[HN Gopher] Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)
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Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)
Author : Books
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-10-17 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| bigbubba wrote:
| The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the
| goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to
| achieve world peace, then the efforts of pragmatists would go
| towards teaching more people English, since that language is the
| closest to the finish line. Of course that would be contentious
| in some political philosophies, it doesn't surprise me that some
| people drawn to the _' universal language for world peace'_ idea
| find the promotion of English unacceptable. However it seems to
| me these people are relinquishing any hope for success in order
| to remain principled.
| lukevp wrote:
| I agree it doesn't make sense in the context of today, but in
| 1887 when it was invented, there was no internet, and you
| couldn't translate between languages with a computer. The
| globalization hadn't happened yet where everyone had to learn
| English, and learning some easier to use intermediate language
| made sense as an easy adoption for translating at a time that
| machine translation was inconceivable.
|
| Think about newspapers as a concept of information
| dissemination. It would be a lot lower effort to create a
| single newsletter and distribute it globally than to have a
| network of translators who can recreate it, redo the layout,
| and reprint it. Or think about travelers, where your queries
| are simple and someone could learn a language in a couple of
| weeks and be a tour guide for travelers from all places.
|
| At this point, English makes far more sense, but I get why they
| invented Esperanto, and at some point I could carry light
| conversations in it, though that has faded since it's fairly
| useless.
| fanf2 wrote:
| My grandfather had a story from when he was travelling around
| Europe between the wars: he tried to have a conversation with
| someone in a youth hostel but they had trouble finding a
| language they had in common ... until they tried Latin!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm not particularly familiar with Esperanto, but I imagine the
| idea is that it's much easier to learn than English. English is
| stupidly complicated--not necessarily more-so than other
| languages, but well above what an intentionally-designed
| language could achieve.
| variaga wrote:
| Esperanto (and all the other intentionally designed
| languages) are simple and logical only because nobody
| actually speaks them as a native language. They're consistent
| because everyone learned them from the same miniscule corpus
| of available books and the occasional film.
|
| If any of the intentionally designed languages were to
| actually come into common use, it would immediately be
| subject to the same kind of regional pronunciation
| differences, usage drift over time, coining of neologisms and
| idiomatic phrases, etc. that make real languages so
| complicated.
| def_true_false wrote:
| Updating the ortography once in a while would take care of
| most of the problems. There are real languages that have
| successfully made "updates" to reflect the shifts in
| pronunciation, or the usage of additional sounds (compared
| to Latin), unlike English.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation,
|
| Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a
| prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably
| expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone
| from the south would use a long a. And which language do
| you have in mind when you imply that there are languages
| that are pronounced in the same way by all of its
| speakers?
|
| Anyway, there is no Academy in charge of English so if
| you want to get started on spelling reform just go to it.
| Promote your revised spelling amongst your friends and
| colleagues. Or should that be: 'Promoat yor rivized
| speling amongst yor frends and koleegs.'?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a
| prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably
| expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone
| from the south would use a long a.
|
| It occurs to me that in an alternate universe, the answer
| could be "both spellings are correct", because logically
| speaking, if both _pronunciations_ are correct, shouldn
| 't the same apply to the written version?
|
| Come to think of it, the idea that a word with many
| correct pronunciations has only one correct spelling is
| actually _totally weird!_ Why should writing be more
| prescriptive than speech?
| thotsBgone wrote:
| I don't want to read your words in your accent, I want to
| read them with my internal monologue.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Huh, that's fair--I suppose if it was possible to wear
| earpieces that made others's accents match our own,
| perhaps we would! Writing actually makes it possible.
| yorwba wrote:
| Another consequence of almost all Esperanto speakers having
| learned the language later in life and without spending a
| lot of time using it, is that a beginner is less likely to
| get negative feedback like "Lau Zamenhof cu estas malbona
| frazon." when they make a mistake like translating from
| their mother tongue too literally. The other person might
| just blame their lack of understanding on their own limited
| command of the language.
| pessimizer wrote:
| English is stupidly complicated to speak perfectly, but it's
| stupidly easy to speak badly and still be understood because
| it's analytic rather than inflectional and relies so much on
| word order.
|
| It's an easy language to do business in, but a very hard
| language to sound perfect in. It's also a hard language to
| read and write.
| olah_1 wrote:
| As a native English speaker, I don't like English being the
| world language because I'm at a significant disadvantage
| because
|
| 1. I have zero incentive to learn another language
|
| 2. I do not have a secret/family language that I can switch
| into for strategic purposes
|
| 3. It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to
| the point that we lose even our productive affixes. We can't
| even create meaningful names within English anymore. It loses
| its richness.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality
| to the point that we lose even our productive affixes.
|
| I have no idea what you're talking about. Nobody in English-
| speaking countries is changing the way they speak "for the
| purposes of internationality." And the way a bunch of
| languages are importing scores of English words wholesale
| isn't much richer in my view.
| Tainnor wrote:
| There have been studies, and I know this also anecdotally
| from native speakers, that e.g. "business English", at
| least in non-English countries, becomes its own, more
| restrictive variant of English because of the high
| percentage of non-native speakers. I know that some such
| native speakers have said that they feel their English got
| worse after living abroad for a while.
|
| Of course, overall, this is a very slow process. People
| don't stop applying the rules or simplify vocabulary over
| night or even within the span of a couple of years, but
| there is growing evidence in general that the more speakers
| a language has, the more it tends to simplify structurally,
| e.g.
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181274
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sure, and materials produced by the government or for
| wide consumption are written in very simple language. But
| this is somewhat outside what "typical" native speakers
| are using.
| [deleted]
| JdeBP wrote:
| Have you tried Brummie? Non-native speakers often have
| significant trouble with England's non-RP accents.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you
| want.
|
| I think having English as a native language actually gives us
| a huge advantage: we can travel to a large chunk of the world
| and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can
| work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And
| so on.
| __sisyphus__ wrote:
| > Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language
| you want.
|
| You're right, nothing is stopping one from learning a
| second language; unfortunately not only do most english
| speakers lack incentive, but also they lack the ability to
| practice in the way most other languages do. Most of the
| time when you run into non-native english speakers, they
| would rather practice their english with you, even when in
| their country of origin.
|
| Additionally, there's very little lingual diversity in the
| US as it stands. Sure, there are plenty of spanish
| speakers, but early education doesn't really focus on
| teaching spanish with any sort of fluency as a true end-
| goal.
|
| So situationally it just makes learning a second language
| that much more difficult. Nonetheless, I do agree with you
| that there are obviously huge benefits to it; the few that
| you mention, along with many others.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language
| you want.
|
| A lack of incentive is what stops most.
|
| > we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a
| pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in
| globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on.
|
| You described the benefit of knowing English, not being a
| native English speaker.
| dathinab wrote:
| At the same time you have a _major_ advantage by most of the
| internet being (language wise) accessible to you from the get
| to go.
|
| I can just say that if I would have been able to speak
| english in my teenage years it would have majorly influenced
| my life in a likely positive but at least more interesting
| direction. Sadly back then I neither had any reasonable
| english skills nor was I aware of how much it would help me.
|
| Through I guess by now it has become quite obvious how use-
| full english is (wrt. IT/CS).
| siltpotato wrote:
| That actually brings up a point that upsets me somewhat:
| The Spanish Internet feels inaccessible to me because I
| don't know where the interesting parts of it are.
| olah_1 wrote:
| I'm sure that it is better to learn English from a young
| age, yes. But as it stands currently, you have an advantage
| over me.
| stereolambda wrote:
| I think that the advantages of being a native speaker in the
| end outweigh the disadvantages. You are exposed to the
| dominant economic and cultural ecosystems easier and much
| earlier. You may lack some ability to switch context and
| reframe things for different cultures, but it's not generally
| a practical necessity in life.
|
| On the other hand, you _may_ sometimes be harder to
| understand for non-native speakers, especially if you speak
| some non-mainstream dialect or pronunciation. (Even standard
| British, in normal speech, is probably harder for me to
| process than American: depends on what you 've been exposed
| to.) Coming from some other Latin script language, you'd
| probably have a better feel for oddities in English
| pronunciation (like 'thumb', or 'pseudo', etc.) and can
| easier adapt some more consistent 'euro' way of pronouncing
| as needed. Sometimes people won't understand you otherwise.
| claudeganon wrote:
| >You are exposed to the dominant economic and cultural
| ecosystems easier and much earlier.
|
| I don't think that early induction into specific ideologies
| as something to be described as blanket good. This kind of
| monolingualism certainly hasn't helped the intellectual
| life of the average American or its society writ large.
| fr2null wrote:
| While you might have a slight disadvantage if you ever really
| needed to talk about someone while they are standing next to
| you, I personally feel like I have a much bigger disadvantage
| since English is not my native language.
|
| My English is at a C2 level, and as such I am able to
| understand and explain complex concepts with ease, however my
| debating and small talk skills are nowhere nears as good in
| English as they are in my native language. I find it much
| harder to convince people using English. I know that the only
| thing that will make it better is practice, but this takes a
| lot of time and effort.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Re. Point 2
|
| Move to glasgow if you want to be able to switch into a
| "different" language
| simion314 wrote:
| But English is so broken, from what I see there are consts for
| spelling where you could create a language with clear rules and
| no freaking exceptions based on the history of the word. Maybe
| if you could reform/refactor English to drop the historical
| stuff and write words exactly how they sound - we would rename
| this language to not cause confusion or outrage, like a clean
| refactor.
| olah_1 wrote:
| When you consider that words are essentially the same thing
| as sinograms (chinese characters), the spelling is not a big
| deal.
|
| English spelling needs to remain the same because they are
| primarily visual. Native level English users just scan the
| general shapes of words and know the meanings in the same way
| that Chinese users just scan the general gists of the
| characters.
|
| The nice result is that you can have 10 wildly different
| English accents / dialects that all use the same spelling. It
| keeps everyone bound together.
|
| After all, if you went with phonetic spelling, which accent
| would you choose?
| emodendroket wrote:
| The comparison is generous to Chinese characters. Even the
| world's worst speller, confronted with an uncommon English
| word, could make a guess at the spelling that's probably
| decipherable. If you forget a Chinese character you may not
| even be able to put the first stroke to paper.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Yes, of course. But that was not the point I was making.
| Personally I find alphabets to be superior for that
| reason. But to be fair, I also don't know Chinese!
| emodendroket wrote:
| There's an unbelievable amount of woo and magical
| thinking floating around this subject. It definitely
| requires more effort to learn and remember. But yes,
| point taken.
| def_true_false wrote:
| Forget dialects, why is it possible in English that words
| sound different while being spelled the same way?
| Pronunciation is completely unpredictable, you have to know
| (guess) the etymology of every loanword and remember which
| of them have the original pronunciation and which of them
| the butchered one.
|
| Why is scythe spelled with a C?.
| ogogmad wrote:
| In the Early Modern period, "scythe" was actually spelled
| "sithe". The spelling changed to resemble a (false)
| classical etymology.[1] A similar thing happened to the
| words "island", "ache" and "tongue", which were
| originally spelled "iland", "ake" and "tung".
|
| See also "some" (originally "sum"), "friend" (originally
| "frend"), "delight" (originally "delite") and "could"
| (originally "coude").
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe
| bigbubba wrote:
| Cynthia, cinder, cyrillic... I wonder why scythe is
| spelled with an S...
| simion314 wrote:
| You use the official accent .
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| There isn't one. English is not imposed by an authority,
| it is pulled and pushed from all directions by schools,
| corporations, governments, history, fashion,
| misunderstanding, other languages, bloody mindedness, and
| more.
| simion314 wrote:
| The one used on national UK TV for example and as I said
| it would be a fork, you don't want to force people to
| change, though something like Esperanto would cause less
| outrage then forking english it seems.
| JdeBP wrote:
| UK national TV has been featuring a multiplicity of
| regional accents since the 1970s.
| simion314 wrote:
| OK, I give up on my idea, hopefully some linguists would
| popup in here and link some articles that would explore
| the topic. I think it would be interesting to plug some
| rules into an algorithm and have it search for the
| optimal language. We would not force it as a main
| language but a secondary one, like when you make a movie
| or book you provide a translation in this language too on
| top of the other popular languages you support. Since is
| a simple and perfectly defined language from it you could
| auto-generate translation to less popular languages.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Back in the day, French was the dominant language for
| international communications. As such, France was the only
| major League of Nations (might have been a different group)
| power to vote against Esperanto being pushed for international
| communications at that time. The USA was supportive at the
| time. Now the tables are turned and native English speakers
| have a significant advantage on the world stage, so the US and
| UK would not benefit as much.
|
| In recent years, Esperanto has pushed itself as more of an
| international auxiliary language. If it's much easier to learn
| than English, than everyone can continue speaking their
| national language and use Esperanto as an intermediary
| language. It's an interesting idea, but I figure we'll just
| move towards fewer and fewer major languages until only 5-10
| are widely spoken (Ex: english, spanish, mandarin,
| Hindi...etc).
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| english is the language of the oppressor
| mythrwy wrote:
| And yet, here you are using it to express that sentiment.
|
| Kind of a catch 22 or strange irony about this, but I suppose
| that is true of the entire philosophical viewpoint being
| expressed.
| [deleted]
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| i posted this as a joke but im not sure if its more or less
| funny how easy it was for everyone to take it seriously..
| bigbubba wrote:
| I understand that point of view, but desiring the creation of
| a universal language makes one an aspirational conqueror. The
| whole premise of 'a universal language for world peace' is
| oppressive (and for that reason I don't support it no matter
| the language chosen.)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| My reading of Esperanto wasn't to make everyone have to
| speak it as their first and only language (though I'm sure
| some have suggested that), but to make it a simpler more
| convenient halfway house language that would put everyone
| at the same disadvantage, if you will. you show willingness
| to be friendly and negotiate by stepping away from your
| native language and learning another, but you don't have to
| step into another's native language and accept being at a
| huge disadvantage, and you don't have to learn the union of
| every language of everyone you want to talk with.
|
| It's an idea that can only really succeed from a combined
| goodwill not conquering oppression.
|
| All over Europe there isn't room to put up road signs and
| menus and instructions in the union of all possible
| languages visitors could speak. It's easy to say all
| visitors must learn the local language, but there's often
| some concession to putting up signs in some other
| languages, Esperanto fits there. All road signs seconded in
| Esperanto isn't as good for locals as all visitors learning
| the local language, it isn't as good for visitors as signs
| being in their native language, but it isn't as bad for
| locals as one group of visitors expecting signs in their
| language and it isn't as bad for visitors as signs being in
| multiple native languages but not theirs.
|
| Expecting to go anywhere and speak English is rude.
| Expecting everyone to learn English is unlikely and going
| to trigger a lot of anger. Also supporting French shows
| some openness but privileges France in a national way. If
| you could get language away from nationalism, tourist
| information in Esperanto doesn't privilege any one nation.
| bigbubba wrote:
| > _Expecting to go anywhere and speak English is rude._
|
| I would just like to clear this up: I do not support the
| notion of any universal language, and that includes
| English. My observation that English is relatively more
| universal than Esperanto is not an endorsement of the
| premise of universal languages being a laudable goal.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Let me change that, a traveller expecting to go anywhere
| and speak their native language is rude, expecting all
| travellers to learn every destination language of
| everywhere they go is unworkable. Every employee learning
| the language of every company and customer, also
| unworkable. A universal intermediate language that isn't
| any nation's preferred language and hasn't been part of
| any colonial efforts in the past, is a possible way to
| dodge both those things. Not rude because everyone's
| stepping out of their home language.
|
| But it would have to be grassroots - if the English
| government mandated that everyone speak Esperanto in
| school then tried to spread it round Ireland and the EU
| it would ruin it. Same if the EU adopted it en masse,
| Brexiteers would reject it on principle. It could only
| ever happen if it grew in a balanced way where more and
| more places distributed around the world use it, and more
| and more people around the world learn it because it's
| useful, and it somehow never becomes one country or one
| group's unfair advantage. (That is to say, it can't ever
| happen).
|
| Would you still oppose a universal language if it was
| voluntary, not pushed by one nation into others, and not
| a replacement to primary national languages?
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > The whole premise of 'a universal language for world
| peace' is oppressive
|
| Could you explain that? I see it more in terms of creating
| a voluntary standard than forcing people to comply.
| bigbubba wrote:
| I think the universal language would gradually extinguish
| other languages. The more universal a language becomes,
| the more powerful the network effects get.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| That's how language has worked throughout history. Alexander
| the Great spread Greek. Rome spread Latin.
| peatmoss wrote:
| For me, what I love most about Esperanto is its unabashed
| affirmative optimism. The name itself means "one who hopes." For
| me it's a microcosm of competing epistemologies in society.
|
| I'll be a little casual with definitions here, but if we adopt a
| rationalist / positivist view of the world, Esperanto is a
| straightforward solution to a problem. Zamenhof despaired at his
| multi-ethnic neighbors killing each other. He hypothesized that
| could be remedied if people were able to speak to each other on
| equal language footing. It's not a bad hypothesis. It's easy to
| hate "those people" but hard to hate the person whose face you've
| looked into and tried to understand.
|
| We can snipe at Esperanto and apply critical theories of how
| Esperanto falls short in crucial ways. Those critiques are
| largely valid! Esperanto is to euro-centric. Esperanto draws too
| much from romance languages. The need for Esperanto has been
| supplanted by the global dominance of English. The language was
| designed by an amateur. Synthetic languages are indulgent in the
| face the extinction of natural languages.
|
| But I think a lot of the criticisms miss the fact that, around
| this simpleton, inadequate language designed by an amateur, has
| coalesced a community infused with something of the "let's build"
| optimism that gave rise to the language in the first place.
|
| If I look at society spanning from academia to pop culture right
| now, we have a hegemony of rhetorically sophisticated criticism.
| I wouldn't want to lose the moderating effect of that critique
| and blunder into starry-eyed utopianism, but I do worry that the
| volume of critique to "we can do it" optimism is out of balance.
|
| The world needs more Zamenhofs.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Zamenhof's optimism isn't as universally admired as you
| suggest. First of all, the Yugoslav wars stand as bloody proof
| that even if neighbors can understand each other and speak more
| or less the same language, they can just find something else to
| fight over.
|
| Secondly, Zamenhof was still writing from an Enlightenment-era
| framework that saw language diversity as a problem, something
| to systematize away. In our modern era, there is a lot of
| support for preserving indigenous cultures, and some of
| Zamenhof's views can be shocking today. Starting in the 1970s
| the Esperanto movement tried to hitch its wagon to the
| language-diversity movement, but this attempt has been rather
| half-hearted, plus World Esperanto Association is obliged by
| statute to be politically neutral, so it can't comment on the
| most common instances of language discrimination (i.e. when a
| strong centralized state cracks down on the minority peoples
| within its borders).
|
| I have been out of the Esperanto movement for quite some years
| now, but among the most active Esperantists who attended the
| annual European congresses frequently and tried to maintain a
| social life in the language, Zamenhof was not someone anyone
| ever thought about much. Those super-idealistic Esperantists
| who praised Zamenhof and banged on about world peace, were seen
| as weirdos and a target of mockery.
| claudeganon wrote:
| >Secondly, Zamenhof was still writing from an Enlightenment-
| era framework that saw language diversity as a problem,
| something to systematize away.
|
| The anarchist philosophy that was responsible for the global
| spread of Esperanto was far more complex than this and rooted
| in a rejection of reductive, Darwinist cultural formulations
| that were coming to prominence at the time. The idea was to
| preserve local autonomy, while providing a universal medium
| for exchange, such that communities could develop their own
| unique cultural systems and permutations thereof, but still
| have recourse to share them in a mutally beneficial way with
| others. Esperanto was widely popular in Japan under this
| rubric, for example:
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/23357508
|
| It was likewise suppressed by authoritarian regimes on the
| left and right for its encouragement of this eclecticism.
| peatmoss wrote:
| > Zamenhof's optimism isn't as universally admired as you
| suggest.
|
| Where did I say say his optimism was universally admired? I
| think I made it clear that I admire his optimism, and think
| it worthy of admiration :-)
|
| > some of Zamenhof's views can be shocking today.
|
| That's fine, having admiration for his work and those views
| of his that I feel have merit don't mean I need to accept
| absolutely everything the man believed.
|
| > Those super-idealistic Esperantists who praised Zamenhof
| and banged on about world peace, were seen as weirdos and a
| target of mockery.
|
| That may well be true, but this feels like an ad-hominem
| argument: "the cool kids are so over Esperanto and world
| peace. You want to be cool, don't you?"
|
| You have critiques of Esperanto and maybe even the idealism
| that I find endearing. That's fine. Those critiques are
| valid. I still maintain Zamenhof added more to the world than
| the critics.
| nabla9 wrote:
| When I tried it just for a few days, I was surprised how easy it
| was to learn. It was much easier to learn than English. On the
| other hand so many people already know English vocabulary that
| just having regular spelling and simple grammar could work. Mark
| Twain already suggested it:
|
| "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling: For example, in
| Year 1 that useless letter 'c' would be dropped to be replased
| either by 'k' or 's', and likewise 'x' would no longer be part of
| the alphabet. The only kase in which 'c' would be retained would
| be the 'ch' formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2
| might reform 'w' spelling, so that 'which' and 'one' would take
| the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish 'y' replasing
| it with 'i' and Iear 4 might fiks the 'g/j' anomali wonse and for
| all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai
| iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and
| Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and
| unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl
| tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez 'c', 'y' and 'x' -- bai now
| jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais 'ch',
| 'sh', and 'th' rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov
| orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius
| xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
| emodendroket wrote:
| People make a fuss about irregular verbs or grammar or whatever
| but what really makes learning languages hard is the very long
| tail of words you need to know. The grammar is a comparatively
| very small amount of content.
|
| When we think about how "easy" a language is a lot of it is how
| likely it is for us to guess from our native language what any
| given difficult word means -- "geografia" is more obvious to an
| English speaker than Di Li ).
| ben_w wrote:
| The ability to guess plausible meanings if great for
| comprehending the words, but for speaking them? I've guessed
| ,,Spoonen" instead of ,,Loffel"; "live", "liver", "love"
| translated as the equally homophonic ,,Leben", ,,Leber",
| ,,Liebe"; and Siri regularly fails to know if I am trying to
| say ,,hoher" or ,,Hure" (only one of the latter words is even
| in Duolingo).
| emodendroket wrote:
| Well, it's better than nothing, and if you're doing the
| producing you can simply stick to words you already know
| and avoid more difficult ones. In many cases you can come
| up with a plausible guess by applying regular patterns
| (e.g., -phy to -fia or -gy to -gia going from English to
| Spanish).
| jefft255 wrote:
| I just love how this gets progressively harder to read!
| dvtrn wrote:
| It's so hilariously and delightfully like Mark Twain to
| actually put readers through this and I chuckled once I
| realized what was going on
| marcodiego wrote:
| Interesting.... as a Portuguese speaker, I'd say that it gets
| progressively easier to read. Note that portuguese has way
| more coherent writing than english.
| dathinab wrote:
| While english was simplified quite a bit in the recent 100+
| (probably more) years and is often seen as a "simple"
| language there are quite many languages which are much more
| coherent then english.
|
| E.g. recently there had been an article on hacker news
| about bilingual people which are fine in one language but
| have a writing-disorder in english. Likely due to it being
| less coherent.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > E.g. recently there had been an article on hacker news
| about bilingual people which are fine in one language but
| have a writing-disorder in english. Likely due to it
| being less coherent.
|
| Also, there is no equivalent of a "spelling bee" in most
| other languages. Being able to spell all words is not
| seen as an exceptional skill in most languages written in
| the Latin script.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think you probably mean "consistent" rather than
| "coherent." Either that or you have a low view of our
| writers!
| marcodiego wrote:
| I used the term "coherent" because I was referring to
| what the text called "kohirnt speling".
| emodendroket wrote:
| Fair but saying English writing is incoherent makes it
| sound like their ideas are all over the place and you
| can't make heads or tails of it
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Of a person, yes. Of a language, I think the intention is
| clear.
|
| Note that this is syntactically ambiguous - a lovely
| feature of English. Try writing a sentence that isn't.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Syntactic ambiguity is a feature of human languages,
| period. Nothing is uniquely English about it.
| phlakaton wrote:
| Shavian sends its regards:
|
| , , 20 , , - .
| Rapzid wrote:
| Heh.. As somebody who has studied a little Japanese by the end
| the voice in my head had taken on that of a Japanese person
| struggling with English..
| sushshshsh wrote:
| I was unironically able to read that but it would probably be
| better if everyone learned IPA just for fun to use for all
| languages and see if people find it useful or not. If it's not
| useful it will die out.
| dropofwill wrote:
| IPA is great for writing down how people speak, but I don't
| think that's the most important aspect to capture for most
| writing. An example where this might be useful is the
| dialogue in Twain's novels, where he would often try to
| capture the particulars of his characters dialects.
|
| But for most writing the goal is to share meaning, not voice.
| What would we do for a word like `data`, which has at least 5
| different pronunciations that I've heard. Accepting all of
| them would probably lead to the opposite of the goal. Picking
| one leads to the same controversy.
|
| Add to that people often aren't aware of their own
| pronunciation. Personal example is that in my dialect I have
| the fool/full merger. I wasn't aware of this, I simply heard
| the language other people spoke as I pronounced it. At
| university I literally didn't believe people who were telling
| me that they pronounce those words differently. I just
| couldn't hear it.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| This is probably what reading the necronomicon must feel like
| croes wrote:
| Fun fact, if you read the last sentence as a german sentence it
| sounds like english with a german accent.
| mmm_grayons wrote:
| I was always under the impression that this was the intent
| and was trying to imply that English was basically
| bastardized German. Is that not what Twain meant?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| No, Twain was satirising the whole ridiculous idea that
| trying to regularise the spelling of English is a good
| idea.
|
| English has homonyms and homophones in part because it is
| always open to taking words from other languages. In fact
| "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has
| pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them
| unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
|
| Any attempt to force English to be strictly 'pronounced as
| written' will fail in the future even if it succeeds in the
| present because someone will import a word from another
| language that sounds like an existing word or invent a new
| one unaware that a word of the same pronunciation already
| exists or just attach a new meaning to an existing word.
|
| See https://wiki.c2.com/?PurityOfEnglish and
| https://library.conlang.org/blog/?p=116
| Tainnor wrote:
| That argument makes no sense. English is far from alone
| in borrowing heavily from other languages. Loanwords are
| one of the most obvious cases of linguistic contact and
| can be found everywhere throughout the world. There are
| multiple ways how a language can deal with such
| loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making
| those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation
| rules, or they can adapt the spelling and pronunciation
| to the borrowing language, or anything in between. Often
| it starts as the former and at some point migrates
| towards the latter.
|
| Meanwhile, there is absolutely no reason why English
| couldn't in principle have a much more phonetic or
| regular spelling system, except maybe dialectal variation
| (which you also do have in other languages with more
| regularised spelling, though).
|
| Now the larger reason for why a huge spelling reform
| would fail is because it would be a massive continuity
| break: people would have to relearn, new spellings would
| appear totally unnatural, it would mean that past text
| would at some point start being incomprehensible, etc.,
| so I don't think there is any practical way of getting
| there.
| ColanR wrote:
| > There are multiple ways how a language can deal with
| such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling,
| making those words an irregular exception to the
| pronunciation rules...
|
| Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about
| 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive
| / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g.,
| "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old
| Norse, "word" is old English). The combination happened
| when Britain spent a while under Norman rule. The
| commoners were largely Saxon & Norse, the rulers were
| French. Eventually the languages simply merged, with
| grammar rules and vocabulary taken from both sides.
|
| I believe the first edition of the Webster dictionary in
| the 1800s was when the spelling was standardized. At that
| point, Webster looked at the original language of the
| words to both define them and figure out a correct
| spelling.
|
| Edit: additional recollections, formatting.
|
| Edit2: I'm being downvoted?
| pessimizer wrote:
| There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English
| orthography is practically irregular (although it's
| vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to
| an analysis based on most probable language origin.)
| Figuring out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen
| before in English is only slightly easier than trying to
| figure out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen
| before in Mandarin.
|
| > Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally
| about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy /
| unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words
| (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is
| old Norse).
|
| Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the
| spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to
| them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that
| the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because
| before the Normans it was just "-scr".
|
| Also, British English tends to Anglicize French
| pronunciations, like "herb," "valet," etc. French borrows
| aren't the major thing making English difficult to read
| and write. French orthography is also pretty bad (and
| Portuguese.)
|
| obligatory: http://zompist.com/spell.html
| ColanR wrote:
| > There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English
| orthography is practically irregular (although it's
| vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to
| an analysis based on most probable language origin.)
|
| I mean, yeah. The rules governing English are a
| combination of the rules governing a couple other
| languages. Divide up the vocabulary according to the
| applicable rules, and I'm pretty sure you end up with a
| fragment each of the French, Saxon, Norse, etc.
| languages, and within those fragments the rules make as
| much sense as they do in the full versions of the
| respective languages. E.g.: put "rendezvous" &
| "accomplice" in one pile, "loan" in another, and the
| rules of each pile would be internally consistent, and
| consistent with the rules of French and Norse
| respectively...accounting for language drift, of course.
|
| A large fraction of English follows French rules - might
| as well ask the French language to fix their spellings to
| make phonetic sense. The work put into that would
| translate directly to fix a lot of English.
|
| > Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the
| spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to
| them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that
| the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because
| before the Normans it was just "-scr".
|
| Personally, given the entymology of English, it makes a
| lot of sense to preserve the original, applicable, rules
| of the languages English is comprised of. Otherwise, it
| would be like rewriting either Norse or French to fit the
| other - as you mention, that's even worse than the
| combination of languages in the first place.
|
| Edit for clarity.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Many more phonetic writing systems re-write loanwords to
| match local pronunciation, at least once the words are
| established enough.
|
| For example, in Romanian, recent borrows do typically
| preserve the original spelling (e.g. English
| 'computer','mall' -> Romanian 'computer', 'mall';
| plausible Romanian phonetic spelling 'compiutar','mol').
| But older loan-words that have become established take on
| a phonetic spelling (e.g. French 'bureau' -> Romanian
| 'birou'; English 'interview', 'tramway', 'jam' ->
| Romanian 'interviu', 'tramvai', 'gem').
|
| So it is possible to absorb large amounts of loan-words
| into a language and completely disregard the orthography
| of the original language. I don't think you lose much by
| doing that, in fact.
| ColanR wrote:
| That's true. I guess what I didn't really say explicitly
| is that I don't think there is a 'local pronunciation' in
| the case of English. French and Saxon seem to have merged
| on equal terms, where neither was sufficiently dominant
| to determine how words were re-written, and neither
| vocabulary would be counted as loan words.
|
| I think English would claim both as the original
| languages.
|
| I, think, english, would, both = old english
|
| claim, original, language = old french
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > French orthography is also pretty bad (and Portuguese.)
|
| Actually, french orthography is a bit complex, but pretty
| regular (if you exclude some old names). Also, French
| grammar would be more complex if the spelling was more
| inline with pronunciation, as the grammar rules have
| changed slower than pronunciation has.
|
| If you went by current pronunciation, the feminine or
| sometimes plural forms of many words, and the tenses of
| many verbs, would add random consonants, while the
| current spelling shows that they simply "revive" a
| consonant that is now elided, but has stayed part of the
| root of the word (e.g. 'present/presente' pronounced
| something like 'prezan/prezant'; 'mis/mise' pronounced
| something like 'mi/miz').
|
| French spelling is also an interesting showcase of what
| happens when a phonetic spelling is frozen while
| pronunciation changes (Old French was almost 1:1 with
| today's spelling, but pronunciation has changed
| dramatically).
| bialpio wrote:
| As a non-native English speaker, the bigger problem to me
| are not homophones, but homographs that aren't
| homophones. Or in general, same groupings of letters that
| are pronounced differently. That aside, there's a bunch
| of words that have been imported from English to Polish
| that mess me up (I'm getting tripped by the Polish
| pronunciation, it bleeds into how I speak the word).
| Grammar is actually great to learn (same goes for Spanish
| based on my limited experience with it).
| croes wrote:
| Possible. He learned german and wrote an essay about it.
| The Awful German Language.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Yeah, I've always wanted to learn a language, but was
| frustrated by all the grammar irregularities and other barriers
| to entry. English has that in spades, but it wasn't a problem
| as you don't have to worry about that with your first language.
|
| Esperanto was the first language I've made any real progress
| with. Spanish is considered a fairly easy language for English
| speakers to learn, but I knew fairly little after 3 years of
| study in school. I've put in substantially less Esperanto
| effort, but am far more confident. I actually believe I could
| become fluent if I continued to focus on it. When someone (even
| with an accent) speaks, I can understand the sounds and spell
| the words no problem. It isn't perfect, but I find learning it
| fun and not frustrating. The community is also vibrant.
| garmaine wrote:
| Pretty much every other language has regular spelling, and
| many have very regular grammar. English is the exception,
| being a Frankenstein assemblage of languages.
| Fnoord wrote:
| That reminds me of this old joke [1]:
|
| > The European Union commissioners have announced that
| agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred
| language for European communications, rather than German, which
| was the other possibility.
|
| > As part of the negotiations, the British and American
| government conceded that English spelling had some room for
| improvement. Consequently, they have adopted a five-year phased
| plan for what will be known as European English (Euro for
| short). In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft
| "c."
|
| > Sertainly sivil servants will resieve this news with joy.
| Also the hard "c" will be replased with "k." Not only will this
| klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
|
| > There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the second year,
| when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f." This will
| make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.
|
| > In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan
| be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes
| are possible. Governments will encourage the removal of double
| leters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
| Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the
| languag is disgrasful and they woud go.
|
| > By the fourth year peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as
| replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by "v." During ze fifz yer, ze
| unesasary "o" kan be droped from vords containing "ou", and
| similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinatins of
| leters.
|
| > Und after ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German lik zey
| vonted in ze first plas.
|
| I never knew it was based on a Mark Twain quote. Then again,
| Mark Twain's philosophy I didn't hear much of either (I'm from
| Europe, don't think I learned any American philosophy on high
| school).
|
| [1] https://alt.jokes.narkive.com/I7hqyPoJ/a-joke-a-plan-for-
| the...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "fotograf" is precisely how it is spelt in Czech and I am not
| sure why the English language insists on keeping the ancient-
| looking "ph" in those words; what the phreaking phuck?
| vinay427 wrote:
| Well, German (among others) does this as well in many
| cases, and it's otherwise far more phonetic than English in
| orthography. It's not some unique Anglo insistence, in this
| case.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Ancient- _looking_ to you perhaps; but an invention of the
| Etruscans and Romans (writing the aspirated "p" that they
| took from Classical Greek as "ph", hence the Romanized name
| of the letter "phi") and not _in fact_ as ancient as the
| Phoenician digamma "f" that you are using. (-:
| elboru wrote:
| Agree, I would add, make vocals consistent, 'a','e','i','o','u'
| should only have one sound per each letter for every case, if
| we need more vocal sounds then use different characters.
| namaemuta wrote:
| That happens with Spanish. Most of the time is WYSIWYS (What
| you see is what you say).
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| It's called phonemic orthography:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography
|
| I'm also from a country with such a language, and as a kid
| I couldn't understand the concept of spelling bee
| competitions in American movies, like, what's even the
| point?
| namaemuta wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't know it was called that. And yes, I had
| the same impression about spelling contests
| dropofwill wrote:
| Problem with English is that there are a lot of vowels (up to
| about 20) and the number varies greatly based on dialect. I
| believe this is an outlier for Indo-European languages.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The vowels in the English language: bat, bait, bet, beet,
| bit, bite, bot, boat, but, butte, bout, boil, book, the 'a'
| in about (/@/), baht. That's only in my dialect, and not
| counting r-colored vowels (which are not r-colored in British
| dialects!).
|
| This list was constructed by building short/long vowel pairs,
| and then tacking on the weirder vowels afterwards. As you'll
| notice from the inclusion of the last entry, there is a major
| dialect issue here. There are four sounds (/ae/, /a/, /a/,
| /o/) that are usually distributed into three sounds in major
| dialects, and these arise from short a and short o in written
| orthography... but _which_ words send their vowels to the
| different targets varies greatly depending on the dialect. If
| you pick it according to any one dialect, you 're going to
| get some poor correlation in another dialect.
|
| The other obvious issue is that adding new characters is
| actually difficult in the modern age. Of the sounds I've
| dropped in above, I can only type in @ and ae without
| resorting to copy-paste, and that's only because those are
| accessible with the Compose key. Telling people that you have
| to use 10 keys not present on their keyboards to write their
| language is going to be a hard sell. Again, note that English
| dropped th as a letter primarily because it wasn't possible
| to print with printing presses imported from Germany.
| bserge wrote:
| Comeback? Has it ever been more than a niche curiosity?
|
| It's more like translation tools will make a comeback. Already
| have.
|
| They've gotten so good, you don't even need to learn a new
| language to learn something that's only available in English (or
| other languages).
|
| Incidentally, this was a major reason I learned English. There
| was so much more information available back in the early 00's
| that I just had to do it.
|
| Romanian Internet was... abysmal. Thankfully, I knew Russian, and
| their Internet activity was far better. Lots of information and
| software. But that paled in comparison to the English Internet.
|
| At the moment, I find the Chinese Internet very active and
| interesting, even though translation is pretty poor and sadly,
| the language is very difficult. Plus, I don't have a real
| incentive to learn it.
|
| I don't know what part of the culture makes people write and
| share information, but some countries definitely have less of
| this activity. Perhaps it's just raw numbers, more people = more
| content.
|
| With Google Translate and the like, it has become much easier to
| access all of it, any kind of information, the best content.
| jobigoud wrote:
| > Perhaps it's just raw numbers, more people = more content.
|
| Definitely not that... Some languages with less speakers
| generate more content than others with more speakers. It's
| cultural. It's not just Internet, if you look for science
| fiction novels for example you'll find more in Polish or German
| than in Portuguese, even though the latter has far more
| speakers.
| antognini wrote:
| > Comeback? Has it ever been more than a niche curiosity?
|
| There was actually a fair amount of momentum behind Esperanto
| in the 1920s. The League of Nations seriously considered
| adopting it as their official language of business and was also
| considering recommending that member states include Esperanto
| in their educational curricula. The only real opposition was
| from the French, who wanted to preserve their language as the
| language of diplomacy, and vetoed these proposals.
|
| But by the late 1930s that momentum had faded away and
| totalitarian governments (particularly Germany and the Soviet
| Union) began to suppress Esperanto.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Don't expect to learn Scots from the World Wide Web, thanks to
| the goings on at the Scots language Wikipedia and all of the
| mirrors and automatic translators that have used it as source
| material.
| Tade0 wrote:
| _They 've gotten so good, you don't even need to learn a new
| language to learn something that's only available in English_
|
| It's a mixed bag really. Japanese is still too foreign for
| Google Translate to interpret properly outside of common
| phrases.
| martinrue wrote:
| I learned Esperanto because it was geeky and super easy to learn,
| and now I use it almost every day. I've made friends all over the
| world via the language, and can find people wherever I am to hang
| out and chat with. It's awesome. In fact, 6 weeks ago I moved
| from the UK to Spain and so far I've spent about 80% of my time
| using only Esperanto, with a combination of broken English and
| Spanish the rest of the time. I wrote a post a while back (that
| did pretty well here on HN) summing up why I love the language:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619
|
| Mi lernis Esperanton pro la nerdeco kaj pro tio, ke gi estas tre
| facile lernebla kaj amuza. 3 jarojn poste kaj mi uzas la lingvon
| ciutage kun amikoj de la tuta mondo. Kie ajn mi trovigas, preskau
| ciam mi povas trovi amikon (saluton!) kaj vagadi, babili, kaj nur
| Esperantumi kune. Fakte, antau 6 semajnoj mi translogigis al
| hispanio kaj gis nun Esperanton mi uzis 80% de la tempo, kaj
| miksajon de la angla kaj mia rompita hispana krom Esperanto la
| ceteran. Jen artikolo, kiun mi skribis (anglalingve) por klarigi
| tial, kial mi tre guas la lingvon:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619
| axegon_ wrote:
| I gave it a go several years ago out of curiosity. Knowing 1
| Germanic language(English), 1 Romance language(Spanish) and 1
| Slavic(Bulgarian), I found it brutally easy. For the most part, I
| could understand the average conversation out of the box with
| ease. One thing that came to my mind is that it could be a huge
| win for nlp purposes: With such simple, yet incredibly strict
| rules, you'd be able to make an incredibly fast and efficient
| tokenizers, parsers and extracting all sorts of information with
| nearly 100% accuracy(if not 100 - as far as I know the language
| has no exceptions in any shape or form). Real shame it didn't
| gain any considerable popularity.
| fanf2 wrote:
| The Esperanto word formation rules can collide, causing
| ambiguities http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/hh.html
| whatatita wrote:
| FYI: The HTTPS cert for this domain expired.
| leke wrote:
| I tried it too, but eventually walked away from the endeavor. I
| found you really have to learn to think the "Esperanto way" of
| saying things. That's the tricky part. At least, if I tried to
| communicate a more complex thought other than a general
| conversation, it wouldn't really be understood by the
| community, or at least be understandable, but just incorrect.
|
| To overcome this, I think I would have next had to emerge
| myself into more complex texts. For example, I had 1984 to
| read, but just never got round to it.
|
| The other thing was this personal relationship building thing
| the community embraces. I really am a loner so am not really
| into their general ideology. It really freaked me out when they
| wanted to meet me when visiting my town, or worse still, stay
| with me! That's the thing that actually really turned me off
| and made me ditch the whole idea.
|
| I've played with various languages over the years, including
| conlangs, and actually found Swedish to be my favorite. There
| are some hard parts, like the declensions of definite,
| indefinite, plural with its genders, but practicing general
| conversation with my wife (who is a native Finnish speaker with
| Swedish as a second language), found we could communicate
| simply, quite well. It just felt more natural and fluent. The
| way you literally say things translate quite well to English,
| so I can still think in English --if that makes any sense.
| tormeh wrote:
| Esperanto deserves to die, honestly. Romance language speakers
| don't need another language in their family (and Esperanto is a
| romance language - I don't see any Germanic or Slavic in there).
| It's just not very useful. I actually at one point started to see
| if I could fuse Germanic, Romance and Slavic into a mutt
| language, but I didn't get very far:
| http://tormodhellen.com/muttlang.html
|
| But honestly, even if you add more language families into the mix
| getting a language established without any government backing is
| going to be extremely hard, if not impossible.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Esperanto is a romance language - I don't see any Germanic or
| Slavic in there
|
| There are loads of Esperanto nouns and verbs based on Germanic
| (mainly based on German, the main Germanic language L.L.
| Zamenhof knew and a prestigious language for intellectual
| communication in Eastern Europe at the time, but also a few
| English roots). With regard to Slavic, the question particle
| was taken from Polish and I have always assumed that the
| inflexion of participles was copied from Russian.
| canjobear wrote:
| Regardless of what you think about the idea of an artificial
| international auxiliary language, Esperanto is very poorly
| designed as a language. Sure, it's easy to learn, because it has
| a small vocabulary and is very regular. But it's like a
| programming language designed by an amateur: full of bells and
| whistles and useless stuff that the designer thought would be
| cool, without regard to the actual challenges faced by language
| users. Let me explain a few ways that Esperanto is messed up.
|
| One issue is that it's hard to pronounce. Not from the
| perspective of an English speaker or a speaker of another
| European language, but from a global perspective. The problem is
| that it has a lot of complex consonant clusters (sequences of
| consonants jammed together without vowels in between) which are
| fine for someone coming from Polish (as Zamenhof, Esperanto's
| creator, was) but which are nightmarish for people coming from
| languages that don't have these clusters. Consider for example
| Chinese, which has no consonant clusters at all. Consider the
| closest Chinese approximation to the Russian city name
| "Vladivostok": Fu La Di Wo Si Tuo Ke fuladiwosituoke (note also
| that there's no /v/ in Chinese nor many other languages, despite
| /v/ being very important in Esperanto). A Chinese speaker is not
| going to find Esperanto easy to produce, with all kinds of
| Slavic-esque words beginning with kv- such as basic words like
| kvam (how). Esperanto also has a number of distinctions between
| sounds which will be lost by speakers of most languages. For
| example the difference between horo (clock) and hxoro (chorus),
| involving a distinction between /h/ and /x/ that most languages
| do not make. Basically Zamenhof was coming from Polish and he did
| succeed in making Esperanto's phonology simpler than Polish, but
| it's still very complex from a global perspective. An
| international auxiliary language should be easy to pronounce.
|
| Relatedly, Zamenhof made up some new diacritics to spell these
| crazy sounds that he shouldn't have included in the language to
| begin with. c spells "ch" in Esperanto and in no other language.
| If you want your language to catch on, why would you give it
| diacritics that no other language has, which people will have
| trouble typesetting and typing? Since Esperantists can rarely
| type c and related glyphs, they end up typing cx, sx, jx, gx,
| etc. instead. Why not just ch or sh? Why not just ditch these
| sounds altogether?
|
| There are lots of other issues. The verb endings -as, -is, -us
| for present, past, and future tense end up sounding very similar
| to each other in fast speech (and the idea of making a tense
| distinction by changing the form of the verb is very European to
| begin with). The accusative endings -n are so confusing that (so
| I hear) the native Esperanto speakers have dropped this feature
| of the language. There is grammatical gender in the pronouns, and
| adjectives must agree in number and case with nouns.
|
| So to conclude the rant, ironically, if Esperanto ever does take
| over as an auxiliary language, it will be solely because it has
| the largest community of all the auxiliary languages, not because
| it is a good language. In other words, the same way that a normal
| language takes over. I guess it bugs me that it could have been
| done much better. It gives a bad name to constructed languages.
| Interlingua and Ido are big improvements, and you can also check
| out Lojban for a much more radical non-Eurocentric approach.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
| k__ wrote:
| I heard it was very eurocentric. Are there more global
| alternatives?
| msla wrote:
| > I heard it was very eurocentric.
|
| It is.
|
| > Are there more global alternatives?
|
| If you refuse to count English, no, none.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Esperanto is like the "Soylent" of languages. Some folks like the
| idea of it, some might even use it, but no one _actually_ likes
| esperanto (OK, except the 1000 "native" speakers the article
| refers to).
|
| There's something profoundly unappealing in a hard-to-define
| subjective sense about engineering a language for humans to
| communicate with.
|
| There's plenty of languages in existence that already "just
| work". What's wrong with English, Spanish and French? One could
| argue that English has already taken on the role that Esperanto
| was supposed to have. In the colonial past that might have been
| French or Spanish. In the distant future an Asian language could
| become a lingua franca? Or perhaps more radically, effective
| machine translation could render such efforts unnecessary?
|
| Yes, there's annoying things about real languages. There's
| inconsistent grammar in English, "Passe Compose" tense in French,
| one could list hundreds of pain points for every language. But
| none of these things actually prevent someone from the practical
| usage of a language and being conversant in the language. Why do
| we need to make-up another language with iron-clad consistency?
| It's just not necessary.
| foolmeonce wrote:
| I can understand French and German. I will never be able to
| speak French without offending the ears of natives. German I
| might do better in with another 10 years, that will be about 20
| years of being an annoying drain on the culture.. A bit like a
| second childhood.
|
| In Esperanto, it's about 3 months to get to not terrible for
| native speakers (yes there are native speakers) and a year or
| two to be quite good, maybe as annoying as your typical
| undergraduate to the top level of translators, authors, etc.
| def_true_false wrote:
| Sure, but why do we have to use a character set that can only
| cleanly represent sounds made by the Romans of 2500 years ago?
| bigbubba wrote:
| Same reason Americans use Phillips head screws instead of
| something sensible like square drive. Network effects. It may
| not be ideal but you can get by with it, and most other
| people are using it as well. Some might look north wistfully,
| but most around them continue using what they know.
|
| And keep in mind, switching to square drive would be _easy_.
| Screwdriver sets already come with square drive bits, and
| hardware stores sell square drive fasteners. Robertson 's
| patents expired generations ago. If America can't drop
| Phillips head screws, do you really think there is any chance
| for replacing the Latin alphabet? Let's get real.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I'm going to be pedantic here, but Phillips head screws
| serve a purpose - they limit torque by allowing the driver
| to cam out. They're almost always improperly used, but my
| point stands :)
|
| Torx is far superior to square drive, too...
| bigbubba wrote:
| Cam-out seems like an ex post facto justification to me.
| Henry Ford would have picked Robertson if not for the
| licensing trouble. Robertson's lack of a cam-out
| 'feature' wasn't the reason.
| def_true_false wrote:
| Well, I suppose the printing press has a way of blocking
| progress. Some languages did manage to update their
| orthography more recently though, e.g. Lithuanian.
|
| If you look at the former Soviet Union (CIS), you can see a
| shift away from Russian Cyrillic, so I suppose given enough
| political incentive, such changes are in fact possible.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| We use the "character set" our parents and our culture gave
| us. It does the job as well as any other character set,
| because language is not merely a tool, like a set of bits for
| your screwdriver. It's a part of your identity and your place
| in the world.
|
| You can, of course, pick up other languages and with effort
| use them either skillfully, or just pragmatically. But no one
| will ever feel that Esperanto is "their" language. It will
| always be either a curiosity or, at best, a utilitarian tool
| (and even then only if it ever becomes wildly successful).
| fanf2 wrote:
| Most informative thing I have read about Esperanto is
| http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html
| fizixer wrote:
| Esperanto sounds and feels too Spanish. If you prefer to replace
| English supremacy with Spanish-ish supremacy, be my guest.
| [deleted]
| dgellow wrote:
| English is the universal language.
| yoz-y wrote:
| *In many places.
|
| For some it might be surprising to find just how many people
| don't speak English.
| HashingtheCode wrote:
| Just learn INGSOC's Newspeak. I know, it doesn't exist yet, but
| big tech and lefties are making it happen by changing the meaning
| of commonly used words in the dictionary.
|
| As personal communication, Newspeak is to be spoken in staccato
| rhythm, using words that are short and easy to pronounce. The
| Party intends to make speech physically automatic and
| intellectually unconscious in order to diminish the possibility
| of critical thought occurring to the speaker. English words of
| comparative and superlative meanings and irregular spellings were
| simplified into regular spellings; thus, better becomes gooder
| and best becomes goodest. The prefixes plus- and doubleplus- are
| used for emphasis (for example, pluscold meaning "very cold" and
| doublepluscold meaning "extremely cold"). Adjectives are formed
| by adding the suffix -ful to a root-word, e.g. goodthinkful means
| "Orthodox in thought."; while adverbs are formed by adding the
| suffix -wise, e.g. goodthinkwise means "In an orthodox manner".
| vikramkr wrote:
| Esperanto isn't actually that universal. It's very European,
| using a Latin alphabet, grammar and syntax from romance
| languages, etc. Its going to be very easy for a Spanish or
| English or German speaker to pick up, for example. Probably a bit
| less easy for someone speaking a language on the idno side of
| indo European, like a hindi speaker, and then progressively
| harder as you get further and further away from the languages'
| core influences. Im bilingual between languages from two totally
| unrelated language families (Indo European and dravidian) - and
| Esperanto is a lot closer to the former than the latter. I dont
| know if its even possible to make a language universal between
| disparate language families.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Let's imagine that there is an auxiliary language that takes 10
| words from every language on Earth.
|
| Such a language would in fact be profoundly _unfair_ to
| speakers of minority languages today because it would deny them
| access to the largest markets of the world. The English
| speakers would keep their knowledge and access to global
| markets while the Finnish speakers would gain 10 words of
| English. Woopty doo.
|
| So a language that takes words only from the top 5 languages
| would be better, yes? Because it teaches minority speakers more
| words from more important languages. But even still, what does
| that give you if you learn 500 words from each major language
| and the grammar is a bizarre mash up of totally different
| languages?
|
| The most "fair" language would be the one that gives the
| minority language speakers _useful_ and _meaningful_ access to
| the most influential language family "at a discount". Picking
| from one family would allow one to distill the grammar _and_
| vocabulary, giving the student truly useful and applicable
| information if they decide to later branch out into natural
| languages / dialects.
|
| In today's world, the most influential language family is by
| far Indo-European (for better or worse). And it just so happens
| that this language family is the easiest to synthesize and join
| back together, although there's nothing stopping others from
| trying to make a Semitic auxiliary language or a Sino-Tibetan
| auxiliary language, etc.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You're not wrong, but if you're designing a universal language
| I think Latin script is the only feasible option. You're not
| helping anyone if you invent an entirely new script that
| everyone has to learn from scratch, and that doesn't even have
| extant keyboards. Latin script is the only choice that makes
| sense -- most people worldwide already have at least some
| familiarity with it, and it has excellent universal hardware
| and software support. Nothing else even comes close.
| bigbubba wrote:
| I agree, but for the same reasons shouldn't Esperanto just be
| English or Spanish? _Way_ more people are familiar with these
| systems than Esperanto.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Esperanto is much easier to learn.
| bigbubba wrote:
| Not really; maybe for a particularly motivated individual
| but not on the large scale. You'll have more succeeds
| teaching English to large numbers of people because more
| people will be motivated to learn it, because learning
| English presently had WAY more immediate short-term
| utility than learning Esperanto.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Have you tried. I wonder if I'm more qualified to judge
| or are you.
|
| I know three languages, Finnish is my native and I know
| both Sweden and English. I'm not good at languages and
| but Esperanto was incredibly easy to learn. The grammar
| is so simple and logic.
|
| Words are created from 900 roots by just adding affixes
| or making compounds. This makes learning the vocabulary
| incredibly easy.
| bigbubba wrote:
| The number of people who succeed is all that matters
| because that's all that moves you closer to the finish
| line of 'universal.' It doesn't matter if Esperanto is
| the most pleasurable language to learn if approximately
| nobody bothers to learn it because it has no pragmatic
| use, because nobody uses it. Network effects work in
| favor of English and against Esperanto. Esperanto simply
| doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell.
| [deleted]
| JdeBP wrote:
| For maximum irony, you should end your post with at least two
| emojis. (-:
| phlakaton wrote:
| *, , .
|
| (With Unicode, the introduction of new alphabetic writing
| systems presents no significant technological problems, as
| you can see.)
| anticensor wrote:
| I have a mother, not a fatheress. (Esperanto speakers got the
| joke)
| JdeBP wrote:
| There _have_ been efforts to fix this over the years, but this
| is indeed a problem with the way that the language was
| designed.
| anticensor wrote:
| Esperanto has chosen all words to be masculine positive by
| default, they could have introduced a feminine-only word like
| French does though, such as _mino_.
| guykdm wrote:
| What's wrong with the king's English?
| yoz-y wrote:
| Esperanto is much easier to learn, provided you already know
| latin or Cyrillic alphabet.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What an excellent example of Betteridge's Law.
| lx0741 wrote:
| Lol English is the new Esperanto!
| swatson741 wrote:
| "Esperanto Is Not Dead: Can The Universal Language Make A
| Comeback?"
|
| I'm not trying to be that guy but, looking at the title for this
| piece I'm thinking: Esperanto is dead and, it is not a universal
| language.
|
| "... Humphrey Tonkin, an English professor at the University of
| Hartford in Connecticut. He taught himself Esperanto at age 14,
| and then used it to travel across Eastern Europe and beyond."
|
| I feel like this needs some clarification.
| garmaine wrote:
| There is an active Esperanto couch serving community. Free room
| and board to those who speak the language.
| rihegher wrote:
| This service is called "Pasporta Servo" for those interested
| garmaine wrote:
| "Couch surfing"
| irrational wrote:
| Recently someone said to me that the EU really needs a common
| language - just like how English is spoken across most USA
| states. But none of the current European languages would be
| acceptable across the EU.
|
| It didn't occur to me at the time, but now I wonder if Esperanto
| could fill that role?
| leke wrote:
| I think English already does fill that role.
| HashingtheCode wrote:
| Nobody needs another language .... we already have too many which
| causes no end of communication problems.
|
| Esperanto, the world's least spoken language. Even Klingon is
| spoken by more people than Esperanto hahahaha.
|
| "Finally, a mention of tlhIngan (Klingon) for you - by far the
| Most widely spoken fictional language. Participants at Star Trek
| conventions frequently converse in the language and in addition
| to a Klingon Dictionary there are Klingon translations of Hamlet,
| Much Ado About Nothing,Gilgamesh, and the Tao Te Ching. Qapla'!"
| -- Guiness Book of World Records
|
| Please just learn English or Klingon.
| innocenat wrote:
| > Esperanto creates a kind of "level playing field," because it's
| a second language for almost everyone who speaks it, says
| Humphrey Tonkin.
|
| It doesn't. It is entirely based on European and Western culture.
| Language have huge influent on thought process, and it seems that
| thought process needed for Esperanto is a Western-centric.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > Language have huge influent on thought process, and it seems
| that thought process needed for Esperanto is a Western-centric
|
| I believe that Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been considered
| unfounded and a meme for a long time now. It sort of makes
| sense, but strangely I don't think there is any evidence for
| such a thing.
| brandmeyer wrote:
| I agree that it is highly unlikely that language affects what
| you can or cannot think. But there are some strong
| differences between European languages and Chinese. Some of
| the Chinese particles function very different from anything
| in English. For example `ma` and `ba` can act like a verbal
| punctuation mark.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles
| lukevp wrote:
| Hmm, I think it makes a lot of sense that a language would
| govern your thought patterns. This happens in software, you
| are limited in what you can create and do by what concepts
| you can easily express, why wouldn't this be true for
| language? I truly want to know because I have heard this many
| times and believed it, but if there's no evidence I'd need to
| reevaluate.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > This happens in software, you are limited in what you can
| create and do by what concepts you can easily express
|
| Even this is rare in software. For example, I recall
| reading a blog "Why Python is a Lisp" or something. And it
| basically destroyed this idea that Lisp was some magical
| insane language because the author did all the lisp things
| except they used python.
|
| But yes, in some of the minor claims, I think there's some
| credence to the idea. But the idea that one language is
| _incapable_ of understanding concepts in another is
| unfounded.
| whatatita wrote:
| I think this rationale is largely conflated with the idea
| that the laguage we speak dictates how we think. As others
| have mentioned, this is largely considered a falacy
| nowadays.
|
| The most obvious argument against this is that you can very
| easily conceive of something but be unable to articulate
| it. You can _think_ something but be unable to _put it into
| words_. Given this, it stands to reason that thought =/=
| language.
|
| Similarly, new words are coined all the time to refer to
| new and original ideas, these ideas must - if you believe
| language dictates what we can conceive - be impossible to
| form.
|
| If you're interested in this subject, I can __strongly
| __recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. (It 's
| available on Kindle and there's plently of 2nd hand
| paperbacks online too.)
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _This happens in software, you are limited in what you
| can create and do by what concepts you can easily express_
|
| Because the computer isn't really thinking. It's just
| mechanically following what the language says. So of course
| what you can do is limited by what the language can
| express, because that's all there is.
|
| Human minds don't seem to be the same. They can have ideas
| without necessarily needing to start with language to build
| the idea on.
|
| For one thing, we've all experienced having a thought but
| being unable to think of the word for it. Despite being
| unable to articulate it, you can look in the dictionary at
| possible words and tell from their definitions whether they
| match.
|
| You could say that this is just our brains thinking in
| terms of that word without being able to recall its
| concrete form. (The essential meaning of a word and the
| spelling/sound of it might be handled separately by the
| brain.) Maybe that's why sometimes, but it's also possible
| to have a thought and not know that there is a word for it.
| You might tell a friend about someone who has an annoying
| habit of rigidly following and enforcing the rules even
| when that serves no constructive purpose, and your friend
| might tell you that's called being legalistic.
|
| Still, you could argue that's still language-based thought
| because all you did was compose together several pieces of
| language ("rigidly following", "constructive purpose",
| etc.), and that your new vocabulary word is really just a
| shorthand for that composition. Maybe that is true for some
| words, but it can't be true for all of them. If words can
| only be introduced by reference to language, then there's
| no way language could have formed in the first place. There
| must have been a first word.
|
| Another approach is a thought experiment: does a feral
| child (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child) have
| thoughts? If a human grows up with no exposure to language,
| that will have profound effects on them, but I don't think
| those effects go as far as making it impossible to have
| thoughts.
|
| Having said all that, do I think that language heavily
| influences thinking? Definitely. For one thing, exposure
| (and non-exposure) to certain ideas has a big influence on
| thinking. Words convey ideas, and when you learn a word,
| you learn its idea. It may also be true that ideas are
| easier to think about (internally) if they have a
| corresponding word. And it's certainly easier to discuss
| ideas if there are words for them, so those ideas will be
| discussed more often.
| wenc wrote:
| I used to think so too but I once did a little thought
| experiment, and while it seems to be true that language
| influences our thought patterns, I'm not sure if it
| necessarily limits them.
|
| Empirically, we are able to think thoughts and feel things
| that we cannot describe in words. I know I'm able to feel
| ennui, limerence, or hygge without knowing these words.
|
| I can also perceive things and states without necessarily
| being able to describe them precisely with single words
| (but I could probably describe them approximately with many
| words)
|
| The classic example is that the Inuit have many words for
| different types of snow -- implicit in this example is that
| they are able to recognize different types of snow and have
| codified them into shared symbols (words). But to me, that
| doesn't mean the rest of us who don't have those words
| cannot perceive the same if we'd lived in the same
| environment. Children can tell packing snow from sleet from
| a dusting even without knowing the words.
|
| There's an industry of people romanticizing certain words
| in a foreign culture, claiming them to be untranslatable,
| and then writing books/articles about them. Not all of this
| is without merit, but I believe that the words themselves
| aren't so much untranslatable, but that they have no
| compact representation outside of a certain cultural
| context.
|
| Words are compressions of meaning, but meaning can be
| perceived outside of verbal representation, or even
| language. It seems to me one can look at a picture or taste
| a meal or listen to instrumental music and perceive and
| manipulate meaning through no use of language at all.
| Kednicma wrote:
| There's evidence against strong Sapir-Whorf in the logical-
| language subculture. They originally wanted people to learn
| logic by learning Loglan, but today the speakers of Lojban
| and Toaq are usually either fluent or logical but not both.
|
| The weakest forms of Sapir-Whorf are obviously true, via
| Zipf's law; being able to shorten long phrases into short
| nonce words allows for faster communication, which allows for
| normalization of concepts, in a positive feedback loop. In
| English, for example, it's no accident that the shortest two
| words are "a" and "I" and that they are also the most two
| common ways to refer to things; "u" is on the way there, too!
| innocenat wrote:
| I didn't know about Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or any argument on
| it, but what I know is that the flow of information during
| sentence construction is totally different. You cannot use
| the same flow in English to construct natural-sounding
| Japanese sentence, and vice versa. The amount of supplement
| information alone is different.
|
| A quick example is that my mother tongue doesn't have tense,
| and I still misuse tense all the time in English when I am
| careless simply because I am not used to incorporating time
| information during sentence creation when the time
| information is not an important information.
|
| It does not necessarily change your cognition or world view,
| but it does change what information you are actively looking
| for/collecting.
| emodendroket wrote:
| If Esperanto were ever adapted in significant numbers it would
| develop irregular forms and all the other quirks that make
| natural languages difficult to learn.
| adrianN wrote:
| Maybe after a couple of centuries. Languages don't change that
| fast, especially after the introduction of the printing press
| and formal language education in schools.
|
| You can read 200 year old texts without problems. Shakespeare
| is close to five hundred years old and you can still understand
| it with a little effort.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It seems like it would be exactly analogous to the formation
| of pidgins, which takes one generation, not centuries. Also,
| if I think back to high school I would challenge the idea
| that every speaker of modern English has "no problems"
| reading 200-year-old texts.
| msla wrote:
| Not if it were only ever a second language, learned in
| classrooms and nowhere else.
|
| Think modern Latin: It's not evolving anymore. It's adding
| words, but its grammar is unchanging.
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