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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.
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: https://xkcd.com/927/
Romanes eunt domus.
DaveyJJ
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.
Because people who do that started two world wars.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
“Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!”
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.
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.
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.
People called Romanes, they go, the house?
There's a great podcast about Esperanto on Freakanomics Radio...
http://freakonomics.com/podcas...
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.
The only people who believe this live either in Quebec or in France. The rest of the world wrote off French a century ago.
#DeleteChrome
People who liked Esperanto also liked:
* Rust
Esperanto has not much to do with spanish.
Flexion is _greek_
The vocabulary is an attempt to collect words that are common in as many european languages as possible.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There's something to what you say, but removing a language accompanies a great loss of culture. Sure, probably everyone in the world should try to speak at least one of the four you mentioned, but it would be a crime (IMO) to forget your heritage and make the world a homogeneous mush. I love the richness of the world with all the different cultures, and language makes up a big part of that.
Zamenhof was originally an idealist who wanted to make a universal second language, but more recently conlangs as I believe they are called, are exercises just for the sake of it, for students of linguistics. There's value to this as well, I think.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
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.
Esperanto is VERY different to Spanish. Just because it begins with "Esp" don't assume it is a derivative language. I know a little bit of both languages and they are very different.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It didn't even really catch on in Europe though, never mind the rest of the world.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
Haha - except the Germans didn't really start the first one, they just became the main force on the side that eventually lost.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
Quoting Wikipedia:
"the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from Germanic languages and minor contributions from Slavic languages and Greek."
All languages are invented, Esperanto just happened to be a relatively recent invented language.
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.
German has all sorts of weird grammar rules and compound words; etc. It's a terrible language for a world's "second language"; probably not as bad as English, but still a terrible second language. As English speakers it is a little easier to learn than some others; for much of the rest of the world its a complicated mess.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...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.
Yet, despite that; China is one of most common places for people to learn it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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
He is probably just Merlin who predicts the future by remembering his past as he travels backwards through time.
Time to offend someone
Rofl ...
Nevertheless your parent is right.
Many parts of Africa, note 'parts', have french as the main language or even official administration language. And/or have a currency derived from french franc and bound to euro.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I don't think he meant to say that those language have no grammar. Perhaps he was interpreting the meaning of "grammar taked out" in different way than you did. Is it even possible to have a language without grammar? Doesn't that just leave a pile of words?
Herman has no weird grammar rules.
The grammar is more or less the same as english.
And what exactly is the difference between world war I and worldwar II?
Oh, the second is a compound word and that is .... difficult?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Esperanto is VERY different to Spanish. Just because it begins with "Esp" don't assume it is a derivative language. I know a little bit of both languages and they are very different.
It, like so many things, depends on your point of view.
From a non-Romance speaking point of view, I'd claim it is more similar to Romance languages than anything else.
The vocabulary is largely Romance based and has more in common with Spanish and Catalan than any other languages, the pronunciation is based on Italian, it lacks dative/genitive/oblique which most non-Romance languages have, treats double negations as emphasizing instead of cancelling, and other features that increases the distance from many other language families.
German has all sorts of weird grammar rules and compound words
The compound words are incredibly simple to learn and understand. It's much better than having a unique word for something, so while the German dictionary is larger than the English one, the number of times you reach for it is actually quite low due to compound words being incredibly descriptive.
As for weird grammar rules they really aren't weird at all. They are just different. In fact if we discuss weirdness as in different from the norm, then in all the North Germanic languages English is the one with the weirdest rules given that grammatically the other North Germanic languages compare far more favourably to each other.
Of course you could just sit on the fence and learn Dutch :)
Dutch has the advantage of getting rid of gendered nouns (which was a mindbogglingly stupid idea in the first place).
(Gendered pronouns are also stupid but at least there are far less of them.)
Real life is overrated.
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?
Japanese is pretty darned regular. Regular conjugations, consistent grammar rules, unambiguous pronunciation.
It's a shame that the writing system is insane.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I didn't find the grammar rules weird at all. Mind you, I fit your description of an English-as-first-language speaker. I'd like to compare notes with you.
Subject goes 1st. Verb goes 2nd. Every time. Conjugation is detailed but generally very predictable. There are some oddballs like "Gern" and "Doch" thrown in. The worst part for me was noun gender, but since German is the only language I speak that uses gender on nouns that makes some sense. I'm told it is far less hard to deal with for most other European speakers, since all of the Romance languages use gendered nouns as well as most German-related languages. Let's not talk about Finnish or Hungarian.
What parts of German, especially Grammar, did you find to be particularly bad?
I love watch - "ArmBandUhr". Why yes, I suppose a watch IS an arm-band-clock.
>hardly any native speakers
Ohh. Me! I'm one.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideto.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ido is indeed better than Esperanto, but it's still not good enough.
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.
The only people who believe this live either in Quebec or in France. The rest of the world wrote off French a century ago.
Just show a prospective language learner a book on French verbs. They'll pick something else soon enough.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
>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.
I retained enough French from school (30 years ago) buy croissants and booze in Paris on a recent trip. Hardly useless. The croissants were very nice.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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; }
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
I didn't find the grammar rules weird at all. Mind you, I fit your description of an English-as-first-language speaker. I'd like to compare notes with you.
Subject goes 1st. Verb goes 2nd. Every time. Conjugation is detailed but generally very predictable. There are some oddballs like "Gern" and "Doch" thrown in. The worst part for me was noun gender, but since German is the only language I speak that uses gender on nouns that makes some sense. I'm told it is far less hard to deal with for most other European speakers, since all of the Romance languages use gendered nouns as well as most German-related languages. Let's not talk about Finnish or Hungarian.
What parts of German, especially Grammar, did you find to be particularly bad?
Well, to start off with there is the three gender, not just two as in many languages. Get that wrong and you can get almost every word in the sentence wrong. How many permutations of "the" are there when you take, not just gender, but tense into account. Or the word "ein" which changes too. It's also completely illogical in many cases. The famous example is that "Turnip" is a feminine noun but "Girl" is neutral. German language assign gender to a turnip but not a girl-child.
Then you have some insanely long compound words, which, if you know the language well don't look too bad. It's pretty much twitter hashtagspeak. However, if you have only a small comprehension of the language they can be daunting and hard to decipher. Text books tend to steer away from the worst of them, but if you pick up a newspaper or walk down a street you'll see all these mile long words which can be daunting to a novice.
Just like English, there are lots of irregular verbs to help trip you up. Also, just like English, the word order can be confusing or backwards to speakers of most other languages.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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.
forget it, he's on a roll
[2018/01/11 07:57] Esperanto Resident: Ne certas, pri kio vi parolas. i tie en la lando de Lindens ni uzas "LSL".
It's "Romani ite domum" as you well know.
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.
Latin with grammar taked out. Lame.
you mean Interlingua?
Dutch has the advantage of getting rid of gendered nouns (which was a mindbogglingly stupid idea in the first place).
(Gendered pronouns are also stupid but at least there are far less of them.)
Only half. There is still a gendered and neuter combination. When speaking Dutch I often fall back on little linguistic tricks. The Dutch are quite cute with their over use of diminutive forms of nouns, and all diminutives take a neuter gender. De auto, becomes het autooje, and you get an instant bonus for offending people who drive hummers. :-)
While I believe we are all better off speaking one language, I don't think we should sacrifice our history to do it. Already, we have lost a lot of history due to the fact that nobody speaks the language any more.
I love watch - "ArmBandUhr". Why yes, I suppose a watch IS an arm-band-clock.
That actually comes back to a grammatical oddity of shortening languages.
We describe a Taschenuhr as a pocket watch, but the leave out the "wrist" of the "wrist watch" for the most common kind of watch. Technically this is no different in German. I don't think I've heard Armbanduhr (only the first letter of the noun is capitalised) used in conversation.
But if you really want to mess up your brain learn Dutch too. In German Uhr means clock or it means o'clock as in "Es ist fuenf Uhr" (5 o'clock). In Dutch "Het is vijf uur" But you can read that time from your "polshorloge", which is borrowed from the french word for clock "horloge" but not the french word for wristwatch "montre-bracelet"
If that wasn't bad enough:
English: Who. Dutch: Wie. German: Wer.
English: How. Dutch: Hoe. German: Wie
English: Where. Dutch: Waar. German: Wo
English: Was. Dutch: Was. German: War
No, it's Romani ite domum. Now write it out one hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
Look at the commonest words in Esperanto. If you actually spoke Spanish (which you don't) you'd see a fair degree of similarity. If you spoke French and Italian (which you don't) and were intelligent enough to adjust for the spelling system (which you aren't) quite a lot of the others would be familiar too.
Stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, if we have 3 or 4 language groups to chose from, and the final distribution would be:
a) 40%
b) 30%
c) 20%
d) 10%
Then _you_ would say, the language is _primarily_ designed by a)
And _I_ would say: no it is not, as the other languages together have a bigger contribution.
Anyway, the roman part of esperanto most certainly does not come from Spanish but from Italian and Latin and a huge degree from Romania.
And more important, the language was not designed by picking some natural languages and pick words from it, that sounded simple, but by analyzing thesauri.
E.g. the word for "ticket" is "billetto". The english "bill" comes to mind, and in german we have the word "Billet", which is not in wide spread use, but we adopted it via French.
Bottom line this approach of finding synonyms that are common all over europe formed the vocabulary.
Your previous post and the wikipedia claim imply that he _deliberately picked_ mostly words from Spanish or roman languages, which is wrong. And if you speak Spanish you still only understand 10% of esperanto, probably less. E.g. look at the numbers 1 - 10 ... similar but simply just strange. They are _derived_ from latin but changed so much you have to explicitly learn them, otherwise you don't recognize them in text if they are written as "words" e.g. "kwar" and "kwin".
But then again a noticeable amount of english or german words are of latin origin ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
By all fairness, if the words would not be translated, then a spanish speaker or french speaker would perhaps recognize 10 words in the list like vir, mondo, pordo or sinjorino. And I doubt e.g. a french would recognize vir, he probably already has trouble to understand pordo. Heck, a french would have problems to correlate infano with enfant, he probably would think about inferno, rofl.
Also I understood that arth in fact speaks spanish ... no idea why you claim he don't.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
In Indonesian, a toe is a foot finger.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Here's the weird thing: There are more Indonesian speakers in the world than there are French speakers, but Indonesian isn't a "world" language like French is.
Doesn't that seem weird?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
E.g. the word for "ticket" is "billetto". The english "bill" comes to mind, and in german we have the word "Billet", which is not in wide spread use, but we adopted it via French.
It's "bileto", actually, only a single letter away from Spanish "boleto". And yes, it's a very good example you came up with. The whole "-eto" construction is common in Spanish and Italian, and almost never found in non-Romance languages.
If a common stem word was what was wanted, there was no need to add -eto, and especially not the -o. The only plausible reason I can see for it being bileto and not, say, bilet or bille is to increase the similarity to Spanish and Italian.
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."
Esperanto certainly has a lot of Romance vocabulary, but so does English. I don't see it as a Romance language. It's seems more a mix of Latin, Germanic, and Slavic.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
What's it got that Klingon doesn't?
The only language less popular than Intercal.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The only plausible reason I can see for it being bileto and not, say, bilet or bille is to increase the similarity to Spanish and Italian. ... but I'm no longer involved in Esperanto since 35 years, needed to google half of the stuff above ;D
Yeah, but that is not the reason. The reason is that the inventor "Zarem-something" (Zaremdorf?) invented a unified grammar and new spelling system for his language.
In this case, all nouns, regardless of male or female end in "o".
Incases where having a female variation makes sense an "ino" is the ending. "Viro" = Man, "Virino" = Woman (which makes no sense from an "italian" point of view as the "ino" makes the thing just smaller, Viro = Man, Virino, small man, or in my case: Angelo versus Angelino, a "cutifying" name).
Anyway, all singular neutral or male words in Esperanto end in "o". Hence Bileto. If you want a female version you can replace the "o" with "ino".
There is a reform underway right now to change this
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.