The main reason I think esperanto is a useless effort is all of the good language design and constructs go out the window when the average person starts speaking it. After 50 years of esperanto...
The main reason I think esperanto is a useless effort is all of the good language design and constructs go out the window when the average person starts speaking it. After 50 years of esperanto usage people would have changed it so much that its hardly any better than what we have now.
That assumes that Esperanto has good language design. There are certainly those who would argue that it doesn't, for example, speakers of Ido or Interlingua[1]. It was designed, after all, by an...
good language design and constructs go out the window when the average person starts speaking it
That assumes that Esperanto has good language design. There are certainly those who would argue that it doesn't, for example, speakers of Ido or Interlingua[1]. It was designed, after all, by an ophthalmologist without the benefit of a strong background in linguistics, or, for that matter, the last century of progress in modern linguistics. Even Zamenhof himself tried to address design flaws with Reformed Esperanto, and was rejected by the community.
The gender problems in the language always stand out to me, for example. That women are almost entirely stripped from the vocabulary and relegated to words for men with "-ino" tacked on the end seems like a caricature of misogyny: even Romans, with their extreme misogyny, did not think to refer to a mother as a patrino.
From a completely different perspective, it's actually a bit surprising that after 100 years of Esperanto usage, not that much has changed.
[1] As an unrelated aside, the predecessor to modern Interlingua was Peano's Interlingua, created under the leadership of Peano of Peano's axioms, who wrote much of his work in the language.
there are some respects which it excels at (it is as always super easy to learn for most europeans and people who speak european-based languages) but objectively, esperanto does some incredibly...
That assumes that Esperanto has good language design. There are certainly those who would argue that it doesn't, for example, speakers of Ido or Interlingua[1]. It was designed, after all, by an ophthalmologist without the benefit of a strong background in linguistics, or, for that matter, the last century of progress in modern linguistics. Even Zamenhof himself tried to address design flaws with Reformed Esperanto, and was rejected by the community.
there are some respects which it excels at (it is as always super easy to learn for most europeans and people who speak european-based languages) but objectively, esperanto does some incredibly dumb shit to a point where if you were going to do something similar to it nowadays i think you'd just scrap a lot of it and start over rather than trying to salvage what you can of it. (to say nothing of the fact that as an "international language" it's so eurocentric and weirdly-structured phonetically that it's kinda useless to non-europeans and doesn't overlap with how most of the world speaks)
Where did English go wrong to make people use the word "Literally" to mean "not literally"? Or to make "terrific" to mean "really good" instead of "a terrifying thing"
Where did English go wrong to make people use the word "Literally" to mean "not literally"? Or to make "terrific" to mean "really good" instead of "a terrifying thing"
English wasn't designed, and therefore can't be judged on design. Esperanto has one single argument in its favour, and that is it WAS designed to supposedly fix all of those issues. If it can't,...
English wasn't designed, and therefore can't be judged on design. Esperanto has one single argument in its favour, and that is it WAS designed to supposedly fix all of those issues. If it can't, then it has nothing going for it whatsoever.
there are plenty of gripes with esperanto--this is probably not of them, though. the language has been a thing since 1889 (so nearly three times the window you specified) and hasn't changed much...
After 50 years of esperanto usage people would have changed it so much that its hardly any better than what we have now.
there are plenty of gripes with esperanto--this is probably not of them, though. the language has been a thing since 1889 (so nearly three times the window you specified) and hasn't changed much of any yet beyond reforming out some of its more boneheaded options, and it literally has a list of fundamental rules which can "never be changed" (the fundamento) even though that's not how language generally works. esperantists also have a tendency to be somewhat reactionary about change, so there are forces which actively try to impede what would be ordinary linguistic progression (hence why the egregious -in suffix is still a thing that people do even though it's clearly a relic of zamenhof's time).
Current esperanto users are enthusiasts so of course it has stayed structured. As soon as your average twitter user starts using it then the language will be butchered.
Current esperanto users are enthusiasts so of course it has stayed structured. As soon as your average twitter user starts using it then the language will be butchered.
esperanto... already has plenty of non-enthusiast users, though? and that's also not really how language works anyways? like, most estimates have L2 users in the hundreds of thousands up to two...
Current esperanto users are enthusiasts so of course it has stayed structured. As soon as your average twitter user starts using it then the language will be butchered.
esperanto... already has plenty of non-enthusiast users, though? and that's also not really how language works anyways? like, most estimates have L2 users in the hundreds of thousands up to two million. it's not like this super obscure cool club of people speak esperanto; esperanto actually has more speakers than a lot of smaller languages do. more importantly though, speaker number has really nothing to do with how "structured" esperanto is or is not.
I love learning languages and more than that I like learning logical languages. But if I'm being honest I don't see myself learning Esperanto. More than just the problem of no one speaking it I...
I love learning languages and more than that I like learning logical languages. But if I'm being honest I don't see myself learning Esperanto. More than just the problem of no one speaking it I think it takes away a bit of the intrinsic beauty of language. To me language is very much linked to location where you can see how a country and its landscape and architecture is somewhat reflected by the language they speak. Esperanto doesn't have that prestige and in my eyes it has no identity, why would use it? If I went to Spain and then went to Korea and they were both fully committed to Esperanto i.e the people spoke it and the written language was in it. I wouldn't feel like I ever even made a trip if you get what I mean.
While I will likely write another comment here critical of Esperanto as a language for myriad technical reasons (patrino, for example, and -ino in general, is a great illustration of something...
While I will likely write another comment here critical of Esperanto as a language for myriad technical reasons (patrino, for example, and -ino in general, is a great illustration of something entirely absurd in a modern context), and it's certainly not going to be taking over the world any more than it did when it could actually claim to be a significant language, here I must entirely disagree with the suggestion that Esperanto doesn't have an identity. Instead, I would argue that it has a much stronger, more distinct identity than most natural languages. Whereas national languages have speakers linked mostly by accident of place of birth, and culturally-connected languages have speakers linked mostly by accident of ancestry, there are no accidental Esperanto speakers: they or their parents made a conscious choice to learn a language that was constructed within a modern movement with specific ideas and goals in mind, ideas that the speakers are very likely to share. If someone speaks Spanish or Korean, what can you say about their view of the world and themselves, or about their politics?
Esperanto, despite its flaws, was and is the language of ambitious internationalism. You can be reasonably confident that, if someone speaks it, they are in favor of closer international cooperation and ties, are opposed to nationalist politics, likely consider their identity more in terms of the world than of their home country, and likely have an ambitious and optimistic view of governance and culture on a global scale.
In the first half of the 20th century, when I would argue Esperanto actually had a claim to importance, it was the language of people who wanted to reshape the world along fairer, less hostile lines, with a close and presumably more utopian global community. It was the language of people who believed in the League of Nations, who spoke of outlawing war, who saw a future where capitalism could be reshaped into something entirely different and fairer to humanity as a whole. In some of my partner's research projects, for example, when she has studied groups with such views, she has been confronted with correspondence in Esperanto, something that would be almost unthinkable anywhere else, along with discussions of teaching Esperanto. Similarly, it is not at all surprising that Bahá'í, in attempting to market itself as the religion of internationalism (despite far worse flaws than Esperanto), promoted Esperanto in its heyday.
Even as the article points out, Esperantists have specific and often shared reasons for learning the language, and this gives them a much closer, and in my mind more interesting, shared identity than most other languages---though perhaps this is because I have a deep fondness for naive internationalism.
It should be pointed out, too, that for the most part, Esperantists have always wanted Esperanto to be a global second language, to facilitate international communication and comradery. If you went to Spain, or Korea, the ideal would be that they would speak Spanish and Korean amongst themselves, and Esperanto with you. This would create a more neutral ground than choosing a national language that would most likely privilege one speaker, the situation that has become a reality with the rise of English as a global auxiliary language. Everyone would be able to learn the language rather easily, because it was based on commonalities of the languages of the world---in which, given the 19th century European culture within which Esperanto was constructed, Korean and most languages of the world are not included, of course---and no one people (where here people means Europeans) would have an advantage of a far better understanding of the language of global communication. This rather illustrates the general views that have been prevalent amongst Esperantists: it is at once naive and ignorant, and yet better than the situation we find ourselves in.
I've never been a fan of Esperanto. Much like someone else pointed out, it has a myriad of technical/design issues that prevent it from reaching its' full potential as an auxiliary language (a...
I've never been a fan of Esperanto. Much like someone else pointed out, it has a myriad of technical/design issues that prevent it from reaching its' full potential as an auxiliary language (a language designed to be a second language). But even more than that, it has somehow become the representative for all constructed languages, mostly due to its' popularity. I wish that a better designed, more modern conlang had become the representative for conlangs.
I'm also relatively disappointed in the Esperanto community as a whole. Many of them believe in a global, constructed, second language (which I think is admirable). However I believe supporting Esperanto, which is dated, eurocentric, and inefficient is extremely counterproductive towards that goal.
Esperanto was originally meant to be an auxiliary language, like English is today, not as a replacement for anyone’s mother tongue. As a sympathizer, I never thought it should be anything more...
Esperanto was originally meant to be an auxiliary language, like English is today, not as a replacement for anyone’s mother tongue. As a sympathizer, I never thought it should be anything more than that.
The main reason I think esperanto is a useless effort is all of the good language design and constructs go out the window when the average person starts speaking it. After 50 years of esperanto usage people would have changed it so much that its hardly any better than what we have now.
That assumes that Esperanto has good language design. There are certainly those who would argue that it doesn't, for example, speakers of Ido or Interlingua[1]. It was designed, after all, by an ophthalmologist without the benefit of a strong background in linguistics, or, for that matter, the last century of progress in modern linguistics. Even Zamenhof himself tried to address design flaws with Reformed Esperanto, and was rejected by the community.
The gender problems in the language always stand out to me, for example. That women are almost entirely stripped from the vocabulary and relegated to words for men with "-ino" tacked on the end seems like a caricature of misogyny: even Romans, with their extreme misogyny, did not think to refer to a mother as a patrino.
From a completely different perspective, it's actually a bit surprising that after 100 years of Esperanto usage, not that much has changed.
[1] As an unrelated aside, the predecessor to modern Interlingua was Peano's Interlingua, created under the leadership of Peano of Peano's axioms, who wrote much of his work in the language.
there are some respects which it excels at (it is as always super easy to learn for most europeans and people who speak european-based languages) but objectively, esperanto does some incredibly dumb shit to a point where if you were going to do something similar to it nowadays i think you'd just scrap a lot of it and start over rather than trying to salvage what you can of it. (to say nothing of the fact that as an "international language" it's so eurocentric and weirdly-structured phonetically that it's kinda useless to non-europeans and doesn't overlap with how most of the world speaks)
If that happens it wasn't good design in the first place.
Where did English go wrong to make people use the word "Literally" to mean "not literally"? Or to make "terrific" to mean "really good" instead of "a terrifying thing"
English wasn't designed, and therefore can't be judged on design. Esperanto has one single argument in its favour, and that is it WAS designed to supposedly fix all of those issues. If it can't, then it has nothing going for it whatsoever.
Then why do they want it?
there are plenty of gripes with esperanto--this is probably not of them, though. the language has been a thing since 1889 (so nearly three times the window you specified) and hasn't changed much of any yet beyond reforming out some of its more boneheaded options, and it literally has a list of fundamental rules which can "never be changed" (the fundamento) even though that's not how language generally works. esperantists also have a tendency to be somewhat reactionary about change, so there are forces which actively try to impede what would be ordinary linguistic progression (hence why the egregious -in suffix is still a thing that people do even though it's clearly a relic of zamenhof's time).
Current esperanto users are enthusiasts so of course it has stayed structured. As soon as your average twitter user starts using it then the language will be butchered.
esperanto... already has plenty of non-enthusiast users, though? and that's also not really how language works anyways? like, most estimates have L2 users in the hundreds of thousands up to two million. it's not like this super obscure cool club of people speak esperanto; esperanto actually has more speakers than a lot of smaller languages do. more importantly though, speaker number has really nothing to do with how "structured" esperanto is or is not.
I love learning languages and more than that I like learning logical languages. But if I'm being honest I don't see myself learning Esperanto. More than just the problem of no one speaking it I think it takes away a bit of the intrinsic beauty of language. To me language is very much linked to location where you can see how a country and its landscape and architecture is somewhat reflected by the language they speak. Esperanto doesn't have that prestige and in my eyes it has no identity, why would use it? If I went to Spain and then went to Korea and they were both fully committed to Esperanto i.e the people spoke it and the written language was in it. I wouldn't feel like I ever even made a trip if you get what I mean.
While I will likely write another comment here critical of Esperanto as a language for myriad technical reasons (patrino, for example, and -ino in general, is a great illustration of something entirely absurd in a modern context), and it's certainly not going to be taking over the world any more than it did when it could actually claim to be a significant language, here I must entirely disagree with the suggestion that Esperanto doesn't have an identity. Instead, I would argue that it has a much stronger, more distinct identity than most natural languages. Whereas national languages have speakers linked mostly by accident of place of birth, and culturally-connected languages have speakers linked mostly by accident of ancestry, there are no accidental Esperanto speakers: they or their parents made a conscious choice to learn a language that was constructed within a modern movement with specific ideas and goals in mind, ideas that the speakers are very likely to share. If someone speaks Spanish or Korean, what can you say about their view of the world and themselves, or about their politics?
Esperanto, despite its flaws, was and is the language of ambitious internationalism. You can be reasonably confident that, if someone speaks it, they are in favor of closer international cooperation and ties, are opposed to nationalist politics, likely consider their identity more in terms of the world than of their home country, and likely have an ambitious and optimistic view of governance and culture on a global scale.
In the first half of the 20th century, when I would argue Esperanto actually had a claim to importance, it was the language of people who wanted to reshape the world along fairer, less hostile lines, with a close and presumably more utopian global community. It was the language of people who believed in the League of Nations, who spoke of outlawing war, who saw a future where capitalism could be reshaped into something entirely different and fairer to humanity as a whole. In some of my partner's research projects, for example, when she has studied groups with such views, she has been confronted with correspondence in Esperanto, something that would be almost unthinkable anywhere else, along with discussions of teaching Esperanto. Similarly, it is not at all surprising that Bahá'í, in attempting to market itself as the religion of internationalism (despite far worse flaws than Esperanto), promoted Esperanto in its heyday.
Even as the article points out, Esperantists have specific and often shared reasons for learning the language, and this gives them a much closer, and in my mind more interesting, shared identity than most other languages---though perhaps this is because I have a deep fondness for naive internationalism.
It should be pointed out, too, that for the most part, Esperantists have always wanted Esperanto to be a global second language, to facilitate international communication and comradery. If you went to Spain, or Korea, the ideal would be that they would speak Spanish and Korean amongst themselves, and Esperanto with you. This would create a more neutral ground than choosing a national language that would most likely privilege one speaker, the situation that has become a reality with the rise of English as a global auxiliary language. Everyone would be able to learn the language rather easily, because it was based on commonalities of the languages of the world---in which, given the 19th century European culture within which Esperanto was constructed, Korean and most languages of the world are not included, of course---and no one people (where here people means Europeans) would have an advantage of a far better understanding of the language of global communication. This rather illustrates the general views that have been prevalent amongst Esperantists: it is at once naive and ignorant, and yet better than the situation we find ourselves in.
I've never been a fan of Esperanto. Much like someone else pointed out, it has a myriad of technical/design issues that prevent it from reaching its' full potential as an auxiliary language (a language designed to be a second language). But even more than that, it has somehow become the representative for all constructed languages, mostly due to its' popularity. I wish that a better designed, more modern conlang had become the representative for conlangs.
I'm also relatively disappointed in the Esperanto community as a whole. Many of them believe in a global, constructed, second language (which I think is admirable). However I believe supporting Esperanto, which is dated, eurocentric, and inefficient is extremely counterproductive towards that goal.
Esperanto was originally meant to be an auxiliary language, like English is today, not as a replacement for anyone’s mother tongue. As a sympathizer, I never thought it should be anything more than that.