yet no matter how provincial it may be, can still communicate effectively with the rest of the world?
The link in the article about native speakers is interesting.
1. All "native" speakers are actually raised bilingual. and
2. George Soros was raised learning esperanto. I am surprised that there isn't some conspiracy about Esperanto
I've met native speakers, and some things surprised me:
1. Some still have a heavy accent. In fact it tends to be the accent of their parents. (all of us have an accent, it just happens that some of our accents are considered standard english)
2. They tend to be fluent but fluency is also a function of frequency of use, and some non-native speakers reach higher fluency by living with other esperanto speakers and using it daily
3. They all type using `x` notation, since they were typing Eo before Eo keyboards existed, so gxis instead of ĝis
If you are into artificial languages, also check out lfn (https://elefen.org). Like Esperanto, it also features regular spelling and simple syntax, but one key difference is that its vocabulary is almost entirely Romance; it is a artificial Romance creolo. As a result, it is very easy for native speakers of Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) to understand, and it can also serve as a "gateway language" for learning other Romance languages.
Well, but probably most of the languages work this way, maybe all of them. English vocabulary resembles a pile of goods stolen from french, germanic languages and so on.
This is intentional: the roots were all taken from what Zamenhof surmised were the "most common" for a given word/concept across Indo-European languages
One of the nice surprises I had after learning Esperanto a while back was that there is a small but vibrant literature of original novels and poetry in Esperanto. Especially in the first half of the 20th century quite a few gems were written. I've been able to read works about life in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, a Czech Jew's experiences during WWI, and a collection of short stories written by Chinese authors shortly after the Cultural Revolution, all without need of a translator. One Esperanto poet, William Auld, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times before he died about a decade ago.
over time, several flaws in the language have been pointed out, and proposals to fix them, as well as alternate approaches to an auxiliary language have been made.
and while it can be said that esperanto was not yet able to appeal to the majority, it is wildly more successful than any other attempt.
why is that?
why have none of the alternatives even made it out of the experimental stage?
with any of the well meant proposals in this discussion, it is important to understand what would make those proposals succeed. (and by succeed i mean at first reach a speaker-base that equals that of esperanto)
i believe that the results up to now indicate that the quality of the language is not the issue.
esperanto is like python 2, but in a world where everyone prefers to use php.
or is it?
are the flaws in esperanto what's holding back further growth? do we need to start from scratch, and go through the painful stages of initial growth esperanto has already been through?
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I've once learnt Spanish and found it the easiest language I've ever seen, easier than English, it took just 2 weeks to learn. Then I've started learning Esperanto (as the idea of engineered languages (or whatever) amazes me, I feel like we should engineer everything) with DuoLingo (I don't happen to know any better Esperanto course) and it felt easy yet it was just a tiny bit easier than Spanish so I was wondering why do we need a new easy language when there already is one spoken by so many people (and it also is very similar to it) but continued learning. Then I've found out Esperanto has grammatical cases and stopped, cases make me panic. I still feel like I would like to learn Esperanto to fluency once as I adore its spirit of technocracy, borderlessness and defiance of nationalism.
How are you measuring having "learnt" a language? Because IMHO that's an incredible feet that almost requires you not to sleep! Or do you just mean learning the grammar?
Chiming in to say that stating "I learned X language in two weeks" is kind of an ambiguous statement without any real meaning behind it. How are you quantifying "learned a language"?
Are you merely stating that you learned the grammatical aspects or are you claiming communicative fluency? I've heard that to be moderately fluent in Spanish you need to have mastered anywhere between 5000 and 10000 words. Even at the low end of fluency, that would mean you're memorizing approximately 350 words every day - not to mention the upkeep necessary to maintain it assuming you're using some kind of SRS.
Do you actually know how many words you know? Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it, I will also state that one needs a lot of time digesting the language from a real-time auditory standpoint. Knowing the vocabulary is a far step from being able to understand the language spoken to you at a native speaker's pace.
I'm not trying to be overly harsh, but unless you're some kind equivalent of a synesthesia Tammett, there is simply no way you came even close to fluency in Spanish in two week. Hell even studying 12 hours a day would only net you 168 hours of language study. On the other hand, if by "learned Spanish", you mean that you know the grammar, numbers, asking for directions, food, simple questions, etc then yeah, 2 weeks is ambitious but definitely doable.
[+] [-] kevinios|7 years ago|reply
I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:
- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).
- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).
I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.
I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.
1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?
2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)
Thanks!
----------------------------
Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto (this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language
Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!
[+] [-] qwerty456127|7 years ago|reply
This is highly subjective view. Of course some people hate diacritics and prefer to write sx instead of ŝ but many have the opposite opinion. As for me sx looks plain disgusting. I would even love to see sh being replaced with ŝ or š or ș in English and the same to happen with sch in German, sz in Polish, ch in French etc. And there have in fact been projects to replace the English alphabet with something that makes more sense and doesn't use combinations of letters to represent a single sound (e.g. the Shavian alphabet). Obviously both ways have their pros and cons, their proponents and opponents so it probably just should be left as it already is in whatever a language.
[+] [-] kissickas|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_tr...
https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=44907
[+] [-] snazz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StevePerkins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chillacy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enriquto|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] titanix2|7 years ago|reply
This is popular misconception shared by a lot of French but actually English has accent and a few other diacritics as well. You can see them in loanwords such as canapé or saké, and on word like coördination.
[+] [-] 4thaccount|7 years ago|reply
The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier. For example, all nouns end in "o", questions usually start with "cu". Also, the vocabulary you need is reduced by marking certain things as opposites (if you know the word for good "bona" the word for bad is "Mal" + "bona" or "malbona".
I still have a ways to go to learn the language, but I figure I have more chance of learning it than other languages I'm interested in like Spanish and Swedish (relatively easy for native English speakers) and Hungarian and Finnish (far beyond my wildest grasps).
There are not many Esperanto speakers you'll meet on the subway, but there is a vibrant online community and international events.
It's beneficial to us in the USA and the UK that English is the lingua Franca. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn Mandarin? The Esperanto language was eventually repurposed as an international auxillary language. So everyone learns their native tongue and international discussions (like the U.N.) are all done in Esperanto and you don't need armies of translators. It will never happen, but I really like the concept.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|7 years ago|reply
This is an illusion generated by the fact that Esperanto has no community of speakers. Your language can be as unusable as you want as long as nobody has to use it.
Compare this quote I collected from Wikipedia years ago:
> In Esperanto each transitive verb has two present participles (active and passive), two past participles, and two future participles. Some speakers have also analogously constructed two conditional participles, which are not in widespread use and are not officially sanctioned by the Akademio de Esperanto, but which are nonetheless readily understood.
Wikipedia today still acknowledges the conditional participles of Esperanto, but protests that they're just a joke, not a real part of the language. But grammatical innovation is guaranteed to occur if a language is ever spoken by more than one person. This neatly summarizes the problem with the concept of a perfectly regular language that's easy to learn -- as soon as people try, those qualities are immediately lost. Esperanto picked up a group of speakers whose native languages had conditional participles, and now Esperanto has them too, even though the existence of conditional participles is a violation of every founding principle of Esperanto.
---
> I'm not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours I've put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in Spanish (where I've gone through 3 years of formal education).
Again, this is an illusion caused by the fact that Esperanto has no speakers. If you look at a real language, Latin, you'll notice that it's much easier to read Latin written in the Renaissance by non-native speakers than Latin written in the Roman Republic by native speakers. Those Renaissance writers were writing in a foreign language, their native language was grammatically closer to yours, and the result is that their Latin is incredibly straightforward. In contrast, Caesar's De Bello Gallico is known for the clarity of the prose, but it is nevertheless infinitely more complex (for a modern reader), because Caesar was writing in his own native tongue.
[+] [-] stevekemp|7 years ago|reply
* Regular grammar.
* Consistent pronunciation.
Given the pain of moving to a foreign country and learning their language I'd struggle to learn another language "for fun", without the ability to use it "for real" on a regular basis.
[+] [-] philsnow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porpoisely|7 years ago|reply
I caught the esperanto bug briefly in high school too, but I quickly gave up on it as the initial novelty wore off.
Esperanto is a nice idea but impractical. Idealism only gets you so far. There are hundreds or thousands of years worth of literature, history, culture, etc tied to the major languages that already exist. Esperanto is not going to overcome this advantage of incumbent languages.
You brought up an interesting point. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn mandarin? If I was forced to learn a language, I'd rather learn mandarin than esperanto. And as frustrating as irregular aspects of languages can be, the irregularity leads to the beauty of languages. There is history to the frustrating aspects of language.
And though esperanto might be useful for the UN, it is useless everywhere else. Almost everyone on earth lives with or near people who speak the same language as them. Think about it? In your day to day experience, when do you really need esperanto? For most people, the answer is never.
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KhoomeiK|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-based_creole_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English-based_pidgins
This one especially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin
[+] [-] kevinios|7 years ago|reply
Many non-native English speaker I know (myself included) still have a hard time understanding some English words after 15-20 years or more of English as a second language and having lived in English-speaking countries for years. A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.
On the contrary, after a few minutes/hours of learning Spanish pronunciation, one is usually able to write words that they hear pronounced slowly, since they are written as they are pronounced and there is only "one" way to pronounce them. Same for Esperanto I believe, or language like Korean (although it's a different alphabet so it takes more time for anyone used to the latin alphabet, but it is still phonetic).
[+] [-] outside1234|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|7 years ago|reply
Looks a lot like Scots :-)
Whatever, inventing a new language (even based on another one heavily) only makes sense if it is going to be better than all the other existing by orders of magnitude. IMHO just making an existing language slightly easier to learn while annoying all the existing speakers (English speakers reading a text won't immediately recognize tuf as tough) does not qualify. As long as we don't manage to produce a distinct engineered language so unquestionably amazing that a huge part of the people would adopt it readily the only viable alternative remaining is just sticking with an existing language that is reasonably easy to learn (e.g. English is usually considered easier to learn than Chinese or even than French but I'd love to know if it actually is easier for people whose native language is neither Indo-European nor Sino-Tibetan and uses a different kind of alphabet) and already is spoken by a significant portion of the whole set of people it is meant for.
[+] [-] Riverheart|7 years ago|reply
https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html
[+] [-] notahacker|7 years ago|reply
But in general the quirks in English are quite easy to drop without losing meaning, things like definite and definite articles can be made optional and then you end up with something not dissimilar to how many basic ESL speakers from different countries communicate with each other anyway...
[+] [-] ebzzry|7 years ago|reply
La parolantojn de aliaj lingvoj, preciple la angla-parolantojn mi ne plu kuraĝigas por Esperanton lerni. Estas malŝparo de energio. Anstataŭe, la lingvon mi uzas sen tiu celo.
Bedaŭrinde, mi ne certas se bonan diskuton pri tiu temo ni povas havi ĉi tie. Se estas parolantoj ĉi tie, mi anticipas ke la nivelo malaltas. Espereble, pli fortan diskuton mi povas havi aŭ vidi.
Kompreneble, mi povas konsenti ke fortas Esperanto. Min mem mi farigis kavio. Mi volis scii, se fakte utilas tiu lingvo. Post preskaŭ kvar monatoj, mi konsciis, ke mi pravis. Jes, fakte funkcias Esperanto. Jes, eĉ la plej bizarajn ideojn mi povas esprimi Esperante. Jes, la lingvon mi subtenos en miaj restantaj jaroj.
[+] [-] asutekku|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BillChapman|7 years ago|reply
Take an unguided wander around the net. You wil find political stuff, religious stuff, scientific stuff - all in Esperanto.
[+] [-] chillacy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mycorrhizal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wishinghand|7 years ago|reply
I find this hard to believe as a conclusion anyone could come to. A universal shared language for international communication? People can keep their mother tongue yet no matter how provincial it may be, can still communicate effectively with the rest of the world?
[+] [-] PaulHoule|7 years ago|reply
Harry Harrison talked about Esperanto in the "Stainless Steel Rat" books and that is why it is so much better known than Interlingua
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
which is really a cleaned-up Latin that you might already know how to read if you've been exposed to Romance languages much at all.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|7 years ago|reply
1. All "native" speakers are actually raised bilingual. and 2. George Soros was raised learning esperanto. I am surprised that there isn't some conspiracy about Esperanto
[+] [-] chillacy|7 years ago|reply
1. Some still have a heavy accent. In fact it tends to be the accent of their parents. (all of us have an accent, it just happens that some of our accents are considered standard english)
2. They tend to be fluent but fluency is also a function of frequency of use, and some non-native speakers reach higher fluency by living with other esperanto speakers and using it daily
3. They all type using `x` notation, since they were typing Eo before Eo keyboards existed, so gxis instead of ĝis
[+] [-] xiaq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edflsafoiewq|7 years ago|reply
> e --- like e in “end” or ay in “may”
does that mean the sounds are in free variation? Should (2) say "It is phonemically spelled"?
Penultimate stress?
edit: The answers appear to be in the affirmative. I found them in the grammar.
[+] [-] whatshisface|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myth2018|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scroot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em-bee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antognini|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em-bee|7 years ago|reply
and while it can be said that esperanto was not yet able to appeal to the majority, it is wildly more successful than any other attempt.
why is that?
why have none of the alternatives even made it out of the experimental stage?
with any of the well meant proposals in this discussion, it is important to understand what would make those proposals succeed. (and by succeed i mean at first reach a speaker-base that equals that of esperanto)
i believe that the results up to now indicate that the quality of the language is not the issue.
esperanto is like python 2, but in a world where everyone prefers to use php.
or is it?
are the flaws in esperanto what's holding back further growth? do we need to start from scratch, and go through the painful stages of initial growth esperanto has already been through?
[+] [-] billfruit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InfiniteBeing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot123|7 years ago|reply
(you can try https, but it was acting up for me somehow. Sorry!)
[+] [-] ZhenyaRybanova|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] malmsteen|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sctb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristofferR|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amaccuish|7 years ago|reply
How are you measuring having "learnt" a language? Because IMHO that's an incredible feet that almost requires you not to sleep! Or do you just mean learning the grammar?
[+] [-] throwaway675309|7 years ago|reply
Are you merely stating that you learned the grammatical aspects or are you claiming communicative fluency? I've heard that to be moderately fluent in Spanish you need to have mastered anywhere between 5000 and 10000 words. Even at the low end of fluency, that would mean you're memorizing approximately 350 words every day - not to mention the upkeep necessary to maintain it assuming you're using some kind of SRS.
Do you actually know how many words you know? Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it, I will also state that one needs a lot of time digesting the language from a real-time auditory standpoint. Knowing the vocabulary is a far step from being able to understand the language spoken to you at a native speaker's pace.
I'm not trying to be overly harsh, but unless you're some kind equivalent of a synesthesia Tammett, there is simply no way you came even close to fluency in Spanish in two week. Hell even studying 12 hours a day would only net you 168 hours of language study. On the other hand, if by "learned Spanish", you mean that you know the grammar, numbers, asking for directions, food, simple questions, etc then yeah, 2 weeks is ambitious but definitely doable.
[+] [-] Shorel|7 years ago|reply