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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 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 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?
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Had it been chosen as a European language and been adopted by a large population, it would quickly stop being simple.
why it didn’t work out
Hitler and Stalin. That’s why.
The Esperanto bento
Use Toki Pona for your scientific papers.
Should have published in Lojban.
