The problem with invented languages is that it is almost always possible to find some easy criticism of it (e.g., inherent sexism in vocabulary), and since it's invented, you can't shrug it off with "historical baggage" like you can with natural languages. When trying to design it for an international audience, and trying to avoid tying it to a specific language or language family, it's basically impossible to find sufficiently universal constructs.
Phonetics is the easiest thing to find a universal subset for--there's basically only so many ways you can physically structure your mouth to make sounds (although it does operate rather on a continuum basis). We can also objectively say that some sounds are easier to produce than others. Even then, the intersection of all languages' phonemic inventories is probably empty. The basic structure of a dozen or so consonants (m, n, b, p, j, s, z, k, g, d, t, w, h, say) with 5 basic vowels structured in a strict CV syllable format, with no diphthongs and vowel length, aspiration, and tone all being non-phonemic is the basic outline for how to design the phonotactics of a universal language.
Moving beyond phonemes is virtually impossible, however. Trying to design a basic lexeme for the language obviously runs into problem of where you source the lexemes (particularly since borrowing from several different languages tends to make it completely incomprehensible to everybody, although you may find that more tasteful than prejudicing one language's speakers as having an easier time mastering the lexeme). But even choosing which words to make root lexemes and which ones to make compounds is difficult. Should blue and green be separate lexemes? What about blue and azure? Should right be "not-left" but south not be "not-north"? Languages often attach multiple meanings to the same word, and these meanings don't always match up across languages.
Grammar is even worse. It's hard to find any grammatical structure that's truly universal across languages; maybe the separation of function between nouns and verbs, but the proclivity to verb nouns is so common in languages that it's questionable how fundamental the distinction actually is. Even the basic meaning of things like mood, aspect, and tense can be hard to settle, since the forms that exist in languages can partially overlap certain combinations (past/present+future versus past+present/future forms being the most well-known). Having to mark cases that don't exist in your native language can be difficult; English users' trouble with the subjunctive is well-known.
> (e.g., inherent sexism in vocabulary), and since it's invented, you can't shrug it off with "historical baggage"
Introduction of Esperanto: 1887
Formation of the International Alliance of Women: 1904
Women's suffrage in the US: 1920
I think this kind of dismisses the claim that Esperanto cannot have historical baggage.
For Esperanto one could even claim that it is a way of making it easier by having neuter and masculine to be identical - just for like most other languages on could interpretations that make it equal, pro men or pro women ("they have their special form").
However I agree that a neutral form would probably even make it easier to talk/communicate in many situations.
One also has to differentiate Ido and Esperanto there. While Esperanto sees the language as set into stone it's most famous and related competitor, Ido is evolving, so one could pick that up in such a case and still be pretty good with Esperanto.
And one last thing: What's important about a standard is that there is one that people use an not that it's perfect. See UTF-8 vs competitors and similar. Esperanto is also primarily meant as an auxiliary language, which I think has the strong point of not manipulating society through language.
Many Esperanto speakers are actually in deference of other and especially not widely used languages, also because of the reason of especially the mother tongue defining how people think.
Disclaimer: I am not an Esperanto speaker, even though I was interested as a teenager.
> (although it does operate rather on a continuum basis)
Actually, consonants are pretty discrete. You can move your tongue further and further back and it is still perceived as the same fricative (for example), but move it just a bit further back and the quality of the sound changes completely to another fricative.
Vocals, on the other hand, are continuous, so that miniscule changes in your jaw-tongue configuration makes it sound differently.
That's why you usually recognize non-native speakers by their vowels. It takes many years to get vowels right.
I can't resist rambling about what kind of a language /I/ would create:
1) The native consonants of Finnish (h j k l m n p r s t v ng/ŋ) and the vowels of Arabic (a u i), as a compromise between not having too many sounds that could be difficult to produce or even distinguish to some, and not having so few that you can't have recognizable loanwords.
2) Syllables CV or CVC
3) No grammar features such as tenses, cases, moods, or even number, because many Asian languages lack them, like classical Chinese for a very literary example, plus they are just an unnecessary detriment to learning and speaking. I'm not sure what the grammar that is left should look like but it should be minimal.
4) Vocabulary sourced from Estonian, since it won't be too terribly mangled by the reduced alphabet, as a Uralic language is equally obscure to everyone else yet has an extensive living vocabulary, and since nobody is likely to go "well why don't I then just learn Estonian instead", especially if they've tried to read an Estonian grammar book.
I think if you wanted to construct a language for maximum learnability, you'd have to tackle it both from the perspective of a speaker/writer and a listener/reader. The language should allow a speaker to make any distinction they can in their native language, but not require them to make a distinction that is foreign to them. On the other hand, it should allow a listener to understand any distinction they could understand in their native language, but allow them to ignore everything else.
In practice, these requirements are obviously at odds with each other. You have to balance the freedom available to a speaker with the mental capacity of a listener. If you want to accomodate speakers of languages that allow free word order due to case marking, as well as languages that have a fixed word order, you might end up with case marking and marks to indicate a specific fixed word order. But then all of these markings would have to be understood by the listener, who'd have trouble keeping the various forms straight.
However, you might be able to quantify the learning effort required and optimize for that. This is obviously hard for grammar and semantics, but could be done for phonetics.
Instead of trying to intersect the phoneme sets in use, or giving up and choosing arbitrarily, you could collect statistics on the ability to produce and distinguish various phones, and then optimize for communicability. A speaker can pronounce a phoneme as well as the allophone that is easiest to pronounce for them, a listener can distinguish a pair of phonemes as well as the most similar combination of allophones from them. Then calculate the expectation over all pairings of speaker and listener, maximize the bandwidth accounting for the required error correction, and you get your perfect phoneme set. I'm actually interested what the result might look like, whether there will be a few, clearly separate phonemes, or a huge number with potential overlap, that needs to be compensated by unambiguous vocabulary.
It also occurred to me that this might somehow apply to constructing programming languages, but I'm hazy about the details. Maybe something like Python's "one way to do it" vs other languages supporting a variety of styles?
Esperanto is already far easier than natural languages for anyone to learn; it's about 10x easier than English or German for French speakers. I'm not sure how much easier it can get.
It's not particularly surprising since Esperanto borrows a lot of vocabulary from Romance languages.
Even citing from the same Wikipedia page:
>According to the results, preliminary Esperanto study led to a 25% improvement in acquiring Russian, 30% for German, 40% for English, and even 50% for French.
It seems to clearly show a greater similarity with French (a romance language) than the others.
I'm French myself but I must say that I never really got the appeal of Esperanto. Sure, I might be able to learn it relatively easily. I could also learn Italian pretty easily and I'd gain access to around 64million native speakers and a very rich culture.
If you want an international lingua franca then there's already English and if you think that's too difficult to learn there's Spanish. Not as easy as Esperanto? Maybe, but call me when Esperanto reaches half a billion speakers.
Also the "10x easier than English or German for French speakers" surprises me because it seems to say that English and German are roughly equally difficult to learn for French speakers while it seems pretty obvious to me (having studied both languages at school for many years) than German is very significantly harder.
English has many cognates thanks to the large influx of French words in past centuries, a very simple grammar for the most part (trivial conjugations in particular), no real case system (only a few leftovers like in Romance languages), no gendered nouns. The only thing that's a bit more difficult in English as far as I can tell is the pronunciation.
"The only thing that's a bit more difficult in English as far as I can tell is the pronunciation."
Add in there a greater load of multi-word expressions compared to other languages, and painstaking word order rules (like if there's more than one adjective then those have to follow each other in a specific manner), and many other downplayed hardships.
It's true, I almost mentioned multi-word expressions because I recall that it was a sticking point when learning the language. That being said German loves compound words and those can get a while to get used to as well. Phrase structure is also pretty different in German, with a propensity to put the verb at the end of sentences in some forms.
Adjective order however is not really a problem IMO, it's irrelevant while consuming the language (unless a text tries to convey some meaning by purposefully miss-ordering the adjectives) and in general getting it wrong while producing English will make you sound foreign but shouldn't hurt comprehension too much. Saying "the red big house" instead of "the big red house" will raise some eyebrows but should remain understandable.
The answers to your questions are in the wikipedia link.
> "10x easier than English or German for French speakers" surprises me
145 hours of Esperanto = 1500 in English = 2000 in German
> I could also learn Italian pretty easily
Can you learn Italian with less than zero effort? No. Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target.
Less than zero effort? Probably not. In 150hours? I'd say I'd get a pretty decent level. French and Italian really are very close, the main difficulty is probably adjusting to the phonology of the spoken language coming from French's rather barbaric pronunciation. I can already slowly decipher Italian newspapers without having ever studied the language.
And once I get fluent enough I have access to a wealth of resources to keep studying: movies, tv shows, radio, videogames, newspapers, philosophy books, plays, operas... I can go anywhere in Italy and practice with people in all kinds of situations. I can even get a job there where I'll speak Italian all day long.
Esperanto is an interesting experiment but I find it really hard to invest the time necessary to learn the language.
>Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target.
Did they check if people performed worse when taught, say, 150 hours of Spanish before the target language? It's not really a surprise that learning a language can make it easier to learn other languages, if only because it gives you a certain discipline and mental framework.
And if it does turn out that learning 150hours of Spanish has the same benefits, wouldn't it make more sense to do that instead even if the level of proficiency reached is lower? The practical uses of (even basic) Spanish dwarf that of Esperanto.
> Did they check if people performed worse when taught, say, 150 hours of Spanish before the target language?
The Australian study [1] that is cited in the Wikipedia article compared pupils that learned Esperanto, Indonesian, German or Japanese, respectively, in primary school and then went on to learn a possibly different language in secondary school.
Let me note a few problems with that study up front:
- There was apparently an additional class per week by a professional Esperanto teacher (the other Esperanto teachers were learning on the go).
- The Japanese teachers in the comparison rated themselves 0.25-0.5 on a number of 5-point scales (Esperanto: 1.6-2.4, German 4.5-5, Indonesian: 2-3). This is essentially a plus for Esperanto (easy to learn for the teachers), but taints the comparison since the Japanese teachers were basically incompetent.
- Due to attrition of study subjects, their evaluation after one year of secondary school has only 21 students of Esperanto. (306 students in total)
- They do not differentiate by (or even talk about) the languages learned in secondary school.
Now to the findings (on a 5-point scale [1,2,3,4,5], rated by the secondary-school teachers, given as percentages in each category):
- Motivation to learn the language (presumably the new one): Esperanto [0, 5, 10, 67, 19], others [ 13, 9, 22, 24, 31]. This one is difficult to analyze, since their motivation might change due to liking the new language better (or worse), or due to a general effect on motivation to learn any language (the authors claim the latter). I'll just point out that both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students.
- "attainment level" (no idea what that specifically means): Esperanto [0, 4, 26, 61, 9], others [10, 9, 23, 26, 32]. Again, both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students. The striking resemblance to the motivation results is interesting.
- speaking ability: Esperanto [0, 0, 48, 43, 10], others [12, 8, 46, 27, 6]. This is the only measure where Esperanto seems to be a uniform improvement.
In my opinion, this study mostly shows that this specific Esperanto course did not completely kill off the students ability to learn a foreign language, unlike apparently some other courses. The improvement in speaking ability could be caused by the focus on an immersive classroom experience, but it did apparently transfer to other languages, which is a plus.
The study definitely doesn't show anything like "those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target." (Since they didn't test any such thing.) In fact, my best guess at explaining the higher rate of perfect motivation/attainment scores for students of other languages is that they continued studying the same language they had already had in primary school. If this were the case, it would pretty clearly show that learning Esperanto before learning Japanese is not going to help someone learn Japanese faster overall.
That is a refreshingly honest evaluation of the study that you tend not to see when these studies get brought up (the Wikipedia page is particularly bad at this).
We already know that language acquisition is going to be driven in large part by motivation on the learner's part, as well as competency on the teacher's part, and it's all too easy to construct a study that self-selects motivated students and competent teachers for Esperanto and unmotivated students and marginal teachers for other languages.
Another major question that's completely unanswered to me is the effect of pedagogy on teaching (and, perhaps to a lesser degree, to assessing competence in the learned language). One of the studies Wikipedia cites claims that you can learn the grammar of Esperanto in ~5 hours, which is "impossible" for other languages. That instead screams to me that Esperanto is taught as a detached grammar course in early instruction, whereas other languages will tend to start with a phonological crash-course combined with basic phrase acquisition, instead spreading grammar out over several hundreds of hours of instruction.
Completely agree with you. In particular regarding the "motivated students and teachers" aspect I think it probably plays a role in favor of esperanto in these studies.
I don't think many people have to learn esperanto at school or for work, clearly it heavily biases towards people who are interested in learning languages and esperanto in particular. You have to be very careful while creating your samples to compensate for that I think.
>One of the studies Wikipedia cites claims that you can learn the grammar of Esperanto in ~5 hours, which is "impossible" for other languages. That instead screams to me that Esperanto is taught as a detached grammar course in early instruction, whereas other languages will tend to start with a phonological crash-course combined with basic phrase acquisition, instead spreading grammar out over several hundreds of hours of instruction.
That might be true but on the other hand imagine teaching English students a "detached" French grammar for instance. I think the students would give up within the hour, it's too dense and quirky to be palatable. If Esperanto's grammar is really simple and regular and can be integrated in 5 hours it's a good point in its favor.
One of my favorite early constructed languages, Volapük, was essentially doomed by its extensive use of umlauts. Non-German speakers found them difficult to pronounce (and strange sounding) but the creator responded to all criticism by insisting that a language without umlauts has no soul.
If it's easy to criticize it's also easy do dismiss. Learning a new language is a lot of work, if said language has a tiny amount of speakers and there are some obvious (albeit subjective) flaws that you're unhappy with, why would you bother with it?
Invented languages are like social networks, it's all about reaching that critical mass where the network effect is self-sustaining. Getting there is extremely hard however, especially if, like the parent points out, it's incredibly difficult to actually make a language "objectively" superior to the hundreds of existing languages which already have millions of speakers.
Indeed, getting that network of speakers is the number one challenge a constructed language faces, so simply appealing to people is vastly more important for an constructed language than it may seem at first glance.
Interesting to see this on HN. I'm actually at the congress right now in Seoul, I can answer any questions people might have (though this is only my second congress).
In general I find that the speakers from Asia have to try harder to be understood because of the reduced shared vocabulary and different phonetics. It seems much easier for a speaker of Spanish or Italian.
Before english became the world's international language, that sentiment I think was pretty strong. Now there's no doubt about english as being the international language. I most recently witnessed a japanese speaker and korean speaker who were chatting and when one used an esperanto word the other didn't know, they found the meaning by saying the english word (even though their english wasn't great).
I haven't met many esperantists who don't speak English at all or even at a pretty decent level.
English does not fulfill the neutrality ideal of Esperanto, which many people that speak Esperanto think it's very important. Currently, if you are born in an English speak country, you have such a great advantage over everybody else (starting with you don't have to spend lots of money to learn English, and few people attain native speaking levels later in life).
But it is true that the current purpose of Esperanto is more ideal than practical. I study Esperanto because I really like its internal ideals. I study English because I want to eat.
Esperanto fails at being neutral because it's inherently oriented towards the subset of European languages Zamenhof based it off of. Someone who speaks German or Czech would have an easier time learning it than someone who speaks Mongolian or Korean or Mandarin Chinese.
I find that spanish/italian speakers pick up esperanto the easiest, followed by I suppose french speakers and english speakers. Harder for any speakers who don't already speak a latin-derived language.
> English does not fulfill the neutrality ideal of Esperanto, which many people that speak Esperanto think it's very important.
Yeah, but neither does Esperanto; it's kind of unlikely that a language designed by a human without a strict, mechanical methodology to assure neutrality would, and even then it would need to be isolated from the normal forces that affect natural languages for it to retain that neutrality.
English is probably, in some senses, more neutral than Esperanto; for one thing, English probably has a far greater share of speakers (even first-language speakers) that aren't middle-class-and-above natives of developed countries in Europe or dominated by populations of European descent.
Eh, I wouldn't say the share of english speakers everywhere reflects its neutrality as much as its usefulness in the modern world.
English is currently the international language, even at the esperanto congress. But it makes me appreciate having english as a native language, because I have to watch two non-native speakers struggle (like a polish guy ordering coffee from a korean barista).
I wasn't around for this, but my understanding is that the community had a crisis and needed to rally around a new cause to exist, and that schism is called Raumism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism
The next question I suppose is: is esperanto culture worth being a part of?
It took me 3 months to learn esperanto (with duolingo), but there are a lot of benefits. Generally people are friendly and inviting, partly due to it's non-mainstream nature (consider behavior during the early days of the internet vs youtube comments now)
* It's a foreign language, and there are studies which link language acquisition with mental health (though I'm not sure how solid they are)
* It's an excuse to travel to cities worldwide where you might not go by yourself otherwise. I've found that solo travel at esperanto conferences is great.
it's english and will be for quite some time. maybe not a perfect language, but good enough, simple enough to learn to OK level (compared to french for example).
How large is the congress? What nations are under/over-represented? How strong is the Esperanto culture? Are there a lot of language dweebs or is it mostly people who buy the vision? Is it growing?
1129 participants this year. The top 5 represented countries are:
1. S. Korea - 242
2. Japan - 186
3. China - 114
4. France - 85
5. Germany - 36
There's a pretty long tail of 61 countries this year. (they published stats in the kongresa libro - congress book)
I find that most esperantists are europeans. The euorpean congresses tend to also be the biggest.
Culturally, there seems to be an age gap. The older generation (of which there are a lot of, I'd say the majority for sure are over 50) tends to be more into people who buy into the vision of world peace and inter-cultural communication. The younger crowd tends to be a mixture of world-travelers, language nerds, programmers, kids of esperantists, and people looking for a subculture to latch on to.
Not sure if it's growing, attendance seems to vary:
> In general I find that the speakers from Asia have to try harder to be understood because of the reduced shared vocabulary and different phonetics. It seems much easier for a speaker of Spanish or Italian.
That's because esperanto is pretty much latin + german + russian. That's the roots of the esperanto.
Esperanto was a silly attempt to "unify" europe via a single language.
The article was rather silly. But I guess it was written by esperanto fanatic who wants to spread esperanto. It'll never happen - lest of all in asia, but the best of luck to him.
One interesting influence of Chinese on Esperanto is that you now have two ways to use adjectives as predicates. To say "Anna is beautiful" you can use the copular verb est:
Anna est bela.
Which is like English and most European languages. But you can also say
Anna belas.
That is, you turn the adjective to a verb and use it as a predicate directly. This mirrors the syntax of Chinese.
It is not a verb form. It is just a short form. Both forms can be used as predicates but have different meanings.
For example, "ты болен" and "ты больной" both mean "you are sick", but in the first case it means a temporary state.
Another example, "эта юбка коротка" and "эта юбка короткая" both mean "this dress is short", but in the first case it has an implication of being short relative to something. For example, you would use first form to mean that this dress is short for you.
>Although the proposal for the League to accept Esperanto as their working language was accepted by ten delegates, mainly from Asian countries, the French delegate used his power of veto to block the issue.
What an odd thing to veto. Was there a good reason for it, or was it just to preserve the "lingua franca" over a new contender?
French here. French politicians, and a big part of the population also, are weirdly defensive about using any international language other than French.
French is actually used in some international organization: international post (and aviation I think?) as well as diplomacy. That latter one may make some politicians blind to the fact that the game is set: English won as the de facto international language.
France could dispute the status of superpower to UK in the time of colonial empires but this time is definitely over, but some are deluded into thinking that we could still dispute the status of English as the predominant language.
It is a combination of pride and laziness that makes so many people consider that we should not accept English as an international language. I find it stupid, but it is not a thing that is specific to the far-right nationalists.
I mostly agree but I think it's a bit simplistic. Languages aren't just a neutral tool, they come with a culture. English is the modern lingua franca not because of some inherent quality of the language but because it's the language of the USA, by far the greatest economic, military and cultural superpower of our times.
Do you realize how much power and influence this gives the USA? We have Captain America in theaters, but Captain China and Peru are nowhere to be seen. When's the last time you've seen a company motto in Spanish or Italian? English, I'm Loving It, Just Do It, Think Different.
Does it make sense to make English the de-facto standard language for the EU when Ireland is the only country left in it which uses it natively?
I'm all for people learning English to facilitate the dialogue between countries and cultures but I think it's very noble and important to strive to preserve diversity, linguistically and culturally.
D'un français à un autre, en anglais, sur un forum anglophone.
I entirely agree with you about the value of maintaining diversity but Iv was pretty much pointing out that Esperanto was vetoed in order to prevent an increase in diversity. French was the diplomatic lingua franca and the French delegates were working very hard to maintain that.
English is now the lingua franca in many fields due to US hegemony as you say. Even though it's not due to any inherent virtue it's not, of itself, a bad thing. I'm not a big fan of Americanization (sic) but that's a slightly different thing from a common means of communication. The latter may well mean we have to suffer some of the former but I personally think it's worth it (don't tell my daughter I, like, said that OK?).
Obviously this will never happen but now would be great time for the EU to adopt English as a common tongue, precisely because of Brexit. It'd clearly not be because of a cultural dominance within the EU and it would save a ton of money and a lot of wasted effort. I await the response of the Académie française with bated breath.
Yeah I agree with you. There's a difference between preserving diversity and trying to push your language down other people's throat. Clearly some of our laws and official posturing has more to do with the latter than the former.
And obviously I won't oppose English becoming the language of the EU since the other obvious contender would be German and I can barely speak a lick of Deutsch!
Also English is easier to learn than German. As a geographically spread-out language without central control all the bits that are hard to learn has gone away. The only problem is that it has accumulated a lot of crufty spelling and prononciation, but that's easier to fix than grammar.
Since WW2 at least the USA has achieved a tremendous global cultural hegemony. To give you an example many of my friends and I agree that it's easier for us to understand spoken "standard" American (i.e. TV and movie american) than british. Let's not even mention the scotts or irish.
Obviously if you're in a ancient british colony like Hong Kong or parts of India then you owe much of the english heritage to the queen's servants but elsewhere english has been pushed massively by the powerhorse that are the USA.
The american entertainment industry plows through all cultures, all demographics and brings you Mac Donalds, Toy Story, Rihanna and Coca Cola even if you're lost in Kazakhstan. Dr Who and Fish and Chips can't compete. Or is it Fish'n'Fries?
Aviation uses English, although that was a change from the widespread tradition of using French for international purposes, at least throughout the 19th century.
> France could dispute the status of superpower to UK in the time of colonial empires but this time is definitely over, but some are deluded into thinking that we could still dispute the status of English as the predominant language.
This is really a pity, as it unnecessarily slowing down EU integration. I hope the newer generations of French understand it.
In a way, the Brexit may make that easier, since English becomes more neutral among the remaining EU members (there's still Ireland, but they don't pose the threat that the UK did).
I think it's a good thing we try to defend our language. With no international reach it would slowly be replaced by English even at home in some given fields (graduate studies, for example).
That said, promoting French should not be equated with replacing other languages (like it was done with regional languages): it is a non-zero-sum game as people can learn multiples languages. So we should not only promote French as a second language for international communication but also work harder to learn foreign languages. In this framework, nor English nor Esperanto development are ennemies of French use.
Learning another language provides enough of a challenge that monolingual English will necessarily win out in international communication and science in the long term as it is the solution that provides the least friction.
However, I fully agree that France should be careful to preserve its own linguistic culture lest they become like Sweden or the Netherlands in terms of getting dominated by Anglophone patterns of thought and expression.
At this stage, therefore, the strongest opposition to
Esperanto came from France, whose strongly nationalistic
government opposed the internationalist aims of Esperanto.
French nationalism was expressed, inter alia, in support for
the use of French as the international language. Since
Versailles, English had threatened the status of French. The
League of Nations was officially bilingual, though (with
French encouragement) French soon became its dominant
language. France was thus hardly likely to favour any kind
of threat to the prestige of its language.
Source: Forster, Peter (1982). The Esperanto Movement. Page 175.
I found the quote using Wikipedia's League of Nations article for a citation and Google Books for the source material. Searching for "strongest opposition" in Google Books should take you straight to the page. I can't figure out how to create a permanent link in Google Books straight to the page that will reliably work for people.
Ironically, the term lingua franca doesn't actually refer to French as many people think, but to the Frankic language Sabir. Sabir was similar to modern Romance languages, but still distinct from them.
The language no longer exists, because as it spread across the Mediterranean, it ended up forking and influencing the local languages there instead.
In the age where travel and communication is slow, yes. It's also why many languages that we perceive as monolithic today consisted of many often barely mutually intelligible dialects as late as 19th century.
As a Romance language, Sabir cannot be a Frankic language, since the Franks were a Germanic tribe speaking a Germanic language.
The wikipedia article notes that by the time of Sabir, "Frank" had turned into a generic term for western Europeans, which makes the term make more sense -- to the Byzantines, Italians and Spaniards were "Franks". Left unexplained is why the Byzantines would refer to Sabir with a phrase in Latin, a language they didn't speak.
> As a Romance language, Sabir cannot be a Frankic language, since the Franks were a Germanic tribe speaking a Germanic language.
There should be a comma after "language": "but to the Frankic language, Sabir". As in, lingua franca literally means "the Frankic language", and it referred to Sabir.
One of the remarkable things about English is how little it varies from country to country, especially in written form. There is much more variation in how French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken and written in different countries.
Probably because English only spread from country to country in the past 200 years, and while the others you listed was hundred(s) of years before that.
Chinese, which spread across China 2000 years ago, vary a lot from region to region, even more so than the languages you've mentioned.
If by "Chinese" you mean all of the languages in China today, such as Cantonese, Amoy, Hakkanese, etc... then you're talking about separate languages more distinct than modern French and Italian are from each other.
That's not what the Chinese government wants you to think. :-)
For nationalistic reasons, China views those as dialects, or did when John DeFrancis was writing about the issue. In the other hand, they share more of a culture (IIUC) and government than Italian and French do.
Yes that's right - 2000 years ago I'm guessing they all sounded the same. I note Cantonese and Mandarin "dialects" have a common (formal) written form.
That guess is not just wrong but somewhat startling.
Why would everyone living in what is now China have spoken the same language 2000 years ago? The people living in what is now the US didn't. Neither did the people living in what's now the EU. Even small territories, such as just the islands of Okinawa had multiple language communities 2000 years ago.
National borders and the language communities within and across them fluctuate wildly over the course of a thousand years.
>" I note Cantonese and Mandarin "dialects" have a common (formal) written form."
They don't even have the same grammar. Cantonese includes characters that don't exist in Mandarin.
"Just as Europeans who spoke various languages could communicate in Latin, so until recently all literate Chinese people could communicate in the somewhat artificial written standard. With the shift over the last century to a written language that is closer to the colloquial, the differences among dialects have increased."
> Why would everyone living in what is now China have spoken the same language 2000 years ago?
That's not really the right question. 2500 years ago, the people in what is currently Spain spoke a language that was distinct from the language then spoken by the people in what is currently Italy. But it's still true that Spanish and Italian sounded exactly the same 2500 years ago.
>" I note Cantonese and Mandarin "dialects" have a common (formal) written form."
I don't know spoken mandarin but I can read written Mandarin, I grew up knowing Cantonese. So I do think they have a common formal written form. And I did specify formal, that strips away the slang Cantonese characters.
It's interesting to see the paper compared the written form to Latin.
What makes you think that the languages sounded more similar in a time when communication was much slower and regional dialects could develop easily without outside influence?
Because the net difference between dialects are the sum of all differences from 2000 years ago to now, while 2000 years ago, less time was elapsed, the net difference was much smaller.
The net difference today is the net difference 2000 years ago plus all the new variations since then.
For the same reason that English and Swedish sounded much more similar a long time ago, when communication was slow, than they do now -- they are descended from a common source, and at the time of that source they would obviously have been identical.
After the time of the source, shortly after diverging[1], they would still have been more similar than they are now because they hadn't had much time to differentiate.
[1] Unlike "the time of the source", you can rigorously defend the existence of the period shortly after divergence.
For countries where it's the dominant native language, yes. On the other hand look at African countries where it's an official language and IIRC there are significant differences.
A symbolic language, such as Bliss[0][1][2], avoids cringe-worthy issues with accents and comprehension, at the cost of being written only. Sign languages do the same.
International Sign Language[3] + Bliss are in theory the perfect combination for intergalactic communication. Blind people, unfortunately, would have to continue to suffer English until such time that direct brain stimulation becomes feasible.
EDIT: Key point in all seriousness: the Bliss language has enabled thousands of cerebral palsy sufferers to communicate with a full range of expression. Sadly curbed in recent years by the much more limited pre-phrased, Hawking-like computer voices. Alternatives exist. Listen to the radio shows in [1] to find out more. The BBC one I found particularly moving. The Radiolab one starts at 5min, goes on for some 30mins.
Another fascinating chapter in the history of perfect languages.
"... McNaughton’s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a “misinterpretation”. For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable —according to the English definition of tomato— even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss’s system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English. (2009, p. 189) Bliss complaints about his symbols “being abused” by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. In spite of this, in 1975 Bliss granted an exclusive world license, for use with disabled children, to the new Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton (later called Blissymbolics Communication International, BCI). Nevertheless, in 1977 Bliss claimed that this agreement was violated so that he was deprived of effective control of his symbol system."
Genuinely curious - why are you hoping to see an uptick in Esperanto speakers? I'm not sure I see the advantage of Esperanto, although I do find constructed languages fascinating.
It is a much easier and possibly the easiest language to learn especially for those who already speak a latin-based language. In some cases, people can be thought of as fluent with a couple months of learning the language.
It's also not tied to any particular nation which makes it easier for people to adopt without feeling like they are just being taken over by another culture.
This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world.
> especially for those who already speak a latin-based language
It's not just easy for speakers of latin-based languages! Esperanto has much in common with various Asian languages and the Chinese also have historically pushed Esperanto more than any other nation. For example, Radio Peking has (or had) daily broadcasts in Esperanto.
It's so much easier you can learn Esperanto with zero effort if you want to learn English:
The fact that it's much easier for those who already speak a Romance language means that it's still is tied to particular nations.
>This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world.
English is as close to a global lingua franca as we've ever had. There's just so much momentum behind it, that it would take something world shaking to change that. I think we'd be better off trying for an artificial language that is mostly mutually intelligible with English if the goal is really widespread adoption.
Zamenhof had a famous ethical argument about this (it begins "Ofte kunvenas personoj de malsamaj nacioj kaj komprenas unu la alian", 'People of different nations frequently encounter and understand one another', and you can find a lot of copies of it online, although I didn't immediately find an English translation). He felt that it was unfair that native speakers of a language that's used in international communication will have an advantage in fluency (and learning effort) compared to non-native speakers, and argued that these were reasons that the eventual international language should not be any community's native language.
However, he was also fighting (and is still fighting) very significant economic or incentive issues. Even before the era of English as an international language, there was always an obvious incentive to learn the most widely spoken or prestigious language or languages in one's region -- such as the language of a nearby large, rich country. People still feel that incentive today and the benefits of learning specific languages of wider communication or languages of prestige can be very tangible. And there are definitely people who feel that it's unfair that they have to learn English rather than English-speakers having to learn their language (and it is!), but many of them learn English anyway because they can clearly see the benefits.
Having a really apparent worldwide Schelling point of "everyone in the world in going to learn this" or "enough people already know this that it's clearly useful for international communication" would help Esperanto tremendously, and Esperanto did have momentum of that kind at one point, but according to the Esperanto Museum in Vienna it seemed to lose it in the course of the World Wars.
If Esperanto ever became the dominant international language people would start making blockbuster movies in it, kids would start learning it, and younger people in smaller countries would use it more than their native tongue.
Then it would start to displace a few native languages until it became some community's native language.
After that it would start to fragment and evolve and lose all the simplicity that comes from it being an artificial language.
I don't think it would fragment that quickly. In times past travel was slow, there was no telephone, or news papers. The few books were mostly reserved for the elite.
600 years ago (before the printing press) most people lived either on or near their farm. You went to the nearby village for things you couldn't make on the farm. Traveling to the next village was as far as most people could go: they needed to get back to the farm to milk the cow again, or otherwise care for the farm. As such there was no way to know your language was fragmenting, much less any reason to care.
Today we have printing presses, telephone, TVs, movies. All give us ways to find out about fragmentation and reasons to care. While languages will still change and fragment over time, the above pressures will help to keep the changes in check.
Language in a literate society changes more slowly. But it still changes, given enough time it will fragment.
There's also no reason to think Esperanto would evolve or fragment any slower than English once it's actually in use. Which negates many of the arguments that we need Esperanto as a global lingua franca because English will fragment once America declines.
English speakers traditionally hate the idea of language planning, at least if it's an overt governmental program, but it's had some powerful effects elsewhere.
and some kind of mechanism to enhance the language regulator's influence (although I don't know exactly what that would be).
I don't think that Zamenhof thought this aspect through in much detail, because he thought that people would continue to use Esperanto exactly as described by the Fundamento de Esperanto. See paragraph 4 of the Boulougne Declaration:
> [...] The only single, perpetually obligatory foundation of the language Esperanto for all Esperantists is the work, Fundamento de Esperanto, to which no one has the right to make changes. If someone deviates from the rules and models from the above-mentioned work, he or she cannot ever excuse himself/herself with the words: "so desires or advised the author of Esperanto". Every idea that cannot be conveniently expressed by the contents of the Fundamento de Esperanto, all Esperantists can express in a manner which they deem the most correct, as is done in any other language. But for reasons of unity all Esperantists are recommended to imitate, as much as possible, that style which is found in the works of the creator of Esperanto, who has worked more that any other for and in Esperanto and who knows its spirit better that any other.
However, I don't think this has worked out exactly as Zamenhof intended, because I think there have indeed been unofficial changes and divergences, as well as slang (maybe smaller than those you'd expect to see in a non-constructed language, but still some). Also, I think there are ultimately grammatical and usage questions that the Fundamento de Esperanto didn't address, because Zamenhof wasn't quite a linguist in the modern sense, didn't know about certain grammatical issues, and didn't conduct user testing with speakers from different linguistic backgrounds.
I found several English versions of the text (which is from the speech Zamenhof gave in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905 at the first World Esperanto Congress) by searching for
As far as learning Esperanto is concerned, English is just as much a Romance language as Spanish or Italian.
In my travels I've found English language proficiency to be exaggerated. First, almost every country lies about the degree and extent of proficiency among its population. Second, where you do see relatively decent English language proficiency, you'll also often see a creole emerging. For example, Singlish. Once the the global cultural dominance of Hollywood peaks (maybe it may already peaked?), expect English to begin to slowly fragment.
For various reasons I think Esperanto would be a great international auxiliary language, in large part precisely because of widespread familiarity with English. Esperanto might not be a reasonable choice today given the dominance of English, but the case for Esperanto will only get stronger.
I say this as someone who absolutely sucks at learning new languages. I don't even know Esperanto; I've only dabbled in it a little. But put me in a room with native English speakers from rural Ireland, a rich Indian neighborhood, or teenage girls from Singapore, and on some days I'd understand them better if they were actually speaking Esperanto.
You're right, English will continue to fragment and already is fragmented.
We are already starting to see the development of a simplified international English dialect. Given enough time, once American dominance seriously declines, it's possible that English and International English will diverge into 2 languages.
However, I think you'd see the same level of evolution and fragmentation with Esperanto as well if it were to really take off. Eventually people would start making blockbuster movies in Esperanto, kids would start learning it, and younger people in smaller countries would use it more than their native tongue.
It would evolve and it would no longer be simple because it would no longer be artificial. It would no longer have the advantage of belonging to no one.
I was thinking that as an auxiliary language which is intentionally kept a second-class language, Esperanto might be more resilient to that kind of fragmentation.
But I suppose that's somewhat circular reasoning. At least, it presupposes that an auxiliary language can see substantial uptake and remain viable while not succumbing to the typical forces that shape language.
I've always thought of liturgical languages (e.g. liturgical Latin, liturgical Syriac) as the closest example we have of languages resisting those forces. But I really have no clue how well they've done so. For example, I haven't read any papers that analyze the stability of liturgical Latin, such as whether the vocabulary has narrowed or pronunciations shifted. I'm sure it exists, but I'm not a linguist (or anything of the sort).
Yet apparently Esperanto does have a culture, according to Wikipedia, and that cultural tradition would necessarily inform the language.
The roots of Esperanto are European so it’s rather “privileged” of one to say that it’s the “best” second language.
And who actually avoids learning a language because they are being felt like they are being taken over by another culture? That actually seems like a veiled anti-English can concept, which, if that were the intent, actually indicates that Esperanto DOES have a cultural bias – it’s a culture of being the “anti-English” because otherwise why not just promote English? Who the hell actually speaks Esperanto? There are apparently 300 “native” speaking families worldwide. It certainly isn’t a language you’ll hear at a market or a playground. It has zero practical value beyond being a possibly fun hobby.
English might be “hard” but the benefits are extensive. Why someone in the Americas would learn Esperanto as a second language rather than English or Spanish is beyond me. That’s an exceedingly irrational. Why a Italian-speaking European would learn Esperanto before French, German, Dutch or English – that is also ridiculous.
Esperanto advocates aren’t advocating it as a third or fourth language but a second language. That suggests that they are delusional or at least highly irrational. Why would I spend 150 hours mastering Esperanto rather than 150 hours getting conversational in Spanish?
I can respect it as a hobby that people enjoy, but as a legitimate language? It’s as legitimate as Klingon and spoken by fewer people.
> This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world.
But the value of a second language isn't in how easy it is to learn (that's just saying it's low cost.)
The value is in the pool of people it lets you communicate with that your first language does not, and on that measure, Esperanto is particularly poor, compared to whichever of (in no particular order) English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, French, and several others you don't already speak.
_One_ value of a second language is the pool of people it lets you communicate with. Another value is whether you can actually learn it well enough to use it.
Cost is part of the value. If I can't afford a BMW, it has no value to me. If I will never become fluent in a language, it has no value to me (at least in some senses).
Duolingo is certainly how I got into it, both because it has a course and because {Esperanto makes learning languages easier and Duolingo has a lot of interesting languages to learn}.
That said, I feel the Duolingo courses in general don't have enough content, and the Esperanto course seems to be on the short side even then.
Clozemaster might be a useful complement to the Duolingo course - lots of content for Esperanto as well as a bunch of other languages. https://www.clozemaster.com
I don't get the philosophy behind the Esperanto language. Why didn't the inventors pick a popular language like English or Spanish, and fixed their inconsistencies, rather than invent a whole new language? Were there political reasons?
This is kind of a let-me-google-that-for-you situation, but the nickel explanation is that Zamenhof saw a culturally-neutral international language as being important for building peace, furthering humanism and combating nationalism. If you look at the historical context, it makes more sense.
Most of the criticism aimed at Esperanto today is about how badly executed the language itself is, but it unquestionably got further towards the larger goals than any other constructed language.
The main reason was neutrality, and respect for the popular language. 'Fixing' the inconsistencies of a language means getting rid of its identity, and culture. You may be able to do that with a dead language, but not with a living one.
As for neutrality, an English or Spanish speaker would always have the advantage, thus the idea that everybody can meet on a ground as even as possible. Esperanto tried to solve that by not belonging to any people, or any nation. It ended up being Eurocentric, but to some extent it does fulfill its neutrality motivation
Yes, Esperanto was a deeply political project. The ultimate goal was to spread international unity and peace, rather than just to create an interesting language. At the time, it was taken very seriously by not insignificant numbers of people, and the movement intersected with other late 19th/early 20th century idealist movements, sometimes in unfortunate ways (eventually, both the Nazis and Soviets viewed Esperantists as spies, which pretty definitively shut down its momentum.)
1. It is meant to be an international language. They tried to blend in as many languages as possible. Otherwise someone speaking German, for example would have a harder time picking it up than someone who already speaks Spanish or English.
2. The Esperanto culture is post-nationalistic. They purposely did not want to align with a specific country, and be global.
Learning Esperanto is a powerful experience, for one simple reason - there's no such thing as a foreign accent. It's a truly international language, with no territorial boundaries and no in-group. Esperanto is a long way from perfect, but it's the closest thing we've got to a linguistic and cultural level playing field.
It's fascinating to read about how Esperanto got adopted so much by people in the "counter-culture", for lack of a better term. What enabled that? It is hard to imagine an artificial language being met with so much enthusiasm today.
In my own experience, people who speak Esperanto are more likely to be against the status quo of nationalism and tend to be against the imperialist nature of their own or other large governments. They tend to be for the free travel of people and against strict immigration laws. Those ideologies square well with political movements of communism, anarchism, libertarianism, etcetera which are usually on the fringes of society.
AFAIU this happened because of where Esperanto was created--among the rapidly shifting cultural and political mores of Central Europe. The emigration of both ideas, particularly communism and anarchism, and people (e.g. educated Jews) helped carry it across Europe. The global spread of communism then carried it around the world.
It's unsurprising that the promise of a single, unifying, constructed, internationalist language would appeal to leftists. Which isn't to say leftists are naive, just that it would be much more odd to see initial interest from nationalists or other conservatives.
In any case, Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages, whether in lexicon (obviously) or in grammar, it is thoroughly european (as demonstrated in great detail here : http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ )
The article isn't about linguistic properties. It's about the uptake of Esperanto literature and culture throughout Asia. (Yes, Esperanto has a culture.)
> Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages.
Do you know why it was created? To have one language for communication for the whole world unencumbered by historical baggage of politico-cultural domineering (e.g., prevalence of english due to British imperialism). (among other reasons).
That right there is a feature that sets it apart from all natural languages (other than the created ones like Klingon, Lojban, etc) not just European.
> Do you know why it was created? To have one language for communication for the whole world unencumbered by historical baggage of politico-cultural domineering (e.g., prevalence of english due to British imperialism). (among other reasons).
Which is actually quite a farce. Esperanto is largely a language that's vaguely Slavic in grammar and strongly Polish in phonology, with vocabulary largely derived from Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages. In other words, Esperanto is a "world language" that comes from a time where "world" meant "Europe", and it largely assumes that Indo-European language peculiarities are fairly universal in languages (they're not).
From John Cowan's list of "Essentialist Explanations", credited to Kapitano Eglefino (http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html#Esperanto):
"Esperanto is essentially English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin, and Greek, invented by someone who speaks English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin, Greek...and Polish."
--
That's one of the things I like about the auxiliary language Interlingua[1] over Esperanto[2]. To quote from Wikipedia:
"Interlingua has detached itself from the movement for the development and introduction of a universal language for all humanity. Whether or not one believes that a language for all humanity is possible, whether or not one believes that Interlingua will become such a language is totally irrelevant from the point of view of Interlingua itself. The only fact that matters (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its ambition of reflecting the cultural and thus linguistic homogeneity of the West, is capable of rendering tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is by its present contributions and not by the promises of its adherents that Interlingua wishes to be judged."
It was created with a goal of taking its structure and vocabulary from other common European (mostly Romance) languages, which means if one is familiar with those languages, they can already decently read Interlingua. The same passage from above, for those who might know some Romance language:
"Interlingua se ha distachate ab le movimento pro le disveloppamento e le introduction de un lingua universal pro tote le humanitate. Si o non on crede que un lingua pro tote le humanitate es possibile, si o non on crede que interlingua va devenir un tal lingua es totalmente indifferente ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme. Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate."
Yeah, there were many such attempts in Slavic world. It gives you uncomfortable 80% understanding, while just speaking your own languages gives you like 60% between most pairs. Not good enough to make people use it.
From my personal experience as a native Slavic speaker in other countries, this doesn't work well across groups - i.e. if my language is East Slavic, and my interlocutor speaks West or South Slavic, we can't really get far; certainly nowhere even close to 60%.
But, yes, with English being the de facto standard, these more localized attempts are becoming redundant - you want to know English anyway because you want to talk to more people, and once you know it, you might as well use it to talk even to people whose languages are related to yours.
I'm Polish, and with Slovaks, Belarussians, Ukrainians it's more than 60%. With Czechs it's maybe 50% cause of their pronounciation, with Russians it's maybe 40-50%, because they have weird word roots.
Maybe it's because I'm vaguely aware of the phonetic changes between east and west Slavic languages (ić - it, ska - skaja, etc), because I've heard some Russian and Ukrainian on street markets in 90s.
Haven't had much experience with other Slavic speakers, but Serbian sounds quite close to western Slavic from the songs I've heard.
I natively know Polish and I know some very little Russian back from high school and Interslavic is more clear to me than Slovio.
I'm interested in linguistics so during one CS conference in Zagreb I asked a few Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Slovenians, one Belarusian (native in Russian actually but he knew some Belarusian) and back in Poland a few Poles who know only Polish and the results were quite mixed.
It really might be better to just treat this as a curio and speak your own (especially in your own West/East/South Slavic language subgroup) and hope for the best. Or just speak English...
I learned French in high school and not Spanish (thanks to growing up in southern Louisiana), and I can't read Spanish or Italian texts unless I'm extraordinarily lucky about vocabulary, but I can read Interlingua just fine. I suspect I'd be hopelessly lost in an ad-hoc mashup of Spanish and Italian, but Interlingua is pretty good about constraining vocabulary to things that are usually obvious to a speaker of any Romance language and not adopting shifts that have only taken place in one / a few languages.
I can understand the above paragraph too (from a background in English/Italian/Latin/school-level French), but I can't say there's anything beautiful about it!
Why do you say that? Esperanto has actually been relatively successful in Asia (as the article details). Yes, its grammar and lexicon are unrelated to any east Asian languages, but it is nonetheless easy to learn, to the point that it is sometimes used pedagogically as a "first European language" in Chinese universities.
In the sense that it is way easier for native speakers of Europeans to learn than for native speakers of languages such as Asian languages I don't think it actually succeeds in the goal of decolonizing, if you will, the lingua franca.
To be fair, a huge fraction already learn solid basic English as the local lingua franca due to differing dialects or international trade.
I don't know though, what features from Asian languages do you think are objectively simpler to learn than those in Esperanto? I don't know Esperanto, but I am pretty sure that not all Asian languages are particularly tonal. So I doubt that would come naturally to them either. Particles? Those are pretty fantastic, but does Esperanto already have them? Maybe a lack of gendered conjugations? Or just no conjugations at all and instead a separate word modifier or particle for different contexts?
Certainly the syllabary of Japanese is wonderful, I think it's better than English. Every consonant except 'n' has a vowel after, every vowel sounds the same regardless of context. Removing the distinction between 'r' and 'l' or 'm' and 'n' seems wise though. But maybe they already did that too?
There is no such thing as "objectively easy." Languages are easy or difficult in the degree to which they share common features and vocabulary with a language you already know. If you speak Spanish as a native language then English is much easier to learn than Japanese, but if you speak Korean as a native language the opposite is true.
You might well answer that, in that case, being truly neutral seems more or less impossible. Maybe so, and maybe you do need to just pick something. But then we get away from the idea of removing political dominance from the equation.
I disagree with your opening argument. Python is objectively easier to learn than c, no matter which one has learned first. In my own experience, I learned Esperanto at about 10X the rate at which I learned French (though this was also due to teacher quality). Esperanto has no irregular verbs, unambiguous pronunciations, and only a quarter of the usual vocabulary to learn because nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs all share identical roots. Being a native English speaker I did know similar roots more often, but no more so than I did for French.
The only place where I would agree Europeans have a significant advantage is that Esperanto has a European style letter script rather than an Asian character-based one. A fair point, and unfortunately no one has come up with something halfway between a letter and a character script. The best apolitical solution to that may be to make two alphabets for the next iteration of Esperanto.
OK, so you've proved that Esperanto is easier than a natural European language for you, a native speaker of English, to learn. Granted. But it's not a refutation of my argument that for someone who speaks, say, Japanese (also a language with almost no irregular verbs or ambiguous pronunciations, by the way), essentially none of the roots will be familiar and so it will still be much more difficult for them than for you.
The script is not really an issue; Chinese is the only major east Asian language (or language family) written exclusively in Chinese characters without a phonetic script, and even then the Roman alphabet is familiar.
Esperanto is certainly easier for someone who already knows a Romance language. However, even for a non-Romance speaker, it will be easier to learn than other Romance languages.
Sure, but what I am saying here is that if you don't speak a European language any Romance language, even Esperanto, is hard.
It's easy to not appreciate this, but in a way the hardest thing about learning a language is mastering the vocabulary. Think about your native language. When was he last time you encountered a grammatical structure you were unfamiliar with? Now when was the last time you encountered a word you were unfamiliar with?
If you're studying two related languages, like Spanish and English, you get a huge boost from the fact that the more difficult words are actually more likely to be the same. You don't have to study very hard to understand what "planeta" or "geografía" or "farmacia" mean. On the other hand, if you're studying Japanese, you have to memorize words like "wakusei," "chiri", and "yakkyoku" which have no resemblance whatever to the English words. And it just goes on and on and you are never really done encountering all the words you will ever encounter. Compared to this slog, mastering a grammar and the number of irregularities typical of a natural language is a minor annoyance.
>There is no such thing as "objectively easy." Languages are easy or difficult in the degree to which they share common features and vocabulary with a language you already know.
That's just wrong. All that means is that you haven't experienced all the crazy language features out there. Children all over the world learn their native languages at different speeds because some languages are harder than others.
I guess your statement is technically correct in that if you already know a really difficult language, learning it is easy, but that's just pedantry.
That's false, unless you want to bring writing into the picture. As far as the language itself (that is, the spoken one) goes it's completely wrong.
I'm going by the (admittedly, introductory) education I had in linguistics, so if you'd like to convince me otherwise I suppose I would need to see some sort of reliable source.
Why do you not think it is reasonable to assume a language with fewer requirements to utilize is easier for a human to learn in general?
If a language avoids relying on tonal information for word definition, for instance, it is very counterintuitive to say that a toddler learning would pick it up exactly as fast as a toddler that only needs to handle syllable identification.
Way more languages, including Asian ones like Japanese and Korean, do not have words which completely change definition based on pitch. I don't have any reason to think a Korean adult would find it any easier than me to detect tones in Mandarin.
I don't know how to search for a reliable source in the field of linguistics, sorry. The idea is really counterintuitive for me though. It's not like Chinese and Japanese are very similar, even if they're more likely to broadly share word roots. Assuming we aren't using pictograph writing anyway, they do share a lot of those.
But if you're going to argue that learning pictograph writing is exactly as easy as learning character writing, I'll direct you to how Japanese kids only can read 1000 characters by the time they're 12. With syllabic writing you can read anything way sooner. So clearly for written language some are easier than others too.
Well, Chinese is a very cool language but it's awful for keyboard input and the like. Ideally we'd use a language with an alphabet that also isn't tonal.
Surely an explicitly tonal alphabet is preferable to a language with implicit tone (e.g. English). I can only imagine that learning English's implicit tone curves pose a challenge to speakers of Asian languages.
(Esperanto is intended to be perfectly understandable without tonal inflection, through the use of particles such as "ĉu" and "ja", though in practice Westerners universally tonally inflect their speech because they don't know otherwise.)
I wish I could say that people are lazy and Chinese is fine if only one can employ the right tools for it, but the thing is, the Chinese writing, through its inherent nature, imposes a heavy cognitive load on its users. In this regard it is comparable to English, which does the same thing through its vocabulary. Many are criticizing the inflections in a given inflected language but that is actually a trick to lessen/optimize the language's vocabulary. The language and writing are communication infrastructure. The less we're paying for using those and the less they are getting in your way - the better.
It's much slower than a skilled alphabetical typist can do. In Japanese, and I assume also in Chinese, there is a faster system used by people who do jobs that require fast typing, but it's very complicated and most people do not learn it.
For Chinese there's the Wubi method [1], which assigns each radical component of a character to a key, by typing the right combination of keys for some of the components, individual strokes and disambiguation keys, any Chinese character can be almost uniquely identified (some typographic variants have identical representations).
I'm currently trying to learn it, because I hate scrolling through long lists of homophones to find some rarer character; but I have not yet achieved the level where I can just freely type out anything without looking up its key sequence.
Sorry, it's been a while since I read about it and I'm having trouble finding the info again. I imagine it's similar to the stroke-based Chinese entry systems because each character would then have an unambiguous key sequence, obviating the need to keep checking the screen and selecting words from the menu.
Easier than neighboring languages sharing thousands of words with common roots? I think I would need to see some sort of evidence to accept this claim.
The problem is that it has a bizarre phonetic inventory for an IAL.
That said, I think people overblow the significance of choosing a European base over some other. I know people whose native languages are syllabaries, abugidas, and logographies; most of them prefer even the supremely flawed English alphabetic writing system.
I can't cite anything to back this up, but Esperanto is a lot easier for native Japanese speakers to pronounce than English is, plus the grammar is more regular.
Television standardized the language of nation-states. Now even the most backward of countrymen speaks or at least understands the common language used on TV, and the local inflections get less and less prominent with each passing generation. (Granted, this was more of a problem in older countries.)
The Internet will do the same on a global scale, in the long run, with English being that language, obviously.
There isn’t a purpose. It’s a contrived language with the historical and cultural relevance of pig latin.
The purpose is likely to provide its enthusiasts with a quirky hobby. It’s not any more serious a language as Klingon.
Why Duolingo/etc wastes resources supporting such a useless language when they could perhaps support any of the number of dying languages that actually have cultural and historical significance (such as Yiddish, Navajo or any number of African or Asian languages) seems to be a waste.
You could almost say the same thing about those cultural languages though. If me, as a white American, wanted to learn Navajo... what's the point? I'm not Native American, I'm very unlikely to adopt their culture, and my knowing the language isn't really going to further the spread of their culture. So I'd just be learning it as an enthusiast with a quirky hobby and have no one to talk to.
The problem with trying to save dying languages is that you need to save their dying culture, too. Otherwise the language is useless, just as useless as Esperanto. If there's no point in Esperanto because it's a language without a culture, there's no point in learning a language without learning their culture. And culture is often a very tricky, very closely guarded thing.
What we have with Esperanto is a brand new culture that's been created, one that's a lot more relatable to a wider audience than Kasanga or Iñapari.
One thing that makes Esperanto popular in Asia is that the Asian languages are much more dissimilar than European languages. For example, the effort for a Japanese person to learn Korean is much more than to learn Esperanto.
How is it unfortunate? Korean might have some features that sound familiar to a Japanese speaker -- e.g. word order and morphology of Sinitic vocabulary -- but phonology is quite challenging and non-Sinitic vocabulary is completely different. Overall it's far, far harder than Esperanto for Japanese speakers.
Eh. I'm not sure if Japanese<->Chinese is that good of an example either; Chinese is sort of the Latin of Japanese.
Even though it's grammar is different, China had a huge cultural influence on Japan, and both its writing system and its vocabulary (as spoken over a thousand years ago though!) were imported and incorporated into Japanese. Something like 60% of the Japanese dictionary is Chinese-derived either as old imported words, or more modern "wasei kango" (lit. Japanese-made Chinese words) -- think "television" for an English word equivalent (modern idea but coined with Greek and Latin word roots).
I think there are two counterproductive forces around Esperanto: a) Attachment to bizarre communist political ideology (I've seen this a lot in online and offline Esperanto groups) and b) slightly deficient phonotactics for an IAL (some sounds used are incredibly difficult to teach to e.g. Japanese speakers).
Third to those is maybe the accusative, the grammar of which is the subject of an entire pamphlet.
It's otherwise super easy to learn if you can manage to pronounce the sounds. I encourage you to give it a shot either through Duolingo or through Kurso de Esperanto
I think you are confusing anti-nationalism/world republic idealism with communism. Certainly the former is part of the traditional Esperanto culture -- Zamenhof's "interna ideo" and all that. The relationship of Esperanto to communism is more antagonistic given that the Soviet Union jailed and executed many Esperantists (see Ulrich Lins' "La Danĝera Lingvo").
The accusative is mostly difficult for native English speakers because we only use the accusative for certain pronouns (he/him, she/her, who/whom). It does take some getting used to if one has never learned the concept in one's native language. But denoting the accusative allows Esperanto to have an arbitrary word order, which cuts out a lot of headache elsewhere.
Can anyone recommend any books or essays written in Esperanto by Asian authors? I'm very interested in experiencing these cultures with a non-English skew.
Please, only recommend things you have read and liked!
Lu Xun also advocated for romanized Chinese instead of characters, citing time wasted for students in achieving literacy, however this part of his character (as well as no doubt his support for Esperanto and the apparent anarchist affiliations alleged here) have been airbrushed from history by the Chinese government, who praise him and have a government audited version of his life taught in schools while removing these politically unfortunate aspects of his character.
In short, a collection of superfluous historic tidbits does not make a regional affiliation for a language fundamentally grounded in the etymology of another.
Esperanto isn't an asian language. It has nothing to do with asia or asian languages ( however you define "asia" ). Just because a meeting about esperanto is being held in asia or that there were some fans of esperanto in asia doesn't make it "asian".
Phonetics is the easiest thing to find a universal subset for--there's basically only so many ways you can physically structure your mouth to make sounds (although it does operate rather on a continuum basis). We can also objectively say that some sounds are easier to produce than others. Even then, the intersection of all languages' phonemic inventories is probably empty. The basic structure of a dozen or so consonants (m, n, b, p, j, s, z, k, g, d, t, w, h, say) with 5 basic vowels structured in a strict CV syllable format, with no diphthongs and vowel length, aspiration, and tone all being non-phonemic is the basic outline for how to design the phonotactics of a universal language.
Moving beyond phonemes is virtually impossible, however. Trying to design a basic lexeme for the language obviously runs into problem of where you source the lexemes (particularly since borrowing from several different languages tends to make it completely incomprehensible to everybody, although you may find that more tasteful than prejudicing one language's speakers as having an easier time mastering the lexeme). But even choosing which words to make root lexemes and which ones to make compounds is difficult. Should blue and green be separate lexemes? What about blue and azure? Should right be "not-left" but south not be "not-north"? Languages often attach multiple meanings to the same word, and these meanings don't always match up across languages.
Grammar is even worse. It's hard to find any grammatical structure that's truly universal across languages; maybe the separation of function between nouns and verbs, but the proclivity to verb nouns is so common in languages that it's questionable how fundamental the distinction actually is. Even the basic meaning of things like mood, aspect, and tense can be hard to settle, since the forms that exist in languages can partially overlap certain combinations (past/present+future versus past+present/future forms being the most well-known). Having to mark cases that don't exist in your native language can be difficult; English users' trouble with the subjunctive is well-known.
Introduction of Esperanto: 1887 Formation of the International Alliance of Women: 1904 Women's suffrage in the US: 1920
I think this kind of dismisses the claim that Esperanto cannot have historical baggage.
For Esperanto one could even claim that it is a way of making it easier by having neuter and masculine to be identical - just for like most other languages on could interpretations that make it equal, pro men or pro women ("they have their special form").
However I agree that a neutral form would probably even make it easier to talk/communicate in many situations.
One also has to differentiate Ido and Esperanto there. While Esperanto sees the language as set into stone it's most famous and related competitor, Ido is evolving, so one could pick that up in such a case and still be pretty good with Esperanto.
And one last thing: What's important about a standard is that there is one that people use an not that it's perfect. See UTF-8 vs competitors and similar. Esperanto is also primarily meant as an auxiliary language, which I think has the strong point of not manipulating society through language.
Many Esperanto speakers are actually in deference of other and especially not widely used languages, also because of the reason of especially the mother tongue defining how people think.
Disclaimer: I am not an Esperanto speaker, even though I was interested as a teenager.
Actually, consonants are pretty discrete. You can move your tongue further and further back and it is still perceived as the same fricative (for example), but move it just a bit further back and the quality of the sound changes completely to another fricative.
Vocals, on the other hand, are continuous, so that miniscule changes in your jaw-tongue configuration makes it sound differently.
That's why you usually recognize non-native speakers by their vowels. It takes many years to get vowels right.
1) The native consonants of Finnish (h j k l m n p r s t v ng/ŋ) and the vowels of Arabic (a u i), as a compromise between not having too many sounds that could be difficult to produce or even distinguish to some, and not having so few that you can't have recognizable loanwords.
2) Syllables CV or CVC
3) No grammar features such as tenses, cases, moods, or even number, because many Asian languages lack them, like classical Chinese for a very literary example, plus they are just an unnecessary detriment to learning and speaking. I'm not sure what the grammar that is left should look like but it should be minimal.
4) Vocabulary sourced from Estonian, since it won't be too terribly mangled by the reduced alphabet, as a Uralic language is equally obscure to everyone else yet has an extensive living vocabulary, and since nobody is likely to go "well why don't I then just learn Estonian instead", especially if they've tried to read an Estonian grammar book.
In practice, these requirements are obviously at odds with each other. You have to balance the freedom available to a speaker with the mental capacity of a listener. If you want to accomodate speakers of languages that allow free word order due to case marking, as well as languages that have a fixed word order, you might end up with case marking and marks to indicate a specific fixed word order. But then all of these markings would have to be understood by the listener, who'd have trouble keeping the various forms straight.
However, you might be able to quantify the learning effort required and optimize for that. This is obviously hard for grammar and semantics, but could be done for phonetics.
Instead of trying to intersect the phoneme sets in use, or giving up and choosing arbitrarily, you could collect statistics on the ability to produce and distinguish various phones, and then optimize for communicability. A speaker can pronounce a phoneme as well as the allophone that is easiest to pronounce for them, a listener can distinguish a pair of phonemes as well as the most similar combination of allophones from them. Then calculate the expectation over all pairings of speaker and listener, maximize the bandwidth accounting for the required error correction, and you get your perfect phoneme set. I'm actually interested what the result might look like, whether there will be a few, clearly separate phonemes, or a huge number with potential overlap, that needs to be compensated by unambiguous vocabulary.
It also occurred to me that this might somehow apply to constructing programming languages, but I'm hazy about the details. Maybe something like Python's "one way to do it" vs other languages supporting a variety of styles?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
Even citing from the same Wikipedia page:
>According to the results, preliminary Esperanto study led to a 25% improvement in acquiring Russian, 30% for German, 40% for English, and even 50% for French.
It seems to clearly show a greater similarity with French (a romance language) than the others.
I'm French myself but I must say that I never really got the appeal of Esperanto. Sure, I might be able to learn it relatively easily. I could also learn Italian pretty easily and I'd gain access to around 64million native speakers and a very rich culture.
If you want an international lingua franca then there's already English and if you think that's too difficult to learn there's Spanish. Not as easy as Esperanto? Maybe, but call me when Esperanto reaches half a billion speakers.
Also the "10x easier than English or German for French speakers" surprises me because it seems to say that English and German are roughly equally difficult to learn for French speakers while it seems pretty obvious to me (having studied both languages at school for many years) than German is very significantly harder.
English has many cognates thanks to the large influx of French words in past centuries, a very simple grammar for the most part (trivial conjugations in particular), no real case system (only a few leftovers like in Romance languages), no gendered nouns. The only thing that's a bit more difficult in English as far as I can tell is the pronunciation.
Add in there a greater load of multi-word expressions compared to other languages, and painstaking word order rules (like if there's more than one adjective then those have to follow each other in a specific manner), and many other downplayed hardships.
Adjective order however is not really a problem IMO, it's irrelevant while consuming the language (unless a text tries to convey some meaning by purposefully miss-ordering the adjectives) and in general getting it wrong while producing English will make you sound foreign but shouldn't hurt comprehension too much. Saying "the red big house" instead of "the big red house" will raise some eyebrows but should remain understandable.
> "10x easier than English or German for French speakers" surprises me
145 hours of Esperanto = 1500 in English = 2000 in German
> I could also learn Italian pretty easily
Can you learn Italian with less than zero effort? No. Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target.
And once I get fluent enough I have access to a wealth of resources to keep studying: movies, tv shows, radio, videogames, newspapers, philosophy books, plays, operas... I can go anywhere in Italy and practice with people in all kinds of situations. I can even get a job there where I'll speak Italian all day long.
Esperanto is an interesting experiment but I find it really hard to invest the time necessary to learn the language.
>Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target.
Did they check if people performed worse when taught, say, 150 hours of Spanish before the target language? It's not really a surprise that learning a language can make it easier to learn other languages, if only because it gives you a certain discipline and mental framework.
And if it does turn out that learning 150hours of Spanish has the same benefits, wouldn't it make more sense to do that instead even if the level of proficiency reached is lower? The practical uses of (even basic) Spanish dwarf that of Esperanto.
The Australian study [1] that is cited in the Wikipedia article compared pupils that learned Esperanto, Indonesian, German or Japanese, respectively, in primary school and then went on to learn a possibly different language in secondary school.
Let me note a few problems with that study up front:
- There was apparently an additional class per week by a professional Esperanto teacher (the other Esperanto teachers were learning on the go).
- The Japanese teachers in the comparison rated themselves 0.25-0.5 on a number of 5-point scales (Esperanto: 1.6-2.4, German 4.5-5, Indonesian: 2-3). This is essentially a plus for Esperanto (easy to learn for the teachers), but taints the comparison since the Japanese teachers were basically incompetent.
- Due to attrition of study subjects, their evaluation after one year of secondary school has only 21 students of Esperanto. (306 students in total)
- They do not differentiate by (or even talk about) the languages learned in secondary school.
Now to the findings (on a 5-point scale [1,2,3,4,5], rated by the secondary-school teachers, given as percentages in each category):
- Motivation to learn the language (presumably the new one): Esperanto [0, 5, 10, 67, 19], others [ 13, 9, 22, 24, 31]. This one is difficult to analyze, since their motivation might change due to liking the new language better (or worse), or due to a general effect on motivation to learn any language (the authors claim the latter). I'll just point out that both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students.
- "attainment level" (no idea what that specifically means): Esperanto [0, 4, 26, 61, 9], others [10, 9, 23, 26, 32]. Again, both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students. The striking resemblance to the motivation results is interesting.
- speaking ability: Esperanto [0, 0, 48, 43, 10], others [12, 8, 46, 27, 6]. This is the only measure where Esperanto seems to be a uniform improvement.
In my opinion, this study mostly shows that this specific Esperanto course did not completely kill off the students ability to learn a foreign language, unlike apparently some other courses. The improvement in speaking ability could be caused by the focus on an immersive classroom experience, but it did apparently transfer to other languages, which is a plus.
The study definitely doesn't show anything like "those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target." (Since they didn't test any such thing.) In fact, my best guess at explaining the higher rate of perfect motivation/attainment scores for students of other languages is that they continued studying the same language they had already had in primary school. If this were the case, it would pretty clearly show that learning Esperanto before learning Japanese is not going to help someone learn Japanese faster overall.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040215074307/http://www.educati...
We already know that language acquisition is going to be driven in large part by motivation on the learner's part, as well as competency on the teacher's part, and it's all too easy to construct a study that self-selects motivated students and competent teachers for Esperanto and unmotivated students and marginal teachers for other languages.
Another major question that's completely unanswered to me is the effect of pedagogy on teaching (and, perhaps to a lesser degree, to assessing competence in the learned language). One of the studies Wikipedia cites claims that you can learn the grammar of Esperanto in ~5 hours, which is "impossible" for other languages. That instead screams to me that Esperanto is taught as a detached grammar course in early instruction, whereas other languages will tend to start with a phonological crash-course combined with basic phrase acquisition, instead spreading grammar out over several hundreds of hours of instruction.
I don't think many people have to learn esperanto at school or for work, clearly it heavily biases towards people who are interested in learning languages and esperanto in particular. You have to be very careful while creating your samples to compensate for that I think.
>One of the studies Wikipedia cites claims that you can learn the grammar of Esperanto in ~5 hours, which is "impossible" for other languages. That instead screams to me that Esperanto is taught as a detached grammar course in early instruction, whereas other languages will tend to start with a phonological crash-course combined with basic phrase acquisition, instead spreading grammar out over several hundreds of hours of instruction.
That might be true but on the other hand imagine teaching English students a "detached" French grammar for instance. I think the students would give up within the hour, it's too dense and quirky to be palatable. If Esperanto's grammar is really simple and regular and can be integrated in 5 hours it's a good point in its favor.
I believe the "a" sound in English "father" is universal. But otherwise yes.
Invented languages are like social networks, it's all about reaching that critical mass where the network effect is self-sustaining. Getting there is extremely hard however, especially if, like the parent points out, it's incredibly difficult to actually make a language "objectively" superior to the hundreds of existing languages which already have millions of speakers.
https://xkcd.com/191/
In general I find that the speakers from Asia have to try harder to be understood because of the reduced shared vocabulary and different phonetics. It seems much easier for a speaker of Spanish or Italian.
I haven't met many esperantists who don't speak English at all or even at a pretty decent level.
It seems for most the new goal is to participate in esperanto culture, which is definitely its own thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism
But it is true that the current purpose of Esperanto is more ideal than practical. I study Esperanto because I really like its internal ideals. I study English because I want to eat.
Yeah, but neither does Esperanto; it's kind of unlikely that a language designed by a human without a strict, mechanical methodology to assure neutrality would, and even then it would need to be isolated from the normal forces that affect natural languages for it to retain that neutrality.
English is probably, in some senses, more neutral than Esperanto; for one thing, English probably has a far greater share of speakers (even first-language speakers) that aren't middle-class-and-above natives of developed countries in Europe or dominated by populations of European descent.
English is currently the international language, even at the esperanto congress. But it makes me appreciate having english as a native language, because I have to watch two non-native speakers struggle (like a polish guy ordering coffee from a korean barista).
Esperanto isn't "neutral". It's entirely a european language which copied tons from latin/german/russian.
The next question I suppose is: is esperanto culture worth being a part of?
It took me 3 months to learn esperanto (with duolingo), but there are a lot of benefits. Generally people are friendly and inviting, partly due to it's non-mainstream nature (consider behavior during the early days of the internet vs youtube comments now)
* It's a foreign language, and there are studies which link language acquisition with mental health (though I'm not sure how solid they are)
* It's an excuse to travel to cities worldwide where you might not go by yourself otherwise. I've found that solo travel at esperanto conferences is great.
1. S. Korea - 242
2. Japan - 186
3. China - 114
4. France - 85
5. Germany - 36
There's a pretty long tail of 61 countries this year. (they published stats in the kongresa libro - congress book)
I find that most esperantists are europeans. The euorpean congresses tend to also be the biggest.
Culturally, there seems to be an age gap. The older generation (of which there are a lot of, I'd say the majority for sure are over 50) tends to be more into people who buy into the vision of world peace and inter-cultural communication. The younger crowd tends to be a mixture of world-travelers, language nerds, programmers, kids of esperantists, and people looking for a subculture to latch on to.
Not sure if it's growing, attendance seems to vary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Esperanto_Congress#/medi...
That's because esperanto is pretty much latin + german + russian. That's the roots of the esperanto.
Esperanto was a silly attempt to "unify" europe via a single language.
The article was rather silly. But I guess it was written by esperanto fanatic who wants to spread esperanto. It'll never happen - lest of all in asia, but the best of luck to him.
verb form:
adjective form:Is "est" acceptable Esperanto? I thought that it had to be "Anna estas bela"?
(sorry, I had to)
What an odd thing to veto. Was there a good reason for it, or was it just to preserve the "lingua franca" over a new contender?
French is actually used in some international organization: international post (and aviation I think?) as well as diplomacy. That latter one may make some politicians blind to the fact that the game is set: English won as the de facto international language.
France could dispute the status of superpower to UK in the time of colonial empires but this time is definitely over, but some are deluded into thinking that we could still dispute the status of English as the predominant language.
It is a combination of pride and laziness that makes so many people consider that we should not accept English as an international language. I find it stupid, but it is not a thing that is specific to the far-right nationalists.
Do you realize how much power and influence this gives the USA? We have Captain America in theaters, but Captain China and Peru are nowhere to be seen. When's the last time you've seen a company motto in Spanish or Italian? English, I'm Loving It, Just Do It, Think Different.
Does it make sense to make English the de-facto standard language for the EU when Ireland is the only country left in it which uses it natively?
I'm all for people learning English to facilitate the dialogue between countries and cultures but I think it's very noble and important to strive to preserve diversity, linguistically and culturally.
D'un français à un autre, en anglais, sur un forum anglophone.
English is now the lingua franca in many fields due to US hegemony as you say. Even though it's not due to any inherent virtue it's not, of itself, a bad thing. I'm not a big fan of Americanization (sic) but that's a slightly different thing from a common means of communication. The latter may well mean we have to suffer some of the former but I personally think it's worth it (don't tell my daughter I, like, said that OK?).
Obviously this will never happen but now would be great time for the EU to adopt English as a common tongue, precisely because of Brexit. It'd clearly not be because of a cultural dominance within the EU and it would save a ton of money and a lot of wasted effort. I await the response of the Académie française with bated breath.
And obviously I won't oppose English becoming the language of the EU since the other obvious contender would be German and I can barely speak a lick of Deutsch!
Obviously if you're in a ancient british colony like Hong Kong or parts of India then you owe much of the english heritage to the queen's servants but elsewhere english has been pushed massively by the powerhorse that are the USA.
The american entertainment industry plows through all cultures, all demographics and brings you Mac Donalds, Toy Story, Rihanna and Coca Cola even if you're lost in Kazakhstan. Dr Who and Fish and Chips can't compete. Or is it Fish'n'Fries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
This is really a pity, as it unnecessarily slowing down EU integration. I hope the newer generations of French understand it.
That said, promoting French should not be equated with replacing other languages (like it was done with regional languages): it is a non-zero-sum game as people can learn multiples languages. So we should not only promote French as a second language for international communication but also work harder to learn foreign languages. In this framework, nor English nor Esperanto development are ennemies of French use.
However, I fully agree that France should be careful to preserve its own linguistic culture lest they become like Sweden or the Netherlands in terms of getting dominated by Anglophone patterns of thought and expression.
To link to a specific page in a book in Google Books, add the URL parameter "pg=PA<#>" where "<#>" is the page number.
Ironically, the term lingua franca doesn't actually refer to French as many people think, but to the Frankic language Sabir. Sabir was similar to modern Romance languages, but still distinct from them.
The language no longer exists, because as it spread across the Mediterranean, it ended up forking and influencing the local languages there instead.
Such is typically the fate of common languages.
In the age where travel and communication is slow, yes. It's also why many languages that we perceive as monolithic today consisted of many often barely mutually intelligible dialects as late as 19th century.
But things are very different now.
The wikipedia article notes that by the time of Sabir, "Frank" had turned into a generic term for western Europeans, which makes the term make more sense -- to the Byzantines, Italians and Spaniards were "Franks". Left unexplained is why the Byzantines would refer to Sabir with a phrase in Latin, a language they didn't speak.
There should be a comma after "language": "but to the Frankic language, Sabir". As in, lingua franca literally means "the Frankic language", and it referred to Sabir.
Chinese, which spread across China 2000 years ago, vary a lot from region to region, even more so than the languages you've mentioned.
For nationalistic reasons, China views those as dialects, or did when John DeFrancis was writing about the issue. In the other hand, they share more of a culture (IIUC) and government than Italian and French do.
Why would everyone living in what is now China have spoken the same language 2000 years ago? The people living in what is now the US didn't. Neither did the people living in what's now the EU. Even small territories, such as just the islands of Okinawa had multiple language communities 2000 years ago.
National borders and the language communities within and across them fluctuate wildly over the course of a thousand years.
>" I note Cantonese and Mandarin "dialects" have a common (formal) written form."
They don't even have the same grammar. Cantonese includes characters that don't exist in Mandarin.
You might find this piece on Language Log interesting: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=548
"Just as Europeans who spoke various languages could communicate in Latin, so until recently all literate Chinese people could communicate in the somewhat artificial written standard. With the shift over the last century to a written language that is closer to the colloquial, the differences among dialects have increased."
That's not really the right question. 2500 years ago, the people in what is currently Spain spoke a language that was distinct from the language then spoken by the people in what is currently Italy. But it's still true that Spanish and Italian sounded exactly the same 2500 years ago.
I don't know spoken mandarin but I can read written Mandarin, I grew up knowing Cantonese. So I do think they have a common formal written form. And I did specify formal, that strips away the slang Cantonese characters.
It's interesting to see the paper compared the written form to Latin.
The net difference today is the net difference 2000 years ago plus all the new variations since then.
After the time of the source, shortly after diverging[1], they would still have been more similar than they are now because they hadn't had much time to differentiate.
[1] Unlike "the time of the source", you can rigorously defend the existence of the period shortly after divergence.
International Sign Language[3] + Bliss are in theory the perfect combination for intergalactic communication. Blind people, unfortunately, would have to continue to suffer English until such time that direct brain stimulation becomes feasible.
EDIT: Key point in all seriousness: the Bliss language has enabled thousands of cerebral palsy sufferers to communicate with a full range of expression. Sadly curbed in recent years by the much more limited pre-phrased, Hawking-like computer voices. Alternatives exist. Listen to the radio shows in [1] to find out more. The BBC one I found particularly moving. The Radiolab one starts at 5min, goes on for some 30mins.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
[1] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08y26qf, http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/
[2] - https://archive.org/details/mrsymbolman
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign
"... McNaughton’s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a “misinterpretation”. For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable —according to the English definition of tomato— even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss’s system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English. (2009, p. 189) Bliss complaints about his symbols “being abused” by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. In spite of this, in 1975 Bliss granted an exclusive world license, for use with disabled children, to the new Blissymbolics Communication Foundation directed by Shirley McNaughton (later called Blissymbolics Communication International, BCI). Nevertheless, in 1977 Bliss claimed that this agreement was violated so that he was deprived of effective control of his symbol system."
It's also not tied to any particular nation which makes it easier for people to adopt without feeling like they are just being taken over by another culture.
This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world.
It's not just easy for speakers of latin-based languages! Esperanto has much in common with various Asian languages and the Chinese also have historically pushed Esperanto more than any other nation. For example, Radio Peking has (or had) daily broadcasts in Esperanto.
It's so much easier you can learn Esperanto with zero effort if you want to learn English:
[1] http://www.aaie.us/wordpress/?page_id=42
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
>This is all to say that Esperanto is genuinely better as a second language for Europe and the Americas if not the world.
English is as close to a global lingua franca as we've ever had. There's just so much momentum behind it, that it would take something world shaking to change that. I think we'd be better off trying for an artificial language that is mostly mutually intelligible with English if the goal is really widespread adoption.
However, he was also fighting (and is still fighting) very significant economic or incentive issues. Even before the era of English as an international language, there was always an obvious incentive to learn the most widely spoken or prestigious language or languages in one's region -- such as the language of a nearby large, rich country. People still feel that incentive today and the benefits of learning specific languages of wider communication or languages of prestige can be very tangible. And there are definitely people who feel that it's unfair that they have to learn English rather than English-speakers having to learn their language (and it is!), but many of them learn English anyway because they can clearly see the benefits.
Having a really apparent worldwide Schelling point of "everyone in the world in going to learn this" or "enough people already know this that it's clearly useful for international communication" would help Esperanto tremendously, and Esperanto did have momentum of that kind at one point, but according to the Esperanto Museum in Vienna it seemed to lose it in the course of the World Wars.
Then it would start to displace a few native languages until it became some community's native language.
After that it would start to fragment and evolve and lose all the simplicity that comes from it being an artificial language.
600 years ago (before the printing press) most people lived either on or near their farm. You went to the nearby village for things you couldn't make on the farm. Traveling to the next village was as far as most people could go: they needed to get back to the farm to milk the cow again, or otherwise care for the farm. As such there was no way to know your language was fragmenting, much less any reason to care.
Today we have printing presses, telephone, TVs, movies. All give us ways to find out about fragmentation and reasons to care. While languages will still change and fragment over time, the above pressures will help to keep the changes in check.
There's also no reason to think Esperanto would evolve or fragment any slower than English once it's actually in use. Which negates many of the arguments that we need Esperanto as a global lingua franca because English will fragment once America declines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
Some world language scenarios might include an idea of a language regulator for the world language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
and some kind of mechanism to enhance the language regulator's influence (although I don't know exactly what that would be).
I don't think that Zamenhof thought this aspect through in much detail, because he thought that people would continue to use Esperanto exactly as described by the Fundamento de Esperanto. See paragraph 4 of the Boulougne Declaration:
> [...] The only single, perpetually obligatory foundation of the language Esperanto for all Esperantists is the work, Fundamento de Esperanto, to which no one has the right to make changes. If someone deviates from the rules and models from the above-mentioned work, he or she cannot ever excuse himself/herself with the words: "so desires or advised the author of Esperanto". Every idea that cannot be conveniently expressed by the contents of the Fundamento de Esperanto, all Esperantists can express in a manner which they deem the most correct, as is done in any other language. But for reasons of unity all Esperantists are recommended to imitate, as much as possible, that style which is found in the works of the creator of Esperanto, who has worked more that any other for and in Esperanto and who knows its spirit better that any other.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140506075349/http://aktuale.in...
https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deklaracio_pri_Esperanto
However, I don't think this has worked out exactly as Zamenhof intended, because I think there have indeed been unofficial changes and divergences, as well as slang (maybe smaller than those you'd expect to see in a non-constructed language, but still some). Also, I think there are ultimately grammatical and usage questions that the Fundamento de Esperanto didn't address, because Zamenhof wasn't quite a linguist in the modern sense, didn't know about certain grammatical issues, and didn't conduct user testing with speakers from different linguistic backgrounds.
http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/
I don't know how readily and consistently Esperanto speakers follow its rulings.
zamenhof "but sincerely"
in case anyone is interested.
In my travels I've found English language proficiency to be exaggerated. First, almost every country lies about the degree and extent of proficiency among its population. Second, where you do see relatively decent English language proficiency, you'll also often see a creole emerging. For example, Singlish. Once the the global cultural dominance of Hollywood peaks (maybe it may already peaked?), expect English to begin to slowly fragment.
For various reasons I think Esperanto would be a great international auxiliary language, in large part precisely because of widespread familiarity with English. Esperanto might not be a reasonable choice today given the dominance of English, but the case for Esperanto will only get stronger.
I say this as someone who absolutely sucks at learning new languages. I don't even know Esperanto; I've only dabbled in it a little. But put me in a room with native English speakers from rural Ireland, a rich Indian neighborhood, or teenage girls from Singapore, and on some days I'd understand them better if they were actually speaking Esperanto.
We are already starting to see the development of a simplified international English dialect. Given enough time, once American dominance seriously declines, it's possible that English and International English will diverge into 2 languages.
However, I think you'd see the same level of evolution and fragmentation with Esperanto as well if it were to really take off. Eventually people would start making blockbuster movies in Esperanto, kids would start learning it, and younger people in smaller countries would use it more than their native tongue.
It would evolve and it would no longer be simple because it would no longer be artificial. It would no longer have the advantage of belonging to no one.
But I suppose that's somewhat circular reasoning. At least, it presupposes that an auxiliary language can see substantial uptake and remain viable while not succumbing to the typical forces that shape language.
I've always thought of liturgical languages (e.g. liturgical Latin, liturgical Syriac) as the closest example we have of languages resisting those forces. But I really have no clue how well they've done so. For example, I haven't read any papers that analyze the stability of liturgical Latin, such as whether the vocabulary has narrowed or pronunciations shifted. I'm sure it exists, but I'm not a linguist (or anything of the sort).
The roots of Esperanto are European so it’s rather “privileged” of one to say that it’s the “best” second language.
And who actually avoids learning a language because they are being felt like they are being taken over by another culture? That actually seems like a veiled anti-English can concept, which, if that were the intent, actually indicates that Esperanto DOES have a cultural bias – it’s a culture of being the “anti-English” because otherwise why not just promote English? Who the hell actually speaks Esperanto? There are apparently 300 “native” speaking families worldwide. It certainly isn’t a language you’ll hear at a market or a playground. It has zero practical value beyond being a possibly fun hobby.
English might be “hard” but the benefits are extensive. Why someone in the Americas would learn Esperanto as a second language rather than English or Spanish is beyond me. That’s an exceedingly irrational. Why a Italian-speaking European would learn Esperanto before French, German, Dutch or English – that is also ridiculous.
Esperanto advocates aren’t advocating it as a third or fourth language but a second language. That suggests that they are delusional or at least highly irrational. Why would I spend 150 hours mastering Esperanto rather than 150 hours getting conversational in Spanish?
I can respect it as a hobby that people enjoy, but as a legitimate language? It’s as legitimate as Klingon and spoken by fewer people.
But the value of a second language isn't in how easy it is to learn (that's just saying it's low cost.)
The value is in the pool of people it lets you communicate with that your first language does not, and on that measure, Esperanto is particularly poor, compared to whichever of (in no particular order) English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, French, and several others you don't already speak.
That said, I feel the Duolingo courses in general don't have enough content, and the Esperanto course seems to be on the short side even then.
Most of the criticism aimed at Esperanto today is about how badly executed the language itself is, but it unquestionably got further towards the larger goals than any other constructed language.
As for neutrality, an English or Spanish speaker would always have the advantage, thus the idea that everybody can meet on a ground as even as possible. Esperanto tried to solve that by not belonging to any people, or any nation. It ended up being Eurocentric, but to some extent it does fulfill its neutrality motivation
2. The Esperanto culture is post-nationalistic. They purposely did not want to align with a specific country, and be global.
It's unsurprising that the promise of a single, unifying, constructed, internationalist language would appeal to leftists. Which isn't to say leftists are naive, just that it would be much more odd to see initial interest from nationalists or other conservatives.
Indifferent would be a better word.
In any case, Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages, whether in lexicon (obviously) or in grammar, it is thoroughly european (as demonstrated in great detail here : http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ )
Do you know why it was created? To have one language for communication for the whole world unencumbered by historical baggage of politico-cultural domineering (e.g., prevalence of english due to British imperialism). (among other reasons).
That right there is a feature that sets it apart from all natural languages (other than the created ones like Klingon, Lojban, etc) not just European.
Which is actually quite a farce. Esperanto is largely a language that's vaguely Slavic in grammar and strongly Polish in phonology, with vocabulary largely derived from Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages. In other words, Esperanto is a "world language" that comes from a time where "world" meant "Europe", and it largely assumes that Indo-European language peculiarities are fairly universal in languages (they're not).
Unfortunately, Esperanto bears a lot of that baggage, despite it's intent.
"Interlingua has detached itself from the movement for the development and introduction of a universal language for all humanity. Whether or not one believes that a language for all humanity is possible, whether or not one believes that Interlingua will become such a language is totally irrelevant from the point of view of Interlingua itself. The only fact that matters (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its ambition of reflecting the cultural and thus linguistic homogeneity of the West, is capable of rendering tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is by its present contributions and not by the promises of its adherents that Interlingua wishes to be judged."
It was created with a goal of taking its structure and vocabulary from other common European (mostly Romance) languages, which means if one is familiar with those languages, they can already decently read Interlingua. The same passage from above, for those who might know some Romance language:
"Interlingua se ha distachate ab le movimento pro le disveloppamento e le introduction de un lingua universal pro tote le humanitate. Si o non on crede que un lingua pro tote le humanitate es possibile, si o non on crede que interlingua va devenir un tal lingua es totalmente indifferente ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme. Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
[2] Not that I've actually studied either, for full disclosure.
http://www.slovio.com/
But, yes, with English being the de facto standard, these more localized attempts are becoming redundant - you want to know English anyway because you want to talk to more people, and once you know it, you might as well use it to talk even to people whose languages are related to yours.
Maybe it's because I'm vaguely aware of the phonetic changes between east and west Slavic languages (ić - it, ska - skaja, etc), because I've heard some Russian and Ukrainian on street markets in 90s.
Haven't had much experience with other Slavic speakers, but Serbian sounds quite close to western Slavic from the songs I've heard.
I natively know Polish and I know some very little Russian back from high school and Interslavic is more clear to me than Slovio.
I'm interested in linguistics so during one CS conference in Zagreb I asked a few Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Slovenians, one Belarusian (native in Russian actually but he knew some Belarusian) and back in Poland a few Poles who know only Polish and the results were quite mixed.
It really might be better to just treat this as a curio and speak your own (especially in your own West/East/South Slavic language subgroup) and hope for the best. Or just speak English...
I don't know though, what features from Asian languages do you think are objectively simpler to learn than those in Esperanto? I don't know Esperanto, but I am pretty sure that not all Asian languages are particularly tonal. So I doubt that would come naturally to them either. Particles? Those are pretty fantastic, but does Esperanto already have them? Maybe a lack of gendered conjugations? Or just no conjugations at all and instead a separate word modifier or particle for different contexts?
Certainly the syllabary of Japanese is wonderful, I think it's better than English. Every consonant except 'n' has a vowel after, every vowel sounds the same regardless of context. Removing the distinction between 'r' and 'l' or 'm' and 'n' seems wise though. But maybe they already did that too?
You might well answer that, in that case, being truly neutral seems more or less impossible. Maybe so, and maybe you do need to just pick something. But then we get away from the idea of removing political dominance from the equation.
The only place where I would agree Europeans have a significant advantage is that Esperanto has a European style letter script rather than an Asian character-based one. A fair point, and unfortunately no one has come up with something halfway between a letter and a character script. The best apolitical solution to that may be to make two alphabets for the next iteration of Esperanto.
The script is not really an issue; Chinese is the only major east Asian language (or language family) written exclusively in Chinese characters without a phonetic script, and even then the Roman alphabet is familiar.
It's easy to not appreciate this, but in a way the hardest thing about learning a language is mastering the vocabulary. Think about your native language. When was he last time you encountered a grammatical structure you were unfamiliar with? Now when was the last time you encountered a word you were unfamiliar with?
If you're studying two related languages, like Spanish and English, you get a huge boost from the fact that the more difficult words are actually more likely to be the same. You don't have to study very hard to understand what "planeta" or "geografía" or "farmacia" mean. On the other hand, if you're studying Japanese, you have to memorize words like "wakusei," "chiri", and "yakkyoku" which have no resemblance whatever to the English words. And it just goes on and on and you are never really done encountering all the words you will ever encounter. Compared to this slog, mastering a grammar and the number of irregularities typical of a natural language is a minor annoyance.
That's just wrong. All that means is that you haven't experienced all the crazy language features out there. Children all over the world learn their native languages at different speeds because some languages are harder than others.
I guess your statement is technically correct in that if you already know a really difficult language, learning it is easy, but that's just pedantry.
I'm going by the (admittedly, introductory) education I had in linguistics, so if you'd like to convince me otherwise I suppose I would need to see some sort of reliable source.
If a language avoids relying on tonal information for word definition, for instance, it is very counterintuitive to say that a toddler learning would pick it up exactly as fast as a toddler that only needs to handle syllable identification.
Way more languages, including Asian ones like Japanese and Korean, do not have words which completely change definition based on pitch. I don't have any reason to think a Korean adult would find it any easier than me to detect tones in Mandarin.
I don't know how to search for a reliable source in the field of linguistics, sorry. The idea is really counterintuitive for me though. It's not like Chinese and Japanese are very similar, even if they're more likely to broadly share word roots. Assuming we aren't using pictograph writing anyway, they do share a lot of those.
But if you're going to argue that learning pictograph writing is exactly as easy as learning character writing, I'll direct you to how Japanese kids only can read 1000 characters by the time they're 12. With syllabic writing you can read anything way sooner. So clearly for written language some are easier than others too.
(Esperanto is intended to be perfectly understandable without tonal inflection, through the use of particles such as "ĉu" and "ja", though in practice Westerners universally tonally inflect their speech because they don't know otherwise.)
I'm currently trying to learn it, because I hate scrolling through long lists of homophones to find some rarer character; but I have not yet achieved the level where I can just freely type out anything without looking up its key sequence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method
e: Actually I found some info here: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E7%9B%B4%E6...
It looks like some systems are T-Code, TUT-code, etc.
That said, I think people overblow the significance of choosing a European base over some other. I know people whose native languages are syllabaries, abugidas, and logographies; most of them prefer even the supremely flawed English alphabetic writing system.
Esperanto: european or asiatic language? (1981)
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...
The Internet will do the same on a global scale, in the long run, with English being that language, obviously.
So what's the purpose of Esperanto, again?
The purpose is likely to provide its enthusiasts with a quirky hobby. It’s not any more serious a language as Klingon.
Why Duolingo/etc wastes resources supporting such a useless language when they could perhaps support any of the number of dying languages that actually have cultural and historical significance (such as Yiddish, Navajo or any number of African or Asian languages) seems to be a waste.
The problem with trying to save dying languages is that you need to save their dying culture, too. Otherwise the language is useless, just as useless as Esperanto. If there's no point in Esperanto because it's a language without a culture, there's no point in learning a language without learning their culture. And culture is often a very tricky, very closely guarded thing.
What we have with Esperanto is a brand new culture that's been created, one that's a lot more relatable to a wider audience than Kasanga or Iñapari.
Try eg. Japanese<->Chinese or Thai<->Malay for neighboring but completely unrelated languages.
Even though it's grammar is different, China had a huge cultural influence on Japan, and both its writing system and its vocabulary (as spoken over a thousand years ago though!) were imported and incorporated into Japanese. Something like 60% of the Japanese dictionary is Chinese-derived either as old imported words, or more modern "wasei kango" (lit. Japanese-made Chinese words) -- think "television" for an English word equivalent (modern idea but coined with Greek and Latin word roots).
There's a lot of really interesting details about this on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary
Third to those is maybe the accusative, the grammar of which is the subject of an entire pamphlet.
It's otherwise super easy to learn if you can manage to pronounce the sounds. I encourage you to give it a shot either through Duolingo or through Kurso de Esperanto
Please, only recommend things you have read and liked!
I'm not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, it is a nice experiment that probably wouldn't hurt. On the other hand, what is the real benefit?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aN94LWe9ro
In short, a collection of superfluous historic tidbits does not make a regional affiliation for a language fundamentally grounded in the etymology of another.