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Note to self: do not make a language intended for global communication by just mixing 3 European languages and taking the hardest to learn features from them.
What do you mean by hardest features? It’s been ages since i looked at Esperanto, but back then I didn’t find it particularly hard to learn.
Let me guess: your native language is Germanic, Romance or Slavic.
Esperanto’s phonetics, phonotactics, vocabulary and grammar are all overly Eurocentric and twice as complicated as they should be for a language that is presented as a tool for global communication. And don’t even get me started on diacritics.
Anyone who grew up speaking a non-Indo-European language is going to have a hard time even getting the hang of the alphabet and all the sounds.
I agree with you there, but I think the problem is that they took the wrong base languages to build Esperanto from, not that they took the hardest parts of those languages.
That is also true.
esperanto is ridiculously easy to learn, even from a global linguistic perspective. the grammar, in particular, is predictable and avoids irregularities. you’re probably referring more to familiarity than ease of learning. of course it is even easier to learn if you come from europe since it adopts many european words, but that doesn’t change it’s general simplicity.
That still makes it a poor tool for global communication. Within EU, maybe. But not global. More than half of global population is going to have to learn a dozen of new sounds and distinctions in pronunciation to even start.
I personally think we should use grunts and gestures
hrmpf 👍
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Not really possible to make a language everyone is familiar with as languages globally are so different.
🤔 🤨 👎
one could of course try to make an easier or better suited language but calling it a poor tool is harsh critique considering that esperanto is the most sucessful attempt for an artificial global language today and already avoids many hard to learn features from other languages.
What can I say, the bar isn’t high. It avoids some hard to learn features but introduces others, mostly in the phonetics and orthography.
i guess i can agree on that. i still would like an artificial easy to learn global language.
Why even make a language, if there are plenty of existing languages to choose from?
Just pick the most widely understood one and you’re done.
Any natural language is way harder than Esperanto.
One problem in international relationships is that native speakers of the language that is used will always be able to express themselves better than others and will thus have an advantage in debates and discussions. The original idea was that everyone should learn Esperanto as a second language which would level the field and improve international relations.
So the solution would be to have Esperanto but with the phonetics of, say, Hawaiian?
Toki pona is an interesting example, though it’s not an international auxiliary language. But it still relies on a simplistic phonetic inventory and limited core vocabulary to make communication as easy as possible.
not an international auxiliary language
Hasn’t stopped people from trying to hammer it into one (i.e kokanu)
Even just within the EU, interligua would be a much better alternative. That one has specifically been designed for use in the EU though, and not for global communication.
I’m not convinced that the consistent grammar and spelling is actually a feature of Esperanto. I think it’s just a feature of being a language that nobody uses so it hasn’t had a chance to inevitably evolve like actual languages people use.
I maintain that the most realistically usable artificial global language would be something inspired by toki pona, but with actual effort put into picking words that are maximally understandable and pronounceable by as many people as possible and is designed to be incredibly difficult to mangle beyond intelligibility.
No even remotely complex rules, nothing fancy whatsoever, just an engineered caveman speech that literally anyone can learn from a pamphlet and reliably use to communicate basic normal things with anyone else. Like the way you end up talking when you just barely know a language and need to communicate “i’m allergic to shellfish, can you guarantee that my food won’t have touched any part of an animal with a shell?”
Yeah, toki pona phonetics are ideal for an international language, literally every phoneme is extremely common
but you can learn esperanto in like a month… estas tre facile stultuloj…
You can learn it in a month….if you are from Western Europe.
Two if you’re from anywhere else, seriously the number of words you need to learn is minuscule compared with other languages because of the suffix and prefix system that esperanto has
You might as well just write it in Singlish. It’s not a real language so it would be difficult to write a technical paper. What is Esperanto for hydrodynamics?
If a word does not exist in Esperanto you can use other words to create a new one just like hydrodynamics means (roughly don’t @ me) “study of movement of fluid” you could put together fluid + movement + study (Fluidmovadlogio) in esperanto and it would be completely understandable even if you don’t know the “correct” term
What is Esperanto for hydrodynamics?
Are you ok? Do you smell burning toast?
(I kid, I knew a guy who was really good at it, it was always fun to have him translate things to esperanto for fun)
lol, BTW spoken esperanto has a bit of a problem because the person speaking it injects the pronunciation of its language into it so you end up with germans and french doing the german and french “R” or the anglos mispronouncing a lot of vowels.
…
Use esoteric knowledge of jet streams to firebomb the Pacific coast of the United States with balloons.
“But Esperanto is the future!”
Hot take: Everyone should accept that English is the common language, and only speaking one language is a setback.
also hot take: US schools should teach 100–300 most common kanji (their meanings and pronunciations in Mandarin) if nothing else to dispel the myth that logograms are “too hard to learn” for English speakers
If it’s Mandarin, they’re hanzi, kanji is specifically Japanese 😝
In 3 months, you could learn 300 at 5 per school day. That’s not even too crazy.
TIL what kanji are called in Mandarin (I’m a weeb and have only studied Japanese haha)
Hah, same for the most part. I have a lot of Chinese friends though, so have learned a tiny bit about Mandarin.
I’d love to split off a timeline where we just teach the basics of as many languages and scripts to kids as possible, it’d be a great experiment
knowing gen Z they’d probably invent a 300+ language pidgin comprised almost entirely of memes which would be impossible for the rest of us to learn. it’d be glorious
Only if you accept that English is a garbage language and reform it so the rest of the world has to learn a sensible language instead of the clusterfuck that is english.
I’m not sure if the language is good or bad. If it’s the most spoken currently, it seems like it’s a shoe in for our DnD common language, though. No favoritism, just using stats to decide.
What’s your proposal?
My thought is: Everyone can speak English, but spelling is just terrible. Make it phonetically consistent. Easiest transition, but of course you are still stuck with… English (words, grammar, quirks).
I actually have a proposal for my own language (spanish). It’s written in a jokingly manner, but here it is: https://github.com/Calcoph/espa-ol-dos
The good thing about Spanish is that if you know the rules, you know how to pronounce a word when you see it written. However, if you hear it, it is ambiguous as to how it is written. So my proposal for spanish makes each letter have 1 sound and 1 sound only. And each sound is represented by a single letter.
A similar thing to that would already massively improve English. And that’s just changing how the words are written, without changing the grammar at all.
Notice how that changes the easiest part of the language to change. You don’t need to change grammar, or words used, or pronunciation.
Just having the sounds and the text be consistent with each other makes the language massively easier to learn. In addition, you wouldn’t have one different way to pronounce each word per town in England. So even if you learned English from a texan, you would still be able to communicate perfectly with a Liverpool Englishman.
Even if local accents form, everyone would know how to fall back to the “correct” pronunciation if they see they’re talking to a foreigner and are having trouble communicating.
Of course, all other aspects of English are a clusterfuck too, but you gotta start somewhere. And I think it’s best to start with the high impact low hanging fruit.
EDIT: I just noticed I didn’t completely read your comment. My proposal is basically the same.
I had a great chuckle at your GitHub, must have taken a while! You have my vote. Gracias por compartir!
all languages are clusterfucks, have you seen japanese?
Doesn’t make it an excuse.
If you want a language to be used universally, it must not be a clusterfuck.
If it is a clusterfuck, it’s easier to make excuses to not adopt the language. So it will fail in becoming a universal language.
“Why would I learn English to communicate with you? You should learn Spanish to communicate with me! Since English has X and Y issues that Spanish doesn’t have”.
Yeah, as fucky as English is, as hard as it can be to learn, it’s currently the lingua franca ;)
Plus, because it’s a language that loves borrowing words and phrases, it’s already set up with an ease of integration to a limited extent.
At this point, any effort to displace it as the default is going to cause as much trouble and hassle as it’s place as the default does.
That being said, a language like Esperanto would be a better choice overall. It’s kinda like how Latin can serve as a neutral and fixed language because it’s dead. Esperanto isn’t dead, but it’s similarly fixed, and not tied to a single culture, so it would work. Then again, so would Latin
Esperanto isn’t dead
Only because it was never alive to begin with
Lmmfao! Yeah, it never even had a chance, unfortunately
Yeah, English is the most spoken language in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
I agree but i think we also need to accept that the majority of humans live in asia and should have their own influence on the language, rather than trying to keep it from changing by associating it to specific countries where it’s native.
If “international english” turns into a creole of basically every major language, and everyone makes an effort to learn or at least become familiar with languages unrelated to their native one; then it becomes vastly more fair and useful as a lingua franca.
Pardon my wall of text:
I’m blowing smoke on this topic based on dnd terms. Common tongue is English because more people speak that already. Whatever people do to it after, they do to it after, but English as a starting point removes the need for more people to learn Esperanto or whatever other language wants to be “common.”
In the fantasy I’ve created in my head/my hot take: it would be easier if people shifted to English as common, and had “secondary” languages based on their location.
(In the real world, even sign language isn’t universal. Certain languages like German apparently also do better for certain things like written law. I realize it’s silly to expect our species to choose a common language based on numbers alone. I think more people speak English specifically because English speaking countries hold more sway on international economics/warfare (for now), and other countries have responded in kind.)
In my setting I use Esperanto as an ancient common tongue and English as a modern one. That’s because it’s ridiculously easy to construct false etymologies to explain various features of the English language if you use Esperanto as a base.
Esperanto words also have somewhat guessable meanings if you know your Latin and Greek roots, even though the text is not comprehensible generally. So players can have hints at the meaning of a text without knowing what it really says.
When I need to obscure the meaning more, I mix up the words in a sentence. Because Esperanto has an accusative case, you can mix up the sentence order without loss of meaning. But it makes the sentence harder to read and obscures the relationship between the words.
Also, it sounds like an incomprehensible but distinctly European language when spoken. Players tell me it sounds like Spanish.
Should have published in Lojban.
The Esperanto bento
I’ve never looked at Esperanto. Is it at least easy to learn and use?
I have to look up it’s history, like who and when thought it’s a good idea, and why it didn’t work out. Sounds like a fun rabbit hole.
It is ridiculously simple. Honestly, I don’t understand why it wasn’t chosen as a European language. We could have had an easy-to-learn, inclusive language that avoids grammatical irregularities. it doesn’t give an advantage to certain nations or disadvantages to others and as an artificial language it doesn’t prefer any culture over another. Just imagine how easy it would be to learn other languages if you already had that foundation. The pronunciation is simple, and even people outside the EU have advocated for it, since it is easy to learn worldwide. I speak German, English, and a little French, Japanese, and Spanish; Esperanto is far easier than any of those languages.
Because language is cultural and thus doesn’t lend itseld to artificiality. Not that it doesn’t happen but it is unpredictable as to what is adopted and what is left in the dust.
Most European languages are some almagation and standardization of a patchwork of dialects. English destroyed scots, Tours french destroyed occitan, hochdeutsch largely displaced bavarian, etc. The reason is the dramatic increase in state power in the 19th century (therefore giving importance to the language of administration), combined with policies of “cultural unification” and nation building. So there in fact very much is artificiality in language that is predictable.
The reason Esperanto wasn’t adopted by states when it was invented is because internationalism was seen as either an utopia or a threat by states. The reason it isn’t adopted by the UE now is because it would be a highly visible and unpopular move that would take decades to bear fruit and therefore politicians will never support it. The entire UE therefore learns english, massively increasing the influence of people who brand themselves its enemies.
The cultural erasure of the past were monarchy run genocides…
Honestly, I don’t understand why it wasn’t chosen as a European language
It has the same problem as Lojban - you can only use it to communicate with the sort of people that learn Esperanto.
That’s because it wasn’t chosen as a European language. If it were, more people would learn it.
Oh you’re a french businessman looking to expand into Spain? Sorry, we don’t know french, you’ll have to use one of the official languages to do the paperwork, which includes esperanto.
You would need to pay a spanish-speaking lawyer. Then a German one, then an English one. Or you could pay a single esperanto-speaking one that would be accepted in any European country.
This would incentivize lawyers to learn esperanto. You could do similar things for other fields. Eventually (after a LOT of time), it would just make sense to do daily life in esperanto.
Had it been chosen as a European language and been adopted by a large population, it would quickly stop being simple.
as an artificial language it doesn’t prefer any culture over another
as long as it’s European, of course
Indo-European. That is, 3.4 billion native speakers. And only for the vocabulary and writing system: the grammar is pretty universal.
oh sure, i bet punjabi speakers find esperanto trivial to learn, and the latin script it’s written in just feels so familiar to them.
Punjabi speakers will find Esperanto easier than any natural language. It will be harder for them than for, say, a French speaker, but in the absolute it will be easy for both.
Not every Indo-European is going to have a compatible phonetic inventory or vocabulary. It’s specifically very limited to Europe, as is grammar.
No the grammar will be easily understood to anyone having a language with an accusative morphosyntactic alignment, that is, by far the most widespread one. The phonetic inventory is quite limited, so perfectly learnable for every culture. For the vocabulary I agree, but it’s linked to the most spoken languages of the world, so, not that bad.
quite limited
If you’re Polish
most spoken languages of the world
Haven’t seen any vocabulary from Mandarin in Esperanto
If you’re Polish
There are 28 phonemes in Esperanto. 44 in English. 51 in Polish (probably less, in fact, I don’t speak Polish maybe someone who does could correct me?).
Haven’t seen any vocabulary from Mandarin in Esperanto.
All ≠ most.
It was a good idea for the time it was created, when Europeans were constantly killing eachother all over the place.
Finally, it was forming the EU that got them to stop. So creating a common language kinda felt unnecessary after that.Do you know if anyone has tried a similar language project that takes the entire globe into account?
There were many, many attempts. Most with a European bias tbh, but not all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages#Auxiliary_languages
Thankyou vm for the references to go through. Cheers. Fascinating topic for me, who has never learned any language other than English.
why it didn’t work out
Hitler and Stalin. That’s why.
Kiam oni konsciiĝas, ke oni povas diri ian ajn rubon sur la interreto per tiu ĉi lingvo, ĉar neniu komprenos sin
Intertanto, multo de personas poterea leger iste sin haber a aprender le lingua.
for one second i thought i was reading portuguese
I didn’t understand the original comment, but does this mean something along the lines of “many people will be able to read this without having learned the language”?
Yes. It’s interlingua. Most people who speak a romance language should be able to make a decent guess as to what it means.
Interesting. I speak German, English, a bit of French and I understand a smidgeon of Spanish and Swedish. Cheers for the explanation, it seems to work.
Interlingua has nothing to do with Esperanto though, does it?
Interlingua has nothing to do with Esperanto though, does it?
It was developed with similar goals, but otherwise not. As a spoken language it’s even less popular than Esperanto, but because of the way it was developed a lot of people can still understand it.
aŭ tiel vi pensas…
Use Toki Pona for your scientific papers.
